Seats were thrown down from the upper tier of the North Stand from the 6,000 visiting fans seeking to rain on Aston Villa’s parade but it was the gauntlet that Tim Sherwood threw down to West Bromwich Albion, the club who twice overlooked him in the past 10 months, that had the biggest impact.
A second victory in five days against their most traditional rivals from five miles across Birmingham has taken Villa from the depths of despair to Wembley and Sherwood from gambler to winner. And what a massive gamble it was.
Villa fans danced, idiotically, on the pitch in stoppage time after goals from Fabian Delph and Scott Sinclair catapulted Sherwood to hero status in the space of three short weeks. The post-match pitch invasion was like something out of FA Cup history; yet this is not Edgar Street and Hereford United beating Newcastle United. This is Aston Villa, a Premier League club, prepared for a derby at a teatime kick-off. There will surely be severe ramifications.
Tony Pulis, with all his experience, has been laughing off the barbs of Sherwood, the new kid on the block, but the Aston Villa manager has been firing them out with increasing directness around these derbies with West Brom; almost as direct as Pulis’s primary gameplan, in fact, if the accusations are to be accepted at face value.
Notwithstanding Tuesday’s league defeat here at Villa Park, the West Brom manager smiled and reckoned Sherwood will be “good fun for everyone around the West Midlands while he is at Aston Villa”. Saturday night’s FA Cup quarter-final didn’t seem so much fun as Pulis looked set to combust on the touchline when a throw-in went against his team in the first half; and it was difficult to see if the Villa manager was laughing as the West Brom fans in the North Stand chanted abuse.
Perhaps Sherwood is miffed that he did not land the West Brom job. He spoke to them about last summer and in January about their latest succession of vacancies. On Monday he got away with chuckling that they’re a “good little club” and he was delighted to “be at a massive club like Villa” ahead of the first game. When he added yesterday morning that Villa don’t have the personnel to “be like the Crystal Palace of last year, or the West Brom of this, digging in, blood and thunder, lump the ball in, protecting a lead, that’s not us,” it started to sound like a theme. It sounded personal.
Villa’s players are better suited to chasing a top-six finish, apparently. Resorting to playing with rigid defensive organisation is, by implication, a tad beneath them. Whether Sherwood, after 32 games in senior management, is right to be disparaging of Pulis’s methods in leading Palace to last year’s survival, collecting a manager of the year award en route, or to West Brom’s current rise to mid-table, eight points clear of the relegation zone, will be judged come the end of this season. There is no long-term consideration here. Sherwood has come in, shooting from the hip, challenging Villa to play expansively, to take risks in the final third, to swagger their way to safety.
Fail, and he can place the blame at the door of Paul Lambert, his predecessor, under whom Villa contrived to score 12 goals in 25 Premier League games. But it’s a gambler’s strategy. Villa needed something to shake them up, and out of the lethargy that was sucking them down inexorably into the Championship. Sherwood plays to the gallery, archly acting the showman, and he knows how to get a laugh.
By contrast, Pulis knows how to help a team keep a clean sheet. He has had 933 games to practise it, honing how to organise a defence to earn his teams the solid platform on which to build.
West Brom had managed seven in their first 10 games on Pulis’s watch before this tumultuous week up against their most traditional rivals. Sherwood had also had a dig at teams who play four centre-backs along the defence. And sure enough, even without the injured Christian Benteke, Villa found themselves up against a back four of Dawson-McAuley-Olsson-Lescott, four strapping six‑footers who know how to defend.
Pulis used to employ similar tactics as he established Stoke in the Premier League, on their way into the Europa League via the 2011 FA Cup final. Stoke fans who sniff at such tactics from the dizzy heights of the top eight of the top flight should remember how they started on such a journey. How Villa would hope to have reached such a position in four years’ time.
