Tim Sherwood shoots from the hip and is willing to die on his sword. He will go down fighting. If it is hard to avoid military metaphors, it is because he introduces them to the conversation and his style of management. Aston Villa seem in a relegation battle. Sherwood is a maverick of a general who may lose his commission.
He is a man under pressure and a mass of contradictions. He is the rookie who had never recruited a player until, in one transfer window at Villa, he brought in 13. He is the supposed apostle of attacking football who, in his last home game, fielded five defenders and claims to be bored by Villa’s football.
He is the outspoken critic who remains unsure of his best team. He has the best win percentage of any Tottenham Hotspur manager in the Premier League, but has won just 11 per cent of his top-flight games with Villa this season. The last eight have produced a solitary point. Even that represented a poor result as it came at home to bottom club Sunderland.
And so Saturday’s match against Swansea City assumes huge proportions for Sherwood. It is his misfortune that enviable alternatives can be eyed. Brendan Rodgers’s CV may be slimmer than his replacement at Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp’s, but it is altogether weightier than Sherwood’s.
David Moyes’s achievements on a limited budget at Everton have long suggested he would be an ideal fit for Villa. Should he leave Real Sociedad then he would be an obvious upgrade.
Moyes has a steely eyed determination that enabled him to drag Everton out of trouble. Sherwood has an emotional volatility, which means that a glance at his face, without even hearing his words, can reveal the scoreline. He has been visibly downcast since the opening-day victory at Bournemouth.
He possesses industrial quantities of self-belief. He has produced bullish rhetoric this week, but it never bodes well when interviews contain more defiance than performances.
Villa’s slide is not entirely Sherwood’s fault; not when he was stripped of the spine of his side by the summer departures of Christian Benteke, Fabian Delph and Ron Vlaar, even if all three are injured now anyway.
Much like Rodgers at Liverpool, he has attempted to deflect responsibility for some of the signings. Pointed references to “the club” in the transfer market are signs that many of the French contingent were not his choices. Sherwood can be a figure of John Bull Englishness, and the indications are that he preferred to shop at home.
Yet Joleon Lescott, who some at West Bromwich Albion were happy to see depart, has disappointed in defence. Villa have contrived to acquire a huge cast of attacking midfielders and wingers but much the brightest, Jack Grealish, is a player they already possessed. Sherwood’s struggles to accommodate others have had the feel of unsuccessful auditions. His substitutions have backfired, especially away at Crystal Palace and Leicester City. A laudable draw and a vital win became two defeats.
Now Villa meet a club who were long their inferiors but have overtaken them. It is 1982 European Cup winners against a club that almost dropped out of the Football League in 2003. It is also a meeting of brothers who arrived from Ligue 1 this summer and who symbolise their respective employers: Jordan Ayew is one of Villa’s expensive disappointments, Andre Ayew one of the signings of the season for Swansea.
In a way, Swansea brought the beginning of the end for Sherwood’s predecessor Paul Lambert. Villa only had 27 per cent of possession when they hosted the Welsh side in December 2013. The Scot had created a team with a lamentable inability to keep the ball. When he then switched to prioritise possession, they had no threat.
Lambert’s Villa lost their identity. Perhaps Sherwood’s Villa have never found one. And so a manager who invariably references armed conflict may be waiting to see if the board pull the trigger.
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