da brdice： Watching Tim Sherwood’s honesty whilst speaking to the media, you can’t help but be reminded of one of his Tottenham predecessors, Harry Redknapp.
da betobet： Christian Benteke and Gabriel Agbonlahor both scored braces in the 4-0 rout at Sunderland, and Sherwood was quick to praise his strikers.
He told the BBC that he ‘didn’t take too much notice of Aston Villa prior to coming’, but that he was always a ‘firm believer’ in his strikers that if you ‘give them the service they’ll give you the goals’.
You don’t usually hear a manager admitting that he didn’t know anything about his new team before getting the job, although a manager sticking up for his strikers is nothing new. Even so, there are shades of Redknapp in there somewhere.
Aside from his candid approach to the press conference – especially with regard to transfer dealings and ‘drive-thru’ interviews – Redknapp was, like Sherwood, a manager who was less prone to caring about tactics yet very good at getting his players to perform well.
Sherwood’s first few games in charge of Villa show that he has a similar gift for man-management.
This season, Villa’s strikers have been under performing severely, and the midlands club hadn’t scored a goal in nearly eleven hours of football until their defeat at home to Chelsea. Even before this weekend, they still hadn’t managed an away goal in over ten hours, until Benteke and Agbonlahor righted that wrong at the Stadium of Light.
Redknapp too inherited a floundering club when he took over from Juande Ramos at Tottenham and managed to bring Spurs within a whisker of the Europa League in his first season in charge, as well as reaching a League Cup final.
Of course, Sherwood isn’t Redknapp. He is a young manager with an unproven record, bar six months in charge of Spurs. He has certainly never managed a club through a relegation battle.
But what he does have is an understanding of the dressing room. He seems able to fire-up his players and motivate them to win games, something Villa hadn’t been doing until he arrived.
The stale squad is now starting to fire, and that’s because of his management of the strikers he ‘believes’ in.
Like I say, a manager sticking up for his strikers is nothing new, but his willingness to shift the blame from them to his midfielders is. By suggesting that they weren’t getting the service, he is placing the blame on those behind rather than the strikers themselves.
But he could say that at the weekend, after all they’ve just won 4-0 away from home – he could’ve said what he liked! The Villa midfielders won’t take offence to this because they’ve just managed to get the strikers into the position to score four goals, and they’ll be motivated to do more. And they surely know that they hadn’t been performing at the start of the season.
But it’s the strikers who benefit most from Sherwood’s arm-around-the-shoulder approach.
Agbonlahor, Benteke and Weimann aren’t bad players, they just haven’t been playing well. Sherwood has given them a bit of an excuse by saying that they’ve been short on support from the midfield, and he’s also taken his opportunity to praise them too. But by singling out Benteke and Agbonlahor, he’s also made them the centre of attention. His motivational, man-management approach has given those two in particular the belief to finish the chances, but the spotlight’s now on them – it’s up to them to score the goals to keep Villa up.
Sherwood may just be the right man at the right time to keep Villa up, and I think his method will work. Villa will get the goals to keep them safe not because Sherwood is a wonderful manager, and not because Villa are a big club with the calibre of players like Benteke and Agbonlahor, but because of one age-old principle: strikers just need to be loved.
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