On the previous occasion Aston Villa lost five successive Premier League matches, Tom Fox decided Paul Lambert needed to be sacked. Randy Lerner asked the chief executive to talk through his thought process and, satisfied with the answers he received, backed the man he trusts to run the club to relieve Lambert of his duties. Tim Sherwood was spared that fate after Villa were beaten at Chelsea but the suspicion lingers that another of those transatlantic phone calls may not be too far away.
Villa host a struggling Swansea side on Saturday and Sherwood, with one point from a possible 21, can ill afford a sixth defeat on the spin. After a fortnight of speculation, the supporters’ trust has called on the club to end the silence and back or sack the manager. Villa are saying nothing but privately insist that at no stage has Sherwood been given an ultimatum to win a match within a certain time frame, reasoning it would not be the greatest motivational tactic to go down that path.
At the same time, there is no escaping the fact the Villa board are deeply concerned at the club’s position on the back of a dismal run of results and, with that in mind, it would be a major surprise if they put out a statement in support of Sherwood. With Villa four points adrift of 17th position and without a victory since Rudy Gestede scored at Bournemouth on the opening day, the manager’s position is perilous and there is no point pretending otherwise.
It has not gone unnoticed within the club that Villa not only have a tricky run of matches ahead to negotiate but that in the corresponding games last season (Watford were in the Championship, and so their visit in November is excluded) they lost six of the next seven fixtures. Villa had also accumulated another seven points from the games played so far.
While the past is never a reliable barometer for the future, in a broader sense Villa supporters could be forgiven for arguing otherwise after what they have been through. Villa have flirted with relegation every season since 2010 and a table based on the 12 clubs that have competed in the past six Premier League campaigns shows the Midlands club bottom with more defeats and fewer goals than anyone else. The malaise, in other words, is deep-rooted and the worry is that Villa, despite their history and size, are starting to feel like a club that belongs in the bottom six.
After promising to arrest the decline if he kept Villa up last season – something that was achieved with a game to spare – Sherwood said on the eve of Saturday’s 2-0 loss at Chelsea that it was agreed in the summer “the objective was to stay in the league” because the board recognised with so many younger players signing and key figures leaving “it was going to be a difficult period for us”.
That recruitment strategy has become a major talking point. Villa reinvested the £40.5m they generated from the sales of Christian Benteke to Liverpool and Fabian Delph to Manchester City and added £10-15m on top to bring in 13 new faces, the majority of whom had never played in the Premier League.
Dismayed at what had gone before, when money was often splurged on high-earning players well past their best and with no sell-on fee, Villa implemented a philosophy this summer that focused predominantly on identifying emerging talent that could be developed and which, in the case of those recruited from overseas, represented better value compared with the English market.
Driving that strategy was Hendrik Almstadt, who joined from Arsenal in July to take up the sporting director role and is big on data analytics, and Paddy Riley, the director of recruitment. Sherwood, 46, has made no secret, whether during his time in charge at Tottenham Hotspur or his early days at Villa, he has little time for the sporting or technical director role and, rightly or wrongly, it is hard to picture him nodding away at everything he is being told by two people who have never played the game at his level.
At his pre-match press conference last week the Villa manager chose his words carefully when asked about transfer strategy and was certainly not critical of the process. He explained how he submitted a list of about 30 names at the start of the summer, that the club came back with some suggestions of their own, and said ultimately “not a player has come in who I didn’t want”. It is, however, an open secret Sherwood would have liked to return to White Hart Lane to do some shopping and was targeting players more familiar with the Premier League.
Either way, the bottom line is the present structure is here to stay at Villa Park and there is a mixture of frustration, bemusement and incredulity within the club that a process designed to bring together expertise and target players to fit a long-term philosophy, rather than the interests of each individual manager at the time, is so often questioned and criticised from outside.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the signings – and nine games feels far too early to make a judgment on players, especially for those who are trying to adapt to a new league as well as a new country – it is also the case Sherwood has not helped himself at times with his tactics, in particular some of the substitutions, and on other occasions has been let down by individual errors.
Indeed, the number crunchers, inside and outside the club, point to data and key performance indicators from the matches so far that suggest Villa should have much more to show for their efforts than four points, yet everyone – and no one more than Sherwood – knows how football operates and the only statistic that matters when a club is dropping like a stone is the result.
Lambert seemed to have nine lives as he somehow managed to hang on for two-and-a-half dire years that Villa supporters will never get back, but Sherwood is unlikely to be cut the same slack and the potential interest and availability of other managers – David Moyes and Brendan Rodgers in particular – only serves to crank up the pressure on the man who re-energised the club last season.
For those fans calling for a return to the high-tempo, dynamic attacking football that characterised Villa’s resurgence, Sherwood has pointed to the loss of Delph and Tom Cleverley, highlighted how that midfield pair set the tone for the team with their energy and industry, and said “you can only be as swashbuckling as the players will allow you to be”.
It is Benteke’s departure, though, that has hurt the manager and the team the most, and that was always going to be the case with a centre-forward who scored 42 and set up eight of Villa’s 105 Premier League goals during his three years at the club.
Sherwood, to his credit, is putting on a brave face, talking positively,promising to play on the front foot, urging the players to take inspiration from himself and vowing to “keep swinging until it works”. The time has come, however, for one of those haymakers to land.
