Our former manager has claimed his first trophy with Zenit St Petersburg. Despite stumbling to a few draws in recent games, including the latest, they've won the title with two games to spare. Congratulations to him. I wonder if their style of play is any more adventurous than the one he adopted at WHL? They've only conceded 16 goals in 28 games, so probably not, though they've scored 57. It'll be interesting to see if he ever comes back to the Premier League.
I think he's perhaps guilty of having a preferred style of play that he's unwilling to change. When he has the best team in the league, like at Porto and Zenit he seems to get good football and results out of them but trying to get Chelsea's players to embrace a technical, continental game was a bad idea and in trying to get the same out of us he made us far too cautious and wouldn't adapt it until it was too late.
In other European football, former Premier League manager news, Moyes has now won just 1 in 9 after 3-0 thumping at home to Granada. Whether he's sacked tomorrow or after the last game is proabably the only question at this point.
Excluding the fact of who has the ball, AVB seems to have a similar style to JM. Organise the team to contain (through sideways ball possession) and pray to chosen deity that one of the flair players creates something magical. I still think he got a lot of things right here. Correcting our fading out of matches through training sessions. Pushing Bale to greater heights. Calling BAE on his crap and getting him away from the first team whilst pushing Rose through. The "works wonders with a great team" is completely true of him though and ultimately his approach just wasn't Spurs.
My money's on the defence... Seeing him do well has provoked a couple of thoughts for me. Did we jump the gun, did the presence of a certain destablising influence have any effect on his time at the club and did Sherwood benefit from it? He's a young manager and I think that he's probably unsuited to Spurs, due to his style of play, so there's that. We've basically replaced him with a similar package who has a worse command of the English language, though. I felt that he'd lost the dressing room, but how much of that could have been down to people at WHL making things difficult? Some of the squad clearly don't give much of a crap and some of the staff have since shown some unfortunate colours. We all know that Sherwood came in a rejuvenated a flagging side and he's done the same with Villa. He plays a much more open and attacking style than either Villas-Boas or Lambert, but I wonder if their influence on the squads helped him defensively. The performance against Southampton has been symptomatic of Villa's recent issues at the back. I'm sure we started to look more ragged in defence towards the end of last season, too. He might need to look at a defensive coach, but we look far more in need of one right now, in all honesty.
I wish AVB well because he clearly cared and tried hard while he was here. But hearing him criticized as being anti-football reminds me he was exactly the wrong manager for Spurs.
I still say he came to the Prem too soon in his career. If he can build up a head of steam in Europe, I'm sure he'll be back here, again, and could well next time out.
