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Wednesday
Feb042009

Tim Sherwood? Does anyone care?

Robbie Keane has been back five minutes and he’s already made an impact. Such is the lack of leadership in our squad (and with Ledley King never fit) Harry has opted to make our returning son club captain. No doubt he will point, look up at the sky, wave his arms, shake his fist and shout at everything and anything including the slackers in the side. Whether any of them bother looking up to take note of our Robbie is altogether another thing. Because, you know. The players don’t care, right? What, you haven't heard? Have you not caught up on your weekly reminder about the lack of caring thing? Slacker. Get that Daily Mail delivered to your home, damn it!

It concerns me that we have to listen to people employed by the club, slag the club off. We have Tottenham forums and the tabloid columnists for that sort of lark. Even if the club deserves to be slagged off or be criticised, we do not need to have the main focus of sound-bites coming from manager and coaching staff (yes, I know…..Harry loves to talk, the irony burns).

I’ve never liked Tim Sherwood, and still don’t have much time for him. I’m not sure I understand the logic behind his employment as a part-time coach with us. How anyone can be part-time in football is beyond me considering it’s not exactly the most challenging profession with regards to hours spent in a working day compared to people who stand on their feet for 8 hours or sit in a office staring at a screen falling into a coma.

Whatever it is Sherwood does at the club as a coach is obviously not working, so I almost ignored reading his latest rant. I sucked in the vomit and went ahead with it anyway. What he says is common knowledge to anyone who watches Spurs. Players don’t care enough. You can’t disagree with it. We can see it for ourselves week to week. He cites that we are capable of defeating Arsenal on our day but fail to grind out results when it’s equally important (but not as glamorous as a NLD). Says the reason we looked at Craig Bellamy was because of his attitude towards winning. Keane does have a similar work ethic. So it does make sense to make him captain when our other choice is Jenas (Woodgate would have been my preference).

Finding myself in agreement with his viewpoint (even though its one shared by anyone following Spurs) still makes me ashamed considering he has spent the past few years slating us at every opportunity on TalkSport radio (he’s neither knowledgeable or insightful….so perfect match). Very bitter man. And I'm still not sure what he has to offer us exactly. If anyone knows what he does at Spurs, please let me know. The bloke has no experience as a coach, was not a great midfielder (should our players be inspired by his presence?) and is unprofessional (talks to the press far too much).

So, to reiterate, it's now a common occurrence to slag off our players and highlight their faults, week in week out, publicly. And it's not working as the results are not changing and the players are still not giving it 110%. All it serves is to pass the blame so everyone is in no doubt who should be blamed (at least from the perspective of the one doing the passing).

So how about working all this out behind closed doors rather than giving the red tops more headlines? Its tiresome stuff to see the same complaints repeated over and over again and yet no progress made. The reason we have managers and coaches is to man-manage and coach.

I expect Tim will be happy regardless. If Tottenham sink, he’ll go back to radio full-time and possibly publish his memoirs on the Titanic travesty Tottenham was in season 2009.

Spurs: The Reason they got Relegated by Tim Sherwood

Future bestseller on Green Street that.

Talking of travesty….Darren Bent. No, I’m joking. Look at his record.

It’s something like 14 goals in 30 games from 18 starts. He scored 8 goals last year as a sub. I might be one or two goals off (as I’m attempting to recall from memory) but still, that’s not too shabby, is it? On paper at least. So why is he much maligned? Well, personally, he doesn’t seem to play well when paired up front with another forward and he can go long periods (several games) without doing much in-game in the way of any thing productive on the eye. In a recent match he must of touched the ball 5 times in 45 minutes.

Which is why we tend to remember his misses more so than his performance and application. In a course of a game, he simply doesn’t seem to be involved us much as a Defoe or Keane or Pav. His Bolton cameo was a good one. Do that every week and we’ll go back to rating him much like we did earlier in the season. Fickle bunch we are. If things don’t work out, we can always flog him to Sunderland come the summer. Best moment of the window came after it actually closed from Ricky Sbragia who ‘tapped up’ Bent (yes, he did, according to Sbragia himself who accused Harry of the exact same thing in relation to us being linked with Jones) when he stated ‘we are interested’.

Er, Ricky…..if you’re gonna tap up a player you need to make sure you time it so that you actually stand a chance of signing the player within the window. Doesn’t actually have much of an affect after it.