Tim Sherwood accepts he is “at the front of the queue” in the sack race but the Aston Villa manager has called for a sense of perspective by highlighting just how difficult it has been for “the worst team left in the Premier League” last season to cope with the loss of their best three players, in particular Christian Benteke.
Villa finished 17th last term, one position above the bottom three, and there are fears that a sixth successive relegation battle beckons after a dismal run in which they have picked up only one point from their last seven matches. The Villa board is deeply concerned and Sherwood’s position has come under scrutiny but it is understood no specific timeframe has been put on the manager’s future, despite reports that he must win one of the next two matches, against Chelsea away on Saturday and Swansea at home seven days later, to save his job.
Appointed eight months ago and praised for keeping Villa in the Premier League, Sherwood admitted to “feeling the pressure” and said he is realistic enough to realise he must start winning. He claimed, however, that nobody at Villa had told him that he has two games left and was in bullish mood as he predicted that the fans will be singing his name in four weeks’ time and added that he is 100% sure they will avoid relegation.
Yet Sherwood did also admit that Villa are struggling to adjust to life after Benteke, who joined Liverpool for £32.5m after almost single-handedly keeping the club up in each of the previous three seasons, with the Belgian scoring 42 and setting up eight of their 105 Premier League goals since his debut in September 2012.
“If he didn’t have a clause in his contract then £100m wouldn’t have taken him away from us,” Sherwood said. “He wasn’t worth selling for any money. No money can guarantee you Premier League survival – that player could.”
Sherwood compared the loss of Benteke, and the impact it has had on the team, to Luis Suárez’s departure at Liverpool and Gareth Bale’s exit at Tottenham Hotspur. He also said that Fabian Delph and Tom Cleverley are badly missed. “It’s all relative,” he said. “We scraped through relegation last season and were the worst team left in the Premier League. We lost our three best players and that should put it in perspective. I’ve seen it first-hand, I’ve seen a lot of players come in to try and replace one; it’s difficult. You do drop – we can’t afford to drop. We have to make sure we stay at least where we were, and higher. That’s the size of the task ahead. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy and I think all the decision-makers at the club appreciated that.”
Villa made 13 signings last summer, with the majority of them new to the Premier League, and although Sherwood said that not one arrived without his approval – “You don’t always get what you want but certainly every player who came in is a name I would have cast my eye over” – he admitted that he could not guarantee when everything would click.
“You can only speed up the process by doing what we’re doing on the training pitch,” he added. “There is no magic wand. You have more assurances if you know that people have played in the league before. It’s difficult. The group we’ve got, I’m pleased with. But they’re the unknown in this division, one million per cent.”
Villa’s style of play, which was so entertaining under him last season, has been nothing like as exciting and questions have also been asked about the manager’s tactics and the formations he has deployed at times. Sherwood, who described Saturday’s Chelsea game as “almost a free shot” for Villa, said that losing Delph, Cleverley and Benteke had forced him to adopt a different approach.
“I love to have a go every game but you work with what you’ve got,” he said. “I want everyone to be as good as Benteke or as lively as Delph but we’re working with a different group and you have to find a way which is best for the team. Sometimes you can’t play the swashbuckling style because of the personnel. Now Adama [Traoré] might be able to give us that – he’s certainly looked better this week and he can be a swashbuckling player. But we’re talking about a 19-year-old boy who’s come from League Two in Spain, which I could still play in with respect.”
