For God’s sake, they couldn’t even get a result against Chelsea.
Tim Sherwood conned us all.
When he took the Villa job one damned Valentine’s Day, questions were raised, Lerner was targeted and Villa fans collectively sh*t themselves in anticipation for the worst.
But the straight-talkin’ geezer from London came in and offered the Birmingham club the same sort of temporary energy injection that he gave Spurs for a couple of months and, in what must’ve been the lowest point for football enthusiasts the world over, we all began to consider the dreaded realisation that this man could actually be a decent football manager.
And we began to accept him.
Then the summer hit. Sherwood was tasked with his very first transfer window and, more importantly, he was faced with the opportunity to prepare a team his way from the start. To build a team.
It’s the worst thing that could’ve happened to him.
He’s been found out. Any relative success Timmy might’ve enjoyed up until now has been shown to be nothing more than a quick hit of positivity that could never be sustained over any sort of period of time.
When Villa started to play well for about five weeks at the end of last season, it wasn’t because Sherwood brought some magical philosophy and it sure as hell wasn’t anything to do with the work they were putting in on the training field. The new manager came in and he told a group of decent players that they were decent players and he let them play like that. And men like Benteke and Delph and Grealish got them enough results before they stumbled to the line and finished in 17th place anyway.
So he lost his two best players in the summer but he was given over £40m for the pair of them to throw back into a team that has long since been crying out for an overhaul. He got the chance that other managers didn’t but, straight away, he wasted over half of that on Jordan Ayew and Rudy Gestede.
After 10 games – and in spite of his first goal for the club on Saturday – Villa fans must surely be asking the question of whether or not Jordan Ayew has genuinely ever been in control of a football.
Rudy Gestede on the other hand is what most Liverpool fans thought Christian Benteke was before they actually saw him play. Decent in the air but basically sh*t.
Gana looks a good prospect, Richards has done well but his only other decent summer signing, Jordan Amavi, has inexplicably been dumped to the bench in favour of Kieron bloody Richardson. And the only explanation for it is Tim Sherwood hasn’t got a notion of what he is doing and he is staggering from game to game trying to learn on the job.
Villa haven’t played the same team once.
Grealish has been dropped, Gil can’t get a look in, Scott Sinclair has played up front and the formation has varied seemingly every single week from three at the back, to five, to 4-3-3, to 4-4-2 and finally to 4-2-3-1 like we saw against Swansea on Saturday with Leandro Bacuna of all people drafted in to a holding central midfield role.
Villa haven’t won since the opening day of the season at newly-promoted Bournemouth and, ever since, Sherwood has chopped and changed his players willy-nilly and tried out different formations and instructions in the hope that one of them would override the programming system.
All he is missing at this rate is a Save Game option before he goes in to each clash so he could have the safety net of restarting the thing every single time until he gets the result he wants.
We’d still be back in August waiting for him to advance to game three though.
The chopping and changing doesn’t make him ruthless or uncompromising or any sort of a perfectionist. It only shows that Aston Villa are working on absolutely nothing on the training ground. They have no game plan, they have no tactic and they don’t even have any intentions of finding one.
Sherwood is trying to stumble across a formation and a first 11 instead of actually devising one and working on one. Instead of actually planning. Managing.
His shouting and hollering and sprinting up and down the line isn’t passion. It’s the mark of a man who has done no studying whatsoever for his exam so he’s running mad, desperately trying to shake the answers out of someone else. He’s not prepared. That’s why he screams. Because he has no control of the situation. He never does.
Against Leicester back in the first half of September, Aston Villa were bloody brilliant. They dominated the game, they played the sort of football their fans have probably only dreamed of in recent years and they deservedly went 2-0 up after a complete period of control. A 70-minute period at that.
In the end, a mistake put them under pressure. Leicester rallied, roared on by a ridiculous home crowd and a chaotic 20 minutes of madness from a fear-riddled Villa, who threw the game away. You came away from that match positive though. You don’t play that well and not progress and all that. At least it was clear we were going somewhere and you even had the audacity to think that the manager was working on something on the training ground.
Not so.
He rung the changes like he has done all year. Different system, different players, different tactics and the same, old, dire results. Except, progressively, they’ve grown more clueless. Hopeless. Leaderless.
Sherwood said before the Swansea match: “We will win tomorrow”. How a man in his position could make that statement in the first place is baffling but that he would even dare to utter words like that without even so much as a half plan on how to deliver on them was criminal.
But that’s what he is. A con man. And we fell for it once.
Not again.
He talked his way into a job, a three-and-a-half-year contract and he even talked his players around into believing his hype for a few weeks too.
What’s worse is that he talked us around. He talked his way into the fans’ open hearts.
He soon found out though that there was more to being a football manager than a Save Game and restart tool. He found out there was more to it than just his first and only love, a press conference.
But the supporters realised more quickly than he did that there was nothing else to their newest messiah but waffle. Randy Lerner brought a barking dog in to lead his crowd-funded revolution but he paid for nothing more than an immature pup.
And Aston Villa and its hurt followers look like they’re the ones who are going to pay the ultimate price.
We’ve danced too long with the devil. Only this time, we invited him home.
Villa fans, I’m sorry.
