Perhaps the funniest thing the comedian Peter Cook did was his last proper thing, an appearance on Clive Anderson Talks Back as the football manager and motivational speaker Alan Latchley ( former Scunthorpe and Manchester City and author of the book Dare To Fail). A riff on the classic big personality English manager, Latchley was a great comic creation and a supreme piece of footballing satire at a time when footballing satire wasn’t really a thing.
In the course of a slightly wild 10-minute spot – eyes blazing with passion, fire and, let’s face it, red wine – Cook produced a stream of classic Latchleyisms. Football is about nothing unless it’s about something! What is football anyway, Clive? She’s more than a mistress. She’s a wife and a daughter. She’s an errant child. Finally, asked what he, Alan Latchley, brings to his teams, Latchley clutches Anderson’s knee, eyes blazing, jaw set, and hisses a single word: “BELIEF!!!”
Funnily enough, this still sounds like a pretty good description of a certain kind of English footballing attitude. Even more so as Saturdays’s FA Cup final marks the biggest managerial occasion in the career of Aston Villa’s own magnetic force of nature, Tim Sherwood.
It has been a little too easy for some to dismiss Sherwood as a modern-day reboot of the old shouty English manager, Alan Latchley in a goose-down gilet. What success he has had, the theory goes, is based not in sound, transformational methods, but in the ability to induce a kind of instant motivational rage. Sherwood, at Tottenham and now Villa, has acted as a managerial amphetamine, an easy buzz, a Red Bull appointment.
Hopefully this is about to change. Not least because for all his raggedness and bluster it is clear Sherwood has some very obvious strengths. This is a manager who in 43 Premier League matches at two clubs over two seasons has had a significant galvanising effect on an unusual number of players, not to mention leaving Spurs and Villa higher in the table than he found them. At Wembley, Sherwood could become the second English manger to win the FA Cup since Joe Royle in 1995. Not to mention – and get this – the only currently employed English manager with a major trophy to his name.
No doubt Sherwood’s brashness hasn’t helped, the king-geezer schtick on the touchline, where he looks less like a cutting-edge modern manager and more like a man about to have a fight at a wedding. There is undoubtedly a skein of snobbishness in this, a reaction to the basic tone and style of Sherwood’s short-term success at Villa, which has, nonetheless, been sensational.
Before he was appointed Villa had scored 12 goals in 25 Premier League matches under Paul Lambert, who, towards the end, seemed to watch his own team in a state of detached amusement, to the extent you half expected to look up and notice him doing some other more useful task like putting together a flatpack sideboard, or sorting a basket of laundry, with just half an eye vaguely on the football. In three months since, Sherwood has brought eight reviving wins and a slightly wild sense of full-throttle freedom. His players have stormed forward at every opportunity with wild, drunken abandon, while Sherwood has been re-cast as a kind of Man at C&A Zdenek Zeman. His methods might look simple enough: pick your most skilful players; pass the ball quickly; run hard in attack; and do whatever it takes to get your best goalscorer firing. But they work. Fabian Delph has been transformed into a spiky little swaggering midfield prince. Tom Cleverley, who played with a faux Xavi-lite gravitas at Manchester United, like an overly grave and serious teenager, has discovered his own inner Tim-drive. Jack Grealish, who under Lambert was hidden away like a delicate consumptive child, has become a regular cog, funnelling possession, discomfiting defences, and transmitting a heads-up, ball-playing confidence.
There is plenty of method here. A midfield diamond has added a supporting weight of numbers around Christian Benteke to great effect, and encouraged Villa’s high-energy ball-carriers to attack from disconcerting angles. Above all, Sherwood wants his team to run, to sprint, to move with freedom and creative aggression, in its own way an Anglo-variation on the heavy-metal football of Jürgen Klopp, or the more refined, carefully calibrated obsession with sprints of Joachim Löw’s Germany.
Really, though, the best thing about Sherwood is his aggression, his fury, his alluringly pantomime-ish presence. As my colleague Scott Murray put it this week, Sherwood appears to appreciate that football is a piece of theatre. He prowls and prances. He radiates a brooding, peaty masculinity.
At the end of which it is hard for the English-leaning neutral not to want Villa and their own impossibly watchable Tim to win the FA Cup. In Arsène Wenger, Sherwood’s opposite number and English football’s arch euro modernist, there is at least an illuminating contrast. For Arsenal, winning the FA Cup represents a slightly better alternative than not winning the FA Cup, a least good trophy-winning option. Whereas for Villa and Sherwood victory would be a moment to revive not just a club but even the Cup itself. Just imagine, for a moment, the celebrations. Sherwood isn’t just going to put the lid on his head, he’s going to eat it. He’s going to climb the arch in his underpants, a corner flag in each ear, pausing only to challenge Pep Guardiola, Alex Ferguson, Herbert Chapman and Mario Zagallo to a mixed martial arts death match.
Or perhaps not. Either way Sherwood does deserve a little respect. Not just for his underrated sense of method but because he is, above all, an antidote to the one thing football really has to fear: predictability, set formulae, a dwindling away of its own irrational, vaulting, agreeably toxic passions. Sherwood may have failed to shake, just yet, the feeling this a manager who’s here for a good time not a long time but one thing is for sure – it certainly won’t be boring.
• This article was corrected on 29 May 2015 to reflect the fact that Tim Sherwood could become the second English manager to win the FA Cup since Joe Royle in 1995.
