Poll - Sherwood - got rid

[oldhill_avfc]

I think it is probably a little fanciful to think that we can go from years of battling relegation to being contenders for a top 6 spot without going through a couple of years of consolidation or  a sudden input of a hundred million or so. What we need is a manager who can establish us on firm foundations and then look to build from there. Moyes fits the bill. What comes after that is as much about money as anything else and unless we are in a position to compete with the big spenders then a best of the rest option is going to be the best we can aim for and again Moyes has previous.

Spot on.

And in the worst case scenario that we get relegated this year then Moyes would be perfect to carry on in the job and get us back up.

(By saying this I wouldn't put any blame on a manager coming in now getting us relegated - the squad is poor, very poor in certain key areas.)

[Ads]

It's not a bad thing, it could just be a better thing. For a decade this club has been making appointments entirely within the world of British football of the 1990s. When we ask how it is that clubs like Swansea and Southampton surge ahead of us, we shouldn't be surprised to find that the answer is 'they didn't appoint someone like David Moyes'.

I'd trust Moyes to keep us safe, and much more than I would Sherwood or Lambert or McLeish, but that's about it. This club needs to be kicked into the present century.

A David Moyes who routinely finished higher than Southampton and Swansea could hope to, on a similar level of spend.

[Ads]

How was Lambert a "treading water" deal? He was regarded as a promising young manager who could get the club upwardly mobile again, rather than a stabiliser cast in the mould of Allardyce or Moyes.

 - On Jack and Gil, I think Moyes would think more like Ads, who I think is basically wrong - we could play them both as the wide-ish players in a 4-3-3 with Ayew up front. I wouldn't expect anything other than Gestede as the focal point under Moyes.

If we came up against a side with pace, whose tempo makes them want to go back to front as quick as possible, such as Leciester for example, then our full backs become exposed and cannot provide the width as they're forced back into a conventional line. Your middle of the park is much more likely to get overrun, especially with only two in there as a result.

[oldhill_avfc]

Maybe because they play for the club? What a weird question.

Not a weird question at all.  They may be all we have at the moment, but that could be put right by a new manager in the transfer window.
 
If/how a new manager might deploy the shower of abject footballing poverty in gestede, ayew and gill for a few weeks shouldn't be a major decision factor on who to appoint.

[Ads]

I don't get my quote fail having checked the formatting?

[Monty]

On stability, an established platform.

Alright, fine, by the fruits of his labour shall we know him. I'm willing to bet that David Moyes' next post in English football will see him humiliatingly out of touch, if he has pretentions to repeating his Everton success. The game has changed too much, and he won't be able to establish what he did before.

If we came up against a side with pace, whose tempo makes them want to go back to front as quick as possible, such as Leciester for example, then our full backs become exposed and cannot provide the width as they're forced back into a conventional line. Your middle of the park is much more likely to get overrun, especially with only two in there as a result.

That's just an argument against playing either of them ever, because teams will always double-up on them if they're playing on a wing or power through them if they're in the middle. Fine, go down that route if you want, but it's pure Allardyce.

[Monty]

Maybe because they play for the club? What a weird question.

Not a weird question at all.  They may be all we have at the moment, but that could be put right by a new manager in the transfer window.
 
If/how a new manager might deploy the shower of abject footballing poverty in gestede, ayew and gill for a few weeks shouldn't be a major decision factor on who to appoint.

I don't know how you can call Gil 'abject' in that way, but fine. I think it matters given that they're the players we have, and some of them will presumably be needed to keep us in the league. If we were only talking about the long-term like that, we wouldn't be talking about Moyes at all.

[Ads]

I don't agree at all that our squad is poor.

We're obviously missing Benteke, but apart from keeper and right back, I think there is enough quality in the squad to push us somewhere into comfortable mid-table.

I also disagree that any of those three players can be described as abject. Gestede is certainly limited in what went before, but then it is the managers failing for not seeing that and providing the sort of service that makes him an asset rather than an hindrance.

[Chris Jameson]

Why on earth are you obsessed with Jack, Gill, Gestede and Ayew?  If there's any chance of progression over the next few seasons then 3 out of those 4 will have to be long gone.

I'm baffled, which three? The youngster who has only just broken into the first team and looks a great prospect, the midfielder who has barely been given a chance but has looked the most creative player in the side on the few occasions he's been given a start, or the two new signings with a few games between them?

I actually think we've got a decent squad, certainly stronger looking than last season but we lack anybody with the know how to get the best use out of it.

[passitsideways]

On stability, an established platform.

Alright, fine, by the fruits of his labour shall we know him. I'm willing to bet that David Moyes' next post in English football will see him humiliatingly out of touch, if he has pretentions to repeating his Everton success. The game has changed too much, and he won't be able to establish what he did before.

If we came up against a side with pace, whose tempo makes them want to go back to front as quick as possible, such as Leciester for example, then our full backs become exposed and cannot provide the width as they're forced back into a conventional line. Your middle of the park is much more likely to get overrun, especially with only two in there as a result.

That's just an argument against playing either of them ever, because teams will always double-up on them if they're playing on a wing or power through them if they're in the middle. Fine, go down that route if you want, but it's pure Allardyce.

I think there's a clear difference between playing a 4-2-3-1 with, say, Grealish in the middle and Gil coming in from the right, and a proper wide player out left and a 4-3-3 where Grealish and Gil are both coming inside.

I'm curious as to why you consider the game to have changed dramatically since, say, five years ago (I know Moyes turned up at Everton around 2003, 2004, but I think he could've done the same thing had he turned up in 2010).

[Ads]

On stability, an established platform.

Alright, fine, by the fruits of his labour shall we know him. I'm willing to bet that David Moyes' next post in English football will see him humiliatingly out of touch, if he has pretentions to repeating his Everton success. The game has changed too much, and he won't be able to establish what he did before.

If we came up against a side with pace, whose tempo makes them want to go back to front as quick as possible, such as Leciester for example, then our full backs become exposed and cannot provide the width as they're forced back into a conventional line. Your middle of the park is much more likely to get overrun, especially with only two in there as a result.

That's just an argument against playing either of them ever, because teams will always double-up on them if they're playing on a wing or power through them if they're in the middle. Fine, go down that route if you want, but it's pure Allardyce.

I cannot square the circle of your argument. How can he be so woefully out of touch, yet has very recent success in this league? Why was he not badly exposed as a charlatan in his latter few years at Everton by progressive forward thinkers? How can he be so retrograde and take 31 positive results out of 38 in his final season at Everton?

His task at Old Trafford was monumental. It’s a job that nobody would have turned down, but everybody probably should. Its baffling how Fergie was able to breeze to the title with such glaring weaknesses at centre half and the middle of the park. For him to come in and try and re-build a squad with a number of old faces going, with obvious weaknesses that needed addressing [and still haven't been], while unlike Fergie or Beaker lacking the luxury of a fit goal scorer for most of the season, all the while under the ready eye of Fergie literally glaring down in physical form and symbolic, with his name emblazoned on the north stand; his failure was assured.

The only way he could have been a success would have been winning the title. Fergie got out at the right time as even he couldn't work the same trick twice.

I also cannot see why recognizing that you need a side to have balance is Allardyce esq. Gil and Grealish are too similar to play effectively with any regularity in the same side. If you put both in, then you're creating an inbalance elsewhere. You play one or the other.

[ClaretAndBlueBlood]

How was Lambert a "treading water" deal? He was regarded as a promising young manager who could get the club upwardly mobile again, rather than a stabiliser cast in the mould of Allardyce or Moyes.

He hasn't exactly had all that many opportunities to replicate his strategies elsewhere: United is in a totally different stratosphere, and Spanish football is very different, so I don't see how that can be substantially used as an example here.

I don't really get the point you make about his success being built out of a platform established a while ago - isn't the point there that he was the one who built that platform?

As for the players he'll use, it's too hard to tell. I personally believe he would play Grealish and Gil, if maybe not every game. He brought through Januzaj at United and I'm sure he would've played Barkley if he had stayed at Everton.

In order:

 - Lambert was a water-treader because, of all the managers in the world, they yet-again decided that 'Premier League experience' was the vital criterion. That's such a conservative and insular way of thinking, and designed to do nothing but hopefully keep us bumbling safely around this league. Moyes would be similar.

 - Those circumstances may well have been unusual, but they're still all we have. I don't think the evidence is there to suggest he'd take us down, but I don't think it's there to suggest he'd be much of a modernising force at the club. If he were, he could have done quite well in Spain; as he isn't, he hasn't.

 - Yes he built the platform, but my point is that the game has moved on since that platform - a defence of stoppers, Lee Carsley in midfield, long-balls-to-the-big-man - was really effective in the Premier League. It's maximum position used to be 5th or even 4th, but now it's probably 12th at absolute best, and Everton continued to do well because of stability (much underrated). Now, I'd kill for 12th right now, but it would all be a bit pointless.

 - On Jack and Gil, I think Moyes would think more like Ads, who I think is basically wrong - we could play them both as the wide-ish players in a 4-3-3 with Ayew up front. I wouldn't expect anything other than Gestede as the focal point under Moyes.

Basically all fair points, but I suppose we differ in terms of how we want the club to get from point A to point B (point B presumably being a club consistently in play for the European spots.) I consider it a two-step process where we hire someone boring to start it off, while working particularly hard to identify the successor who takes the big steps.

I don't really think it's a matter of 'modernising', so to speak, that we should be prioritising. I know it's not ideal to have someone as dull as Moyes in there, but we've run ourselves into such a mess that honestly I think that no other approach is all that realistic (or as a different way of expressing it, I think it would be too much of a gamble.)

I agree entirely with that. Our first priority is to stay up this season, then 2 or 3 seasons of mid table obscurity at worst where we aren't in any serious danger of flirting with relegation, and then we can think about pushing onto the next stage of being around the top 7 or 8.

Not a very exciting prospect really and that is a large reason as to why football is broken, where is the excitement in trying to finish 8th if you have a good season?

[Mister E]

This is worth a read - I think it is written with rose-tinted glasses on and is overly-favourable toward our Tim but in th einterests of balance ...

There is a lot of talk that Tim Sherwood is close to being sacked by Aston Villa but I cannot understand why they would even contemplate getting rid of him at this stage of the season.
    If he does become the next Premier League manager to lose his job, it would not just be unfair, it would be absolutely ridiculous.
 'Sherwood was always manager material'  Sherwood played with Sutton at Blackburn between 1994 and 1999      I cleaned Tim's boots when I was an apprentice at Norwich in the late 1980s, and he was the captain at Blackburn Rovers when we won the Premier League together in 1995.
    Of course I am not just backing him to succeed at Villa because I used to play with him - the reason is that, since the earliest days of my career, I have always seen him as manager material.
    When I was a teenager I looked up to him because I liked the way he went about things and how he dealt with me and other people. Even though he was a young man then too, the other players all thought the same.
    Character is a bit of a buzzword these days, but as a player I looked around for team-mates who had the ability to handle pressure and Tim was always one of them.
    At 46, he is a relatively young manager now, certainly in terms of experience, but you have to remember he was quite a young captain at Blackburn too - he was 26 when we were champions.
    We had some pretty big-hitters in terms of personalities in that dressing room, the likes of Alan Shearer, David Batty, Tim Flowers and Colin Hendry.
    They were never afraid to have their say but, if you speak to them, they will all tell you they admired Tim not just for what he brought to the team as a player but also his contribution to the club's success as captain.
  Sutton looks on as Alan Shearer and Tim Sherwood celebrate a goal in Blackburn's win over Villa in 1994  'It's OK to be cocky as long as you make sense'     For Tim to be skipper ahead of, say, Shearer shows you what the Blackburn boss Kenny Dalglish thought of him too.
    He always had the leadership qualities you need as a manager and, on top of that, I always thought he was extremely knowledgeable about the game.
    He comes across as confident or even cocky in some respects, but in the dressing room it doesn't matter whether you are an introvert or an extrovert as long as what you are saying makes sense. Tim always did.
    So it does not surprise me that, as a manager, he has got the best out of players who had been under-performing - like Emmanuel Adebayor at Spurs or Christian Benteke and Fabian Delph at Villa last season - because he has always had the ability to get people playing for him.
  Adebayor was frozen out at Spurs until Sherwood took charge in November 2013, then scored 14 goals in 24 games when he was manager      At times he might say things that players don't like - because he tells the truth. That ruffles a few feathers but I don't mind it, in fact he should be commended for it.
    These days I hear a lot of people in football say things with no substance behind them, but Tim certainly is not like that - he can always back his opinions up.
 'He is trying to build a new team'  Christian Benteke had scored two goals in 16 league games before Sherwood took charge of Villa last season. Under Sherwood, he scored 11 in 13, earning Villa 11 points - they stayed up by three points      Tim earned his right to have a proper crack at being Villa boss with the incredible job he did to keep them up after taking charge in February, when they were in desperate trouble with a dreadful scoring record.
    Villa have been fighting relegation for a few years now under several different managers so this season was never going to be any different.
    But, just eight games into the new campaign and at the first sign of adversity, Sherwood already appears to be under massive pressure.
    You have to take into consideration that he lost his two best players over the summer in striker Benteke and midfielder Delph, who were both inspirational for him last season, and realise he is trying to build a new team with all the signings that Villa have made.
    Villa's net spend over the summer was under £10m - and a lot of that went on young players with little or no Premier League experience.
    They have plenty of potential, and also plenty of sell-on value which seems to be a big part of the club's thinking, but it is a gamble whether they work out for Villa now and that is Sherwood's problem.
    I don't know who had the final say on each deal but from what I understand, Villa's head of recruitment Paddy Reilly and sporting director Hendrik Almstadt play a big part in the process.
    You cannot blame Tim for the squad not being strong enough if it is not just down to him, but he is the one who is being criticised because Villa have not won since the opening day.
    I get why the club's owner Randy Lerner might be getting twitchy because of the amount of money at stake if they go down, but the logical thing to do is to give Sherwood more time because he is an intelligent man who has already shown he can improve players - which is exactly what Villa need now.
 

			Aston Villa's signings - summer 2015
Player	From	Age	Fee
Idrissa Gueye	Lille	26	£9m
Jordan Ayew	Lorient	24	£8.5m
Jordan Veretout	Nantes	22	£8m
Jordan Amavi	Nice	21	£7.7m
Adama Traore	Barcelona	19	£7m
Rudy Gestede	Blackburn	27	£6m
Scott Sinclair	Man City	26	£2.5m
Joleon Lescott	Man City	33	£2m
Jose Angel Crespo	Bologna	28	£550k
Matija Sarkic	Anderlecht	18	Unknown
Micah Richards	Man City	27	Free
Mark Bunn	Norwich	30	Free
Tiago Ilori	Liverpool	22	Loan

  'Trying to find the right balance in attack and defence'  Gestede has scored four goals in five starts for Villa since his £6m summer move from Blackburn      Sherwood has chopped and changed his team and formation a lot so far, but that is only because he is trying to find the right balance between attack and defence while he beds those new signings in and finds a system that works with the players he has got.
    The choices he has to make with his current forwards is an example of how difficult that is.
    Like Benteke, Rudy Gestede has tremendous physical attributes and is as good as there is in the air in the Premier League.
    In an effort to make the most of that, Sherwood has tried to get his full-backs forward to get crosses into the box - Jordan Amavi and Alan Hutton or Leandro Bacuna have all done that far more than any of Villa's midfielders.
    But what Gestede doesn't have is the ability to link up play, or the pace to get behind defences. In that way, Benteke was much more of an all-round striker.
    Sherwood can leave out Gestede and play Gabriel Agbonlahor or Jordan Ayew if he wants pace, but then he does not have that same physical presence up front, or any aerial threat.
    Whoever he picks, he is missing something that Benteke provided on his own.
    Because he is trying to find that balance between attack and defence, he cannot always play two up front to solve that problem, especially because he is also trying to fit Jack Grealish into his team as an attacking midfielder.
 

		Aston Villa in the Premier League 2015-16
Player/position	Starts	Most open-play crosses
		*One of Bacuna's starts came as a right-winger, when he made four of his crosses
Jordan Amavi  (left-back)	8	35
Alan Hutton (right-back)	4	27
Leandro Bacuna (right-back)*	5	14
Ashley Westwood (midfield)	8	12
Scott Sinclair (midfield)	7	8

  'Grealish has defensive responsibilities too'  Jack Grealish scores Villa's first goal against Leicester - they led 2-0, but lost 3-2      Grealish is a young player who has a lot of talent but picking him creates a different issue because winning games is not just down to what happens when you have got the ball.
    However good Grealish is going forward, he does not always put in a shift going back the other way.
    When you lose possession, you need to be compact and tight defensively and Villa have lacked that in the games I have seen, notably in their defeat by Leicester when they were hit on the counter-attack time and time again.
    You really need defensive responsibility when you are in Villa's position near the bottom of the table.
    That might be one of the reasons why Sherwood has apparently used this international break to try to get Grealish fitter.
    After trying so many formations and line-ups, maybe we will see Sherwood sticking with just one in the next five or six games.
    A settled system and some continuity is what Villa need at the moment. Tim knows that and, if he is given the chance, I am confident he will get it right.
 

			Aston Villa in the Premier League 2015-16
Game	Formation	Team changes	Score
Bournemouth (a)	4-3-3		W1-0
Man Utd (h)	4-3-3	0	L1-0
Crystal Palace (a)	4-3-3	3	L2-1
Sunderland (h)	4-3-3	2	D2-2
Leicester (a)	4-2-3-1	3	L3-2
West Brom (h)	4-4-1-1	1	L1-0
Liverpool (a)	4-3-3	2	L3-2
Stoke (h)	3-5-2	2	L1-0

      Chris Sutton was speaking to BBC Sport's Chris Bevan.

[Toronto Villa]

Monty, I'm no fan of Moyes, but I really don't see how the game has moved on so much since he left it two years ago, or how he could possibly "humiliatingly out of touch". Fair enough if you think his football isn't progressive or stoic, but it's not like his replacement at Everton for example is playing the game much differently. Or any number of clubs outside of the select few are that different to the Everton sides he produced. I don't see how at all he'd be out of touch with the majority of the league to be honest.

Now, my biggest concern is how quickly could he take what we have stabilize and propel us up the table. He's hardly going to play the beautiful game the situation we are in. I think he would play pragmatic, safe football to ensure we stayed up and then work to integrate the more skilful players over time. It certainly wouldn't be pretty to begin with. What Moyes represents is the manager Randy should have appointed instead of McLeish. We wouldn't be where we are today. But clearly he had bigger projects in mind, and very possibly Fergie had tipped him off about one day managing Man U. Moyes wouldn't in any way be sexy, but he'd be the upgrade to Allardyce, and sideways step from Rodgers in my opinion.

[mrfuse]

How was Lambert a "treading water" deal? He was regarded as a promising young manager who could get the club upwardly mobile again, rather than a stabiliser cast in the mould of Allardyce or Moyes.

He hasn't exactly had all that many opportunities to replicate his strategies elsewhere: United is in a totally different stratosphere, and Spanish football is very different, so I don't see how that can be substantially used as an example here.

I don't really get the point you make about his success being built out of a platform established a while ago - isn't the point there that he was the one who built that platform?

As for the players he'll use, it's too hard to tell. I personally believe he would play Grealish and Gil, if maybe not every game. He brought through Januzaj at United and I'm sure he would've played Barkley if he had stayed at Everton.

In order:

 - Lambert was a water-treader because, of all the managers in the world, they yet-again decided that 'Premier League experience' was the vital criterion. That's such a conservative and insular way of thinking, and designed to do nothing but hopefully keep us bumbling safely around this league. Moyes would be similar.

 - Those circumstances may well have been unusual, but they're still all we have. I don't think the evidence is there to suggest he'd take us down, but I don't think it's there to suggest he'd be much of a modernising force at the club. If he were, he could have done quite well in Spain; as he isn't, he hasn't.

 - Yes he built the platform, but my point is that the game has moved on since that platform - a defence of stoppers, Lee Carsley in midfield, long-balls-to-the-big-man - was really effective in the Premier League. It's maximum position used to be 5th or even 4th, but now it's probably 12th at absolute best, and Everton continued to do well because of stability (much underrated). Now, I'd kill for 12th right now, but it would all be a bit pointless.

 - On Jack and Gil, I think Moyes would think more like Ads, who I think is basically wrong - we could play them both as the wide-ish players in a 4-3-3 with Ayew up front. I wouldn't expect anything other than Gestede as the focal point under Moyes.

Basically all fair points, but I suppose we differ in terms of how we want the club to get from point A to point B (point B presumably being a club consistently in play for the European spots.) I consider it a two-step process where we hire someone boring to start it off, while working particularly hard to identify the successor who takes the big steps.

I don't really think it's a matter of 'modernising', so to speak, that we should be prioritising. I know it's not ideal to have someone as dull as Moyes in there, but we've run ourselves into such a mess that honestly I think that no other approach is all that realistic (or as a different way of expressing it, I think it would be too much of a gamble.)

I agree entirely with that. Our first priority is to stay up this season, then 2 or 3 seasons of mid table obscurity at worst where we aren't in any serious danger of flirting with relegation, and then we can think about pushing onto the next stage of being around the top 7 or 8.

Not a very exciting prospect really and that is a large reason as to why football is broken, where is the excitement in trying to finish 8th if you have a good season?

I agree totally but how many seasons have we been saying this for? We haven't even got close to the Mid table Obscurity for sometime now.