Second prize is a set of steak knives

There was a picture doing the rounds last week and it did not make me laugh. You’d really have to wonder did it make anyone laugh, even the person/12-year-old who put it together. It was the poster for Dumb and Dumber, but with the heads of Tim Sherwood and David Moyes crudely superimposed over the faces of Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey! 

Smashing sense of humour.

You see, Sherwood is undergoing a difficult time as Head Coach at Spurs, his honeymoon period definitely over, and David Moyes is looking more and more like a man whose wife has left him at the altar and nobody knows where to look.

United fans have taken to singing about their 20 league titles, the chant essentially becoming a self-hypnotising mantra that allows them float blissfully over the chaos.

In this way they have inadvertently appropriated Man City fans’ We’re not really here. Spurs fans don’t have any mantras, or worry beads; instead there is a kind of quiet civil war taking place. There are those who want Sherwood to be given a chance. They see him as ‘passionate’ and honest. They like the picture of him appearing to front up to poor old David.

On the other hand, there are those who cannot believe he is anywhere near the dugout on match days. He’s a bish-bosh merchant. He has no experience, he doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, they argue. The results have varied, giving both camps just enough oxygen to sustain them until the next match. It’s fair to say that both sides of the argument have lingering AVB and Harry issues that would fill a van full of big blue IKEA canvas bags.

[linequote]‘I have ideas of what I want to do and what I want to put in place when the time is right’  David Moyes[/linequote]

The performances by and large, have not varied. The performances have been poor. It’s actually hard to remember a really exciting post-Bale performance. But let’s not go down the Bale-Modric-Van der Vaart route again. (And please let us not delude ourselves by including Defoe in that list.) Let’s stick with what will surely be known in due course as “the short-lived Sherwood era” or “the bizarre self-inflicted flesh-eating virus.”

Bar the wins over Everton and Cardiff – both 1-0 at home – with every Sherwood victory there seems to be mitigating circumstances as to why it happened.

Southampton – riddled with injuries and suspensions
Stoke – did not turn up, key men suspended
Man Utd – Moyes
Palace – missed a penalty and bossed first half
Swansea – Laudrup sat and watched like a bad version of Sven, stuff going on behind the scenes. Knew he was sacked?
Newcastle – Cabaye just gone, woeful run of form

In fairness to Sherwood, there is nothing he can do about issues affecting opponents, and you could probably mitigate in a similar fashion about any club’s run of wins. Nevertheless, he was lucky to come up against teams completely out of form, missing 3/4s of their defence or who contrive to miss penalties at a crucial moment.

And this has all been achieved while the playing style is “not entirely” how Sherwood wants to play the game. Imagine how good we’re gonna be when it all clicks, kids. He has suggested the Sherwood style has been in evidence only in fits and starts. So far nobody has thought to ask him to pinpoint a period of play in any match when the players have done what he has been trying to tell them to do.

Does he want it in the mixer early? Does he really like 4-4-2? What’s Sir Les on about anyway?

Sherwood seemed happy with the performance against Woolwich in the league (in the cup defeat Woolwich almost looked bored dismantling Spurs). Are we to infer from his satisfaction that there were glimpses of the nascent Sherwood style in the boot, b*llock and pride performance? Lord help us.

Inferring anything from a derby performance is never wise though.

So, in reality, we still don’t know what he’s trying to do. He’s been saying since he was appointed that it will take time for him to get his playing style across to the players he has inherited. Fair enough. But after 19 matches is anybody any the wiser as to what he is trying to do?

[linequote]‘I know how I want to play the game and it’s completely….it’s not entirely what you see out there’ Tim Sherwood[/linequote]

It will be interesting to see what transpires against Southampton. Nobody on earth knows what team Sherwood will pick – maybe not even himself. The recurring gag is that he will pick Bentaleb no matter what. People were impressed with Bentaleb on his debut. It was clever of Sherwood to promote a player he has helped bring through. But he has overplayed his trick.

Bentaleb has made mistakes and disappeared in other matches. Sherwood is in danger of ruining him. Maybe he saw Wenger promoting Fabregas when he was 17 and thought he could try the same. Bentaleb looks assured and moves around smoothly, but he is no Cesc Fabregas. He wouldn’t be playing for Spurs if he was.

Selecting Harry Kane in the crucial Europa home tie against Benfica was worrying, as was the thinking behind it. “He’s earned it” explained Tim. A 20-year-old striker who has shown little to suggest he is anything other than another Lee Barnard should not be earning starts in such big matches when a man with 24 goals in 47 European matches sits on the bench. It was a ludicrous decision and unfair on Kane.

It’s hard not to think that Sherwood is making these decisions in an attempt to demonstrate that he’s very much his own man and to hell with you if you don’t like it. His entire modus operandi has frightening echoes of the tragically deluded football manager Tony Adams: “I’m juggling, I’m acting, I’m managing. And then I just give one or two of ’em a bollocking”. And we all know how that turned out, Tone.

Things have gone worse than imaginable for Moyes, who inherited a completely lopsided, sated squad. Relatively speaking things have actually done rather better for Sherwood, who amazingly seems to believe he has something going on. Dumb and Dumber doesn’t capture it at all. They’re more like characters from Glengarry Glen Ross. Desperate salesmen running out of time.