AVB/Sherwood contrast hints at English football's fear of change
Tim Sherwood had a beaming smile on his face as he said it.
Tottenham's press officer had already warned the assembled throng of journalists to cease and desist with the questions about his future. Less probing about where he stands, please, and more about the 5-1 victory over Sunderland, if you could. One sneaked through the net.
Does he, came the enquiry, believe he is the right man to lead the White Hart Lane side forward beyond this season? "I think I'm the best manager this club's ever had," Sherwood replied. From the look on his face, he was joking. At least, I think he was joking. He's not short on confidence, Tim Sherwood.
In his defence, there is at least one statistic that would back his assertion up if it turned out he was serious. It has been produced over the last few days to outline the folly of Spurs -- as they will -- dispensing with Sherwood in the summer.
The stat is this: Sherwood has the best win percentage of any Spurs manager in the Premier League era. He has emerged with three points from 58.8 percent of his 17 games in charge. His nearest challenger has 53.7 percent, albeit from a much larger sample of 54 games.
This is made more intriguing by the identity of the man in second place: Andre Villas-Boas, the man Sherwood replaced, the man who was chased out of north London, branded a charlatan and a fraud, told by all and sundry he is too young, too callow, too cold, too scientific, too arrogant to be a top-class manager.
That means that when Villas-Boas was sacked in December, he was in the same position as Sherwood is now: he was Spurs' most successful manager of the last 20 years in terms of results.
And so why, when Villas-Boas departed, was there no wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth? Where was the statistic proving how well he had done in his 18 months at Tottenham then? Why did he leave in a fire-storm of criticism? Why, when he returned to the world of gainful employment at Zenit St Petersburg, was the general reaction that he had hoodwinked another club? Why was he not afforded the same treatment as Sherwood: painted as a victim of a cruel and callous regime, a young coach with big ideas and big plans who deserved more of a shot?
Is it because of that slender difference in their win ratios? Is it because Villas-Boas sidelined Emmanuel Adebayor, whereas Sherwood has embraced him and reaped the rewards? Is it because Villas-Boas was not popular among the players? Is it because his tactics were not working, or his vision for the club was flawed?
None of these adequately explains it.
The difference in their win ratios is five per cent -- substantial enough -- but their sample sizes are not comparable. Villas-Boas sidelined Adebayor, but then Sherwood has hardly made an effort to incorporate some of Spurs' expensive summer signings; he has disclosed privately that there are five of them he just does not rate.
Villas-Boas commanded some loyalty among his squad -- so, too, does Sherwood -- and no manager is ever universally popular. In terms of tactics and vision, Villas-Boas was not perfect, but few would suggest that Sherwood -- in his first job in management -- is.
So, then, is it age? Well, possibly, but for all the Sherwood is seven years older, he has substantially less experience: Villas-Boas, after all, came to Spurs having managed four clubs with varying degrees of success; Sherwood was on zero.
There is one other explanation, and it is one Villas-Boas hinted at while he was still at White Hart Lane. The Portuguese was a little confused as to why he was under so much pressure when Manchester United, the reigning champions, seemed to be escaping the media spotlight.
"For the champions of England to be sitting in their position, there has not been a lot of drama," he said, at a time when David Moyes' side were eighth in the Premier League. "I was involved in another club before and there was more drama surrounding my results than Man United's results."
That means one of three things: expectations are higher at Chelsea than United (not true), there is a personal agenda against Villas-Boas (possible, but incomplete) or -- and this is the one Villas-Boas himself would go for -- foreign coaches get a rougher time of it in England than their home-grown counterparts.
The contrasting treatment of the Portuguese and Sherwood certainly suggests that there is something in that. In fact, a flick through the history of imported managers in the Premier League provides reams of circumstantial supporting evidence.
Claudio Ranieri was widely derided as the "Tinkerman" for his habit of mixing and matching his players. Rafael Benitez was labelled cynical, cold and defensive for his 4-2-3-1 formation -- pretty much de rigeur in the Premier League these days -- and foolish for his obsession with zonal marking. So, too, was Luiz Felipe Scolari. Juande Ramos, like Villas-Boas and Michael Laudrup, was dismissed as unable to establish a dressing room rapport with his players.
The pattern that emerges is clear: the automatic reaction to a foreign manager seems to be suspicion, followed swiftly by derision and then vindication as his reign comes to an end. Never mind that everyone rotates now, that loads of teams play a 4-2-3-1 and that zonal marking is as common as man-to-man*; Ranieri, Benitez and the like were always destined to fail, because this is England and in England, that is not the way we do things.
(*Ranieri and Benitez did not invent these concepts, obviously, They did not even introduce them to England. But they were associated with these strange new ideas that would, as received wisdom had it, never catch on.)
The easy conclusion here is that the media is xenophobic. That, though, is too simplistic. For a start, the "media" as it is conceived in the public imagination does not exist. It is constructed of disparate organisations and, within them, hundreds and thousands of individuals, each with their own beliefs and views and all of them doing different jobs.
There are no shadowy meetings at which journalists decide they are going to knife Villas-Boas, say. There is no set agenda. There are as many reporters and writers who have no time for Jose Mourinho as agree with him that he is a supreme being, descended from heaven.
Most of these individuals, moreover, are (relatively) young, open-minded, well-educated individuals -- even Iain Macintosh. They are as unlikely to be xenophobes as they are racists. Besides, even those few who do resent the cosmopolitan make-up of English football would accept we are through the looking glass: it is no good trying to get rid of one foreigner, because -- like the Hydra -- it would most likely only result in a fresh one arriving.
No, the "media" and the people who constitute it are not xenophobic. The underlying cause is more complex than that. It is, in some way, down to a legitimate and genuine anxiety over whether English coaches are given enough opportunity, though this has always been a personal bugbear: the block on home-grown managerial talent is not imports but the wizened, proven failures who clog up the jobs at the upper end of the Championship.
There are good young coaches in England, lots of them. Yet they are forever destined to remain in the lower tiers -- either of the league or the ranks -- because they cannot get those stepping-stone jobs to alert Premier League sides to their talent; not because there are lots of foreigners, but because people like Stuart Pearce and Neil Warnock are the first names on any club's list of candidates.
That is a symptom of the crucial underlying factor: English football does not like change. It does not like new ideas. It does not appreciate being told that it has been doing things wrong, or that there is a different way to look at things. What unites Ranieri, Benitez and Villas-Boas is not that they are from different countries. It is that they are all ostensibly "other."
There are foreign managers who have come to England and been feted. Arsene Wenger had to endure scepticism at first, but he soon won the country round. Mourinho turned grown adults into love-sick teenagers with but a glance. Why? Partly because they won, and fast; it is hard to argue with results as spectacular as both managed.
But also because they fit our model of a manager. They are foreign, but they are not other. They are of us. We understand them. They want complete control, they are demagogues, they do not come up with complex new ideas or seem to be telling us we are doing things wrong. They do it our way; they just do it better. That is much easier to swallow.
It is hard to think of a better example of this than Sherwood and Villas-Boas: the former all passion and heart and keeping it simple, the latter all data and low blocks and rotating sixes. One is ours, another is different, inexorably different. We get one, and we are sad to see it leave; the other is a mystery we do not want to solve.
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