TOTTENHAM ARE STILL A BIG CLUB!

if spurs lose their next two matches at home (benfica and arsenal), which is quite likely, would sherwood get the sack?

who would replace him? the season would be a write off, they'd just stagger to the end with him surely

yes, all that guff from sherwood applies to himself more than any particular player

Levy would make himself a laughing stock sacking Sherwood before the end of the season, it's probably not going to happen.

We have the players to beat most of the teams below us and none of the clubs above us, so we'll be fine and finish more-or-less where we are now without Sherwood doing anything spectacular, but that's pretty much the end of it. Season is a write-off anyway unless the unthinkable happens and we win the Europa League.

Spalletti would be available immediately.

Man for man we're in about the right positiin but jesus its been a long time since we've anything like clicked

Happy enough for sherwood to threaten all and any player from now til summer, surely they all realise he's the lamest duck since howard

TS:

"I'm the one planning it at the moment and looking at different personnel. The boys here have an opportunity to prove that they want to stay. If not, they'll be moved on and we'll look for replacements. I know the DNA of the guys and I know the ones I can trust and those I can't."

Asked which players were playing for their future, Sherwood added: "All of them. Everyone gets a second chance. They've got an opportunity to respond, they know what's required. It's about rolling your sleeves up in adversity and that's what I'm looking for. The players are men; I'm a manager not a babysitter."

^
He openly states that he cannot trust some of the players.
Is he leaving them to wonder which ones?
Does he know what 'DNA' means?
If he doesn't trust some of the players, why do they get a second chance? They can't be trusted with it.

He's a terrible thing.

My guess is he's talking about Vertonghen, who I think mentally checked out a while ago. Maybe Paulinho or Capoue as well. Startlingly inept man management either way given his obviously draining authority, it's not like he can pull a Mourinho or even a Redknapp here.

Also if he thinks Levy will back him in writing off £100m of by and large good players then he's more foolish than I imagined.

Weird how in all of this it's Adebayor who gets to play teacher's pet.

I mean Capoue had already gone on record as basically saying "in England they don't know shit about foreign players" and I can't really fault him for it given the way he's been treated.

but pf, i really can't see the point in getting exercised about sherwood!

he has never been in the running for the job.

I'm not even sure if he can damage the players given his position.

but i'm not against shouting at vertonghen and the likes.

He's in the job!

Fair

I suspect that several of the new arrivals, especially the ones who are in and out of the team, will be very nervous about their World Cup prospects and may well consider their moves here a disaster in that regard. The Belgians and maybe Paulinho will be alright but one or two of the others must be dropping out of the reckoning.

WC squad hopes a vg point alright.

Naughton will be doin well at this stage id say

pondered before an alternative world in which bale is unhappily at spurs at lamela goes to the 2014 wc after a great season at roma

Benfica are a big club. I wonder how good they'll be against Spurs tonight.

They have been a bit disappointing this season but are still top of the league, iirc. If they turn up, I would be happy with a draw.

Will tune in just for the chance to see Lazar Markovic for the first time. Unless it clashes with the Porto-Napoli.

Benfica looked more like a big club.

Spurs, especially in the second half, had several passages of idk 7-8 passes which went nowhere useful and felt like a kind of simulation of what a confident team and/or Big Club does; at those times their inferiority seemed much more apparent than during moments of individual cretinism

Thats merely the managerial cretinism showing up where the individual cretinism fails

A rare enough fuckin occurrence in itself tbh

I would like to believe that Sherwood is now discredited and this is commonly understood.

But reality does not always work like that. Possibly the club's owners remain as confident about him as he does. I will believe his departure when I see it.

Wouldn't normally C&P from The Fiver but their demolition of Sherwood today was pretty damning. They didn't bother to even try and be funny:

Tim Sherwood, a "source" told the Sun in January, "is not afraid to speak out". Thanks, "source". We hadn't noticed. As the man himself said this week, "I am singing it from the heart, not from the script – I'm not an actor, I work on impulse." On Thursday night he impulsively declared that Benfica's finger-waving manager Jorge Jesus "lacks class", and what's more he thinks it would be a good idea to ignore him completely when Spurs are in Lisbon for their Big Vase round of whatever second leg. "Nah, not for me thank you," he declared. "I have no intention of speaking to him."

Good plan, Tim. If you don't much like someone, it's often best to avoid them completely. And he wouldn't be the first Spurs manager to refuse to talk to a person he considered disrespectful, after all. Glenn Hoddle did it once, when one particularly insolent player criticised him in the press. Midfielder, this player was. Name of Sherwood. "The day after the article came out I tried to have a meeting with Hoddle," he sobbed. "He just said, 'I don't want to talk to you.' And those were the last words he ever said to me … In the end, the situation got so bad I wrote a formal letter of grievance."

OK, but a man's allowed to change his mind, isn't he? And to his great credit, Sherwood seems a principled chap. Take, for example, his criticism of Dimitar Berbatov in 2007, towards the end of the sulky Bulgarian's time at Spurs. "He is a big character in the dressing room and if he starts poisoning the rest of the boys you've had it," Sherwood said. "You need players in this situation, players who are going to fight for you." Like Sherwood himself fought for his managers. Take, say, Mr Roy at Blackeye Rovers, who wistfully recalled: "Tim became very disenchanted with the club. Being such an important character, his discontent was able to spread to a lot of other players. These people didn't have the strength of character or experience to stand up to somebody who was finding fault with most things."

Finding fault with most things, eh? Doesn't sound like Tim. He just sings from the heart. And, besides, he was younger then, and still learning. He's older now. Wiser. "When you get to this late stage of your career," he said a full decade ago, "you do start to think about the possibility of management and what you have learned from your different bosses." So, let's see exactly what he's learned, and how well he learned it:

Thing No1: "George Graham has a simple philosophy: 'If you don't lose goals you don't lose games.' If there's a secret behind his success, I think that's it." Result: Spurs, having kept a clean sheet in 54% of games this season before his appointment, have been running at 29% since.

Thing No2: "I've learned a hell of a lot from Glenn Hoddle – and all of it his how not to do the job. His biggest fault is he has absolutely no man-management skills. The art of successful management involves keeping everyone in the squad happy." The result: Sherwood accuses his players of being "lazy and unprofessional" and "too nice to each other". He shouldn't have to worry about their feelings, he reveals: "They are men. I'm a manager, not a babysitter."

Thing No3: "Kenny Dalglish's great managerial talent was that not only did he know every one of his own players but everybody else's as well. He would study the opposition and tell us what their players were good and bad at. He was a genius, the absolute guv'nor." Result: Luisão left totally unmarked by an ill-prepared Spurs defence at set pieces and scores for Benfica. Twice.

In summary, don't pay any attention to anything the man says. Or does.

This reminds us that Sherwood is not only incompetent, unintelligent and unqualified, but vile.

i wonder has any other manager ever expressed sentiments not totally in keeping with isolated incidents from his last defeat

i'd imagine they have

Tbf some of those were from the defeat before that.

Sherwood must have some dynamite blackmail material on David Hytner.

On the money, pandemic.

"gloriously unreconstructed and off-message"

Incredible.

Tottenham manager Tim Sherwood wants to see a "blood and thunder" encounter when his side host north London rivals Arsenal on Sunday.

Fifth-placed Spurs are six points behind fourth-placed Arsenal, who are seven points behind Premier League leaders Chelsea.

"I don't think there is much blood and thunder these days - I want it to be more of that," said Sherwood.

"I think that gives us the edge. We are more functional than they are."

red card/serious injury sweepstake

there's a return of the repressed ambience about tim sherwood, get rid of the technocrat and appoint mediocre expro with no experience, who loses first game at home playing a 442 with two forwards and touchline wingers under orders to 'fill up the box' but thinks he deserves the job fulltime

― A Skanger Barkley (nakhchivan), Sunday, 22 December 2013 03:55 (2 months ago)

functional connotes rudimentary, unreconstructed, real rather than anything to do with....functioning like a properly managed team might be expected to

Sherwood's appointment has highlighted so much that is antediluvian about English football discourse.

you wanna be sacking your english managers and hiring european sophisticates, it's the hot thing

floods were only three weeks ago tbf xp

i heard you sacked your european sophisticates and hired english managers

ach this was poss already implicit. let's talk abt rtc's classical education

imago delenda est

so i'm feminine/neuter plural now am i

no wait neuter plural would be 'delenda sunt'

made a pig's ear of this counterzing

villas boas is signing with zenit

Boo. Was hoping he'd turn up at Schalke in the summer.

Good move for all involved. Now if Spalletti could come the other way...

"I can't apologise for it," he continued, "and I can't say it won't ever happen again. I don't even know why I was angry. It's probably something we worked on in training. I would say if I remembered but when it's not applied it winds me up. Every manager would be the same but I suppose I show it more than others. If we were all the same, then this world would be very boring. I've got to show my emotions. If I didn't, then I'd be acting and there's too many actors in this game. I just want to wear my heart on my sleeve, when I wear them.

fucking moron

that was a terrible game, tottenham playing in sherwood's image and arsenal going along with it, virtually nothing of any quality after 73 seconds

what a great character he thinks he is. he has actually overtaken mark hughes as the most hateful, delusional idiot in the league

I know lots of top managers use a degree of delusional paranoia to stay insulated from their shortcomings, but it's normally in the service of the team, sherwood is just a poisonous, traitorous individual ready to turn on the next player he can scapegoat

So well said Ogmor.

The conspiratorially minded might wonder whether the easy ride he's being given by the likes of Hytner is because he was their inside man for leaks in the AVB era.

He's being given an easy ride because You Can Talk About Tactics All Day Long But It's A Simple Game At Heart with a hefty chunk of Sam Allardici jingoistic bollocks in there as well.

As if Brendan Rodgers has put together the best Liverpool team in forever purely through just putting it in the box and going "just go out there and play".