Spurs Balls: Redknapp’s Pal Blames Funny Foreigner AVB For Chelsea Thrashing Sherwood’s Mirthless Men
MARTIN Samuel has written a monocular article about Spurs in the Daily Mail. Tottenham haave just lost 4-0 to Chelsea. Spurs losing to Chelsea is no big shocker. Games between the clubs are akin to watching the best bits from classic TV sit-coms.
Spurs are managed by Tim Sherwood. He’s English. To Samuel that is crucial:
Having lost 4-0 to Chelsea, the young manager appeared emotional. He told his employers to wake up from their dreams of Champions League football, claimed his team lacked character and talked about individuals in the group that he could not trust. It is fair to assume he is feeling the pressure.
You might think Sherwood’s management skills and ability to handle the media in the face of abject defeat are lacking. But Samuel sees something else:
Yet that strain is not greatly created by Chelsea, or any opponent. The load on Sherwood comes from within. He has a short-term contract and Louis van Gaal as good as applying for his job at every press conference. His chairman, Daniel Levy, is known to favour the exotic and this creates a climate of expectation.
That would be Levy, who before hiring and sacking Andre Villas-Boas, whom Sherwood replaced, put his faith in that exotic creature Harry Redknapp? Coincidentally, Samuel was the ghost writer of Harry Redknapp’s autobiography.
Levy became chairman of Tottenham in February 2001. This is the list of full-time and caretaker manager’s he’s appointed since:
2001 Glenn Hoddle (England)
2003 David Pleat (England)
2004 Jacques Santini (France)
2004 Martin Jol (Holland)
2007 Clive Allen (England)
2007 Juande Ramos (Spain)
2008 Harry Redknapp (England)
2012 André Villas-Boas (Portugal)
2013 Tim Sherwood (England)
Not exactly the most exotic line-up of countries, is it? If you’re tuning in from Peru, it might be. But a Mail writer from London shouldn’t be so easily impressed by places reachable on a ferry and, in Redknapp’s case, via the M3.
‘Until you get a foreign manager of this club, nobody is happy,’ Sherwood said last week. And he is right, of course.
Oh, I dunno. What about Alex Ferguson making a return at Spurs? Or the afresaid Hoddle?
The names of well-qualified rivals will be trotted out now: Joachim Low, Jurgen Klopp, Lucien Favre (the Swiss chap at Borussia Monchengladbach who is the latest flavour of the month, the candidate only the real aficionados know). Sherwood hears the refrain, constantly. Foreign is best, foreign is better, foreign knows more, foreign is shrewder, more savvy, more tactically adept. Yet that ignores one salient fact. Foreign got Tottenham into this mess.
Eh? Levy was born in Essex.
It wasn’t Sherwood who squandered large chunks of the Gareth Bale bounty in the summer. It wasn’t Sherwood who conceded six away to Manchester City and five at home to Liverpool.
But Sherwood was the manager when Spurs lost 5-1 to Man City at home. He was the manager when Spurs lost to Chelsea 4-0 away. He was there when Spurs lost to FC Dnipro. But Samuel is not listening. He’s blaming it all on AVB:
The manager of the time, Andre Villas-Boas, is Portuguese, the director of football and still in situ, Franco Baldini, is Italian.
And..? Your point is?
…when Sherwood took charge, the club was in the elite equivalent of crisis: seventh place with 27 points from 16 matches, at an average of 1.68. Tottenham have since taken 26 points from Sherwood’s 13 Premier League games at an average of two, and risen to fifth place.
So. All the wins are down to him; and all the defeats are down to them?
Last season, two points per game would have been enough to finish third. So Sherwood has improved Tottenham’s fortunes, just not by enough to chase down the top four.
In the 2012-13 season, when AVB was in charge, Spurs scores 72 points from 38 games. That’s 1.89 points a game. One season earlier, that would have been enough to secure third place.
In the 2011-2012 season, with Englisher Redknapp in charge, Spurs csored 69 points from 38 games. That’s an average of 1.82 point per game.
AVB improved Spurs. Right?
…Tottenham were unlucky at Stamford Bridge.
4-0. You can let in four unlucky goal. But to get nil you have to have failed to have scored.
That’s not unlucky. That’s a failure. That;s good tactics by Chelsea, whose manager is…foreign.
Posted: 10th, March 2014 | In: Sports, Spurs Comments (3) | TrackBack | Permalink
