Gerrard is somehow making Sherwood look irresistible

Long time no see.

Life has been busy - it's been wild. I've been sorting out a room, trying not to destroy my bank balance, keeping on top of my medication.

I've also been trying to avoid Villa. They actively disappoint me nowadays. The team are in win-now mode but Steven Gerrard can only make them stumble to ties.

In a team that is pretty supercharged with genuinely good players across the field, it's becoming nigh-on unacceptable. A win on Monday would've changed everything.

A win against Chelsea could still do that, but time and faith is ticking away. Goodwill is all but eroded.

Can I just shock you? Win ratio is a shite stat.

You can be a pretty good coach and still have a poor win ratio. Football doesn't always allow the best team to win. You can score and win games on freak accidents.

It doesn't often happen, not enough to affect the averages, but there's better ways to judge managers. Have players improved? In general, is the club going forward under their leadership?

If Gerrard's win ratio was skewed more towards last season, and he won most of him games this season - we wouldn't care about it. It's the context that makes it.

It always is.

Anyway, on win ratio. Check this:

• Gerrard: 33 games, 12 wins, 5 draws, 16 losses = 36.36% wins
• Sherwood: 28 games, 10 wins, 2 draws, 16 losses = 35.71% wins

I think that speaks volumes. It's a simple, stupid stat. I believe Steven Gerrard is a better manager than Tim Sherwood, however I also believe he is getting nowhere enough from his team. It's such a poor return that I firmly believe that I'd like to see what Sherwood would've done with Coutinho, Buendia, Ings, Watkins and Bailey.

A few more losses for Gerrard would live him - at face value - as a poorer Villa gaffer than the roundly-mocked Sherwood. That'd be fair as well.

The main content of this newsletter will be an article I wrote a few years ago. It was originally published on 7500 to Holte, but I think it speaks strongly about the current situation.

Gerrard is losing games. Sherwood lost them.

The big difference is at least one was fun.

For a brief moment in 2015, Villa were just about untouchable - and led by a manager wearing an iconic piece of clothing. I own that piece of clothing.

Tim Sherwood, hope and the holy gilet

I clicked buy. Paypal didn’t push-back either. One-click verification - and it’s done. The disappointed look on my girlfriend’s face told the full story. I didn’t regret it one bit and I knew it’d take an extra purchase (of Untitled Goose Game & Donut County) to sort that issue out. The cost - the emotional one and the actual one - was paid. My girlfriend was happy, I was happy. For Tim Sherwood’s worn gilet was mine.

Finally.

I’ve always felt like I’ve had a problem with overreaction. Everything had to be immortalised, everything had to be dramatic. Maybe that’s because I wanted to be a writer and you do have to use certain flourishes to transform the mundane into the interesting. This gets me into trouble sometimes, as I’m usually optimistic. Combine overreaction with that and what you get is someone who usually looks like an idiot when they speak out loud. For this reason, I have been scared to speak about Tim Sherwood for a long time. However, I started reading up about the history of the Catholic Church, football culture and all sorts of other things - and I can tell you that overreaction and the immortalisation of the mundane is the human experience. We have Toby Jugs, Friday night dinner rituals, and mortar board hats for Pete’s sake! We have spent our lives injecting meaning and symbolism into useless items and rituals. We want meaning, we want it at all costs and we want it all the time. If I have a problem with meaning, so does everyone else.

The meaning of the gilet and Tim Sherwood relates more to the 2014/15 season rather than the doomed 2015/2016 campaign, and to really understand the meaning of Sherwood, his antics and the damned gilet, we need to talk about February 2015 - when Villa really were doomed.

A wicked February night in Hull saw Steve Bruce and Hull City crowned winners in less than glorious circumstances. The bedsheets were out for Villa boss Paul Lambert - and his head was demanded by Aston Villa fans who had seen their club fall into a right state on the pitch. Lambert’s late-stage Villa team were despondent. A team who had tried to adapt one-too many times. A mixing pot of footballing ideas let loose and without hope. It was over. Villa were dead and buried.

Lambert himself was a ghost. Drifting along the touchline with his hopes and dreams in tatters. Every single thing that he had tried to do to fix Aston Villa had blown up in his face. There would be no fond memories of his time at Aston Villa. It curdled and broke. While his enforced departure following a meeting with the Villa board the next day would be a relief to Villa fans, who were desperate to see their club compete. You could argue in hindsight that it was more of a relief for Lambert, who had started to decompose on the Villa touchline during his damned crusade.

Aston Villa needed an injection. What they got was Tim Sherwood. What happened next is the only time in the past decade I’ve felt good about Aston Villa in the Premier League bar this season. It was screaming at the crowd, geeing up his team, nicking wins and battling to a cup final.

It was mental, and while it ended badly - really badly - the season preceding the eventual disaster was full of meaning in the most glorious manner. Tim Sherwood and his 14/15 campaign would be a mere footnote if not for Paul Lambert’s tenure and it’s degradation towards the end. After a near half-decade on life support, Sherwood showed Aston Villa how to live.

To me, as the Villa fan in 2015, Sherwood meant a lot for those brief months. Pre-Sherwood, the fans were spectators. As Winter fled and Spring arrived, the Villa fan felt like a live participant in the action and that was in part due to Sherwood’s pantomime theatrics - miming a pulse check at the Holte End, and slamming his gilet into the floor in frustration. His celebrations were wild and almost unwarranted. He was truly untamed. Where in Lambert there was a wind-battered monolith, in Sherwood there was a boisterous and braying Hyena.

It also helped that his side stepped up. There have been passages of play in the early-stage Sherwood era that are overlooked. The constant fight, the chasing of the game. It was blood, thunder - and bluster. Villa carried themselves like title winners, when in reality, they barely escaped relegation. Their fight showed best in a match-up with Tottenham, where Villa ran at the game relentlessly, and Tim Sherwood almost psychically operated a dominant Christian Benteke, propelling him to win the game for Villa. Their bluster was evident when Sadio Mane blasted a hat-trick past Villa inside of three minutes.

Not a single thing would ever be the same after that half-season or so. Sherwood wasn’t provided with the full trust of Aston Villa and fell away. Jack Grealish wasn’t used correctly by a number of managers until he himself was trusted by both Steve Bruce and Dean Smith. Fabian Delph slinked away to join Man City and win titles. Christian Benteke opted for a high-profile move but never found a Tim Sherwood to believe in him at Liverpool and Crystal Palace. Aston Villa dropped out of the Premier League. Sherwood didn’t find another ‘proper’ managerial role. Lambert blew out of jobs at a dizzying pace before finding himself in Ipswich, the rivals of the club where he made his name. Aston Villa fans lost hope, and it would be a long time before it returned - with the fans becoming almost zombified in shock and horror at their team until 2018 ticked over. The only real highlight of that Premier League era being a brief interlude from disaster, hosted by Sherwood.

I think I know a lot more about football now than I did in 2015. I refused to understand tactics and stats and I thrust myself to believe in the theatrics. I could pick at Tim Sherwood’s early 2015 and point out the issues - but it’s pointless. I don’t want to take a rapier and carve out those memories, for they were good ones.

As the summer passed, Sherwood found himself in a room full of unfamiliar faces. New directors, new players, a disjointed squad and an absent owner. He’s no hero in the story of Aston Villa’s relegation in 2015/2016. The momentum of 2015 was not capitalised on and Villa blew up, in a big way. His successor, Remi Garde’s reign was a complete and utter failure, and Eric Black’s was worse.

It all ended badly, but for a fleeting moment - it was beautiful. It was serene. It was heroic and almost legendary. Thumping Albion twice in a week, that match against Liverpool, the introduction of Jack Grealish. We had moments and the season ended in success - if we ignore the cup final itself, that is.

It was all Sherwood. It was all guts. It was cinematic in the best kind of way, and it was a story. At the centre of it all? The bloody gilet.

The gilet, or bodywarmer, is almost a useless piece of clothing. A semi-coat without sleeves, it is far too much of a warming garment to wear when it’s warm, it cannot protect you from the rain and it’s redundant when it’s cold. Truth be told, there’s probably one month of the year where a gilet might be of use, and that is October, where the last dregs of warmth evaporate amongst the falling leaves of Autumn.

October is a funny month. I am looking for a way to poetically present it, but it is an empty month, like the rest - it is defined with what we fill it with. October makes me think of the gilet and it makes me think of Tim Sherwood. I recall his final game, a loss against Swansea. I don’t care to ponder the score-line anymore, because it’s without point to do so. A loss, back then in 2015, was a loss, and all of them were as crushing as the last. Aston Villa four years ago found themselves to be under the pestle of the league and ground into a fine dust to be blown into the Championship and forgotten.

Sherwood wasn’t wearing the gilet in his last match, nor the one before that, nor the one before that. He became a different man, buried under expectation and losing hold of results. Games slipped away, his personality - his one binding feature - disappeared. Like Lambert before him, he had lost his way. The gilet was away, and on came the sweater. Sherwood, but not Sherwood. Did the gilet give him power? Did Sherwood become someone else?

I am wearing the gilet now - and I’m almost like a child. It’s a little too big, and I feel like a baby being coddled up inside of it. It has protective qualities. I feel supremely confident in it. The ‘TS’ under the manufacturers logo has meaning to me. It’s from the season where Sherwood and Aston Villa were good - it’s not the blusterous collapse of the relegation season. I have started to think of the gilet as somewhat of a holy relic. It is fabled, it is spoken of, it is known - and it’s not necessarily a good thing. Neither are many holy relics. Some of them are covered in the blood of an unnamed victim, who had their head chopped off for standing on a wall that belonged to a different God - apparently. Some are death shrouds, a blackness sucking in the death rattle of a saint. Holy relics don’t have to represent good things - but this gilet is the closest thing that Aston Villa have to a Papal Vestment, and for a few hours - on a cold night of football, Villa Park was Sherwood’s Vatican, his gilet a relic. His coat, a relic. The whistle and 2014 teppo stopwatch in the pocket of the gilet, a relic. His time at Aston Villa - dust. History.

And that was it. History. The one thing I can cling onto to remember the fact that Aston Villa are never truly dead and buried is currently hanging over my shoulders.