Tim Sherwood: Football Manager

tim sherwoodSo that was the Sherwood Years, folks. All 6 months of them. A whirlwind dynasty of daring, guts and unparalleled banter.

In many ways it would be fun if Tim found his way back into the Premier League next season; from a pure comedy point of view he’s got just the right amount of hopeless simplicity about him to make it entertaining for the neutral. Someone you could really enjoy watching from a safe, unattached distance.

Last Sunday, for example, even as the death rattle of his first managerial job sounded and the serious business of him getting sacked loomed ever closer, Sherwood didn’t ever forget that he had a bloody audience to keep entertained and dicked about as per usual. This is what I want to see, I thought, as he hauled one overly critical supporter from the stands and plonked him in the dugout next to Les Ferdinand like it was the most natural thing in the world.

That’s it, Tim. You guzzle down that applause. You and your own mind-blowing unorthodoxy deserve it. Sherwood routinely exerts the kind of freethinking madness I want from a manager, who, importantly, isn’t doing his managing at the club I support.

But don’t feel too bad for Tim; he’ll get his chance again. A much-referenced win percentage at Spurs has already ensured that the entry-level of his next job will be set artificially high and a club more suited to his methods will see him as more than just a thoughtless gamble. In theory, at least, Sherwood is a Premier League manager capable of winning games.

His careful handling of Emmanuelle Adebayor is also something potential employers might be impressed by. Plenty of good managers have failed to pique the Togolese firebrand’s interest for anything longer than a couple of months, but it’s clearly one area where Sherwood succeeded. Coaxing genuinely decent performances out of the striker on a weekly basis. He even had some weird mirrored salute routine going with him, which, while a massive shame, did at least show that he’d bought into Tim’s brand.

Or he just liked that he played him every week. You decide.

In the end, though, it was Tim’s gruff, no-nonsense media style that let him down- the very thing that makes him compulsive viewing for the unassociated. Instead of inspiring Spurs fans with his outspokenness it annoyed many of them to the point of resentment. The players didn’t appear to respond to well to his frequent, public smackdowns either; Sandro, one of his prime targets, even took to the very non-public Twitter to vent his discontent.

Football, of course, is a sport full of mavericks and you can accept a certain amount of ball-swinging and bravado from serial winners like Mourinho and Van Gaal (literally, in his case) but when it’s coming from an absolute novice like Sherwood, there’s a danger of the shock-value rhetoric sounding just plain absurd. But that’s for someone else to worry about now. It should be fascinating.

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