Sherwood has been shooting off his mouth a lot in the media about his time at Spurs since he left, a lot of it rather self-serving, and I've lost some respect for him because of it. Ferdinand also annoyed me when he started telling tales during the Europa League game punditry he did a while back. It was the stuff about joking to Dembele about going to Real Madrid - harmless training pitch banter really but to me it grated, because selling Bale and Modric was such a contentious issue for so many fans that to reveal he joked about it to other players put me out a bit. Anyway, Sherwood as a coach. Well he did have an interesting manner with the media and said too much/the wrong things at points. Some of his comments about our scouting and youth players were well wide of the mark, as others have said. Then again perhaps some of what he said needed saying - what he said about giving players who showed quality and desire game time, rather than players with big names and big price tags is after all what Pochettino is doing. Sometimes I guess he put things across the wrong way, maybe due to inexperience and a desire to overtly show himself to be this no nonsense, more old-school manager rather than like AVB. He certainly did try to play entertaining, attacking football and got a lot out of Eriksen and Ade, and its probably fair to give him some credit for Bentaleb's emergence and Kane's progress. At the same time he made some very odd choices - the Chelsea game being a prime example of this - and his record in cups and big games wasn't all that great at all. He also lost some senior players in the dressing room, most notably Lloris who now appears to be very content under Pochettino, and he clearly rubbed a lot of other people up the wrong way. Again perhaps some of that was needed really, there are clearly some bad apples in the Spurs squad still. Ade, who Sherwood seemed to have a good relationship with, is oddly enough one of them. Who knows eh? Tim Sherwood is a pretty decent gamble for QPR in my opinion. Some people on here would have entertained the idea of him staying on as Spurs manager, and to be fair who knows what he'd have achieved as he developed as a coach and was (hopefully) backed re. transfer targets. He won't take any **** from players who won't put a shift in and he will not pick solely on reputations, and maybe the security of a contract more than 6 months long might cause him to be less brash in his interactions with players he doesn't quite see eye to eye with - and when he has to be hard he can enforce the decision by selling, rather than the players knowing he'll be off in a few months like a supply teacher. And he'll try to play entertaining football too. As a neutral, a Sherwood team would probably be a good watch, and I think a fair proportion of Spurs fans would wish him well, probably realising that the Spurs job came too early in his career for him.
So no mention yet of what credit Alex Inglethorpe gets for anything. Or is he the Andy Carroll of Academy directors (cue the Mouser Watch) ...
I’m more of a fan of Sherwood than most, but... Redknapp is actually the soul of a PR man. Most of what he says is what a representative of a club should say. But there are problems. He will always say something, so as on point as he may be, he’ll end up saying poorly judged things periodically, which get as much negative attention as the many positive things he says. He puts himself forward, rather than the team, a bit too much. Also, "most" of what he says may be fine, but some of what he says is very poorly judged, like claiming his nan could have scored one his striker didn’t, or saying Defoe was "born offsides." Sherwood strikes me as a devil’s advocate, naysayer, call it what you will. He’s sort of a natural anti-PR person. He seems to dislike pablum enough that he’ll say anti-pablum, which comes across as misanthropic. He would call it plain speaking, and there’s some truth to that. He shares the tendency to put himself forward too much. Promoting youth, getting the best out of Adebayor, losing badly to the top teams and his poor cup record have been covered. To say his teams played like Redknapp’s has some truth to it. But there was something very strange, and strangely effective, about how his teams played. They generally came out looking inert, strolling about. The other team would feel confident and attack. Then we’d score on the counter. It was like he got the team playing possum. So I’m not sure I’d call it all that attractive, but it was very effective in getting our quality players, Adebayor, Eriksen and Kane, runs at exposed defenders. Also, I understand people may resent the stats he always pointed to. But the truth is we were improving fast at the end. 2/3 or his best games were two of the three or four last games of the season. I’m not sure he’d be a good choice for QPR. His style was very well suited to getting very talented players to shine. Take away Adebayor and Eriksen and I don’t think it would have worked for us. To be fair, QPR does seem to have one big talent. But will it be enough to make Sherwood a success at manager? I just don’t know. If I were a QPR fan, I’d probably take him over the usual suspects, or most of them, though. His open style should help Austin score some winning goals, which may be enough to keep you up.
Cheers lads. Beggars can't be choosers I suppose. There is quite a decent chance he might reject us once he sees what a basket case we are. Cheers Harry.
To his credit, he did bring in and bring along Bentaleb, Kane, and no doubt would have given other young players their chance. Having said that, I dislike his arrogance and I would have a tad more respect for him if he would shut the **** up about all the supposedly good things he did whilst our manager, while conveniently forgetting all the bad stuff. Good luck with him. I hope he's learnt something, but I somehow doubt it.
