Patrick Barclay: It’s going to be a rough ride for Tim Sherwood at Tottenham

 
17 December 2013

Tim Sherwood takes over with Tottenham in seventh place, level on points with sixth-ranked Newcastle, which is roughly where the club should be if judged by their budget.

In other words, Andre Villas-Boas did an okay job, despite the leaks that have appeared about his man-managerial shortcomings, the most hilarious of which is that he fell out with Emmanuel Adebayor — any manager who doesn’t fall out with Adebayor is a rare bird indeed.

Now Sherwood will show how it should be done. If he can get Adebayor and the rest working as hard as he himself did during a career that peaked with Blackburn’s title and three England caps, Spurs will do well. But if it were as easy as that, every club would want Robbie Savage as their manager.

What Daniel Levy intends to discover — and rarely has a chairmanship turned into such a wide-ranging voyage of discovery — is whether Sherwood, whose forthright opinions make him such a powerful pundit, can put genuine leadership where his mouth is.

As Blackburn captain he did so. But this is different. This is management — the art that has defeated even better captains than Sherwood, men such as Bryan Robson. Even if Sherwood improves Spurs’s results and, towards the end of the season, is given the job on what will be laughably described as a “permanent” basis, his difficulties will be only beginning.

High among them will be the task of keeping board and players happy at the same time. Among those who have suffered from that, at a club with expectations bigger than their crowd, is Roy Hodgson, when encountering Blackburn in turbulent decline. And among the players who became disaffected was Sherwood.

He is to be congratulated on achieving his chance to shine. As is Les Ferdinand, while no one deserves a step up to first-team duty more than the long-serving Chris Ramsey. Welcome to the madhouse.

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