Tottenham comment: Spurs were wrong to sack Tim Sherwood
The wrong decision was made by Daniel Levy, argues Ally McKay
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Your support makes all the difference.Tim Sherwood did all we could have expected of him this season. Under "Tactics Tim", as he was sarcastically (and unfairly) nicknamed, Spurs beat the teams below us (with only two exceptions in Norwich and West Ham) and lost to those above us.
Sixth is a fair representation of where we are as a club. It is certainly not where we want to be, but realistically it is about right following the mistakes in the transfer market made by chairman Daniel Levy and technical director Franco Baldini in the summer; the stubborn refusal of previous manager Andre Villas-Boas to change his system when it patently was not working in the autumn; and a dearth of talent in the back four.
Since Sherwood took over we have performed in line with the quality of our squad and our resources. It is, of course, a shame not to make the top four, but to lay any of the blame for that at Sherwood's door is unfair. He deserved a full season to show whether he could deliver the holy grail of Champions League football and oversee a badly needed recalibration of the squad to give us a decent chance of doing so.
Sherwood haters will point to the humiliating defeats to Manchester City, Liverpool and Chelsea – and these were indeed tough to take – as reasons why he had to go, but we went for broke in those games – as we had to do against extremely tough opponents – and came up short.
It would not have made any difference to our season if we had played cagily and lost those games 1-0, we would still have finished sixth and it is unreasonable to suppose that another manager would have seen us overcome the three sides that battled it out for the title.
But that is where we are: looking for another manager, our 11th since Arsène Wenger took over down the road at Arsenal back in 1996. It is likely to be a foreign coach with little understanding of Tottenham Hotspur's proud heritage and, probably, no idea of quite how much pressure and expectation come with the job. Good luck to him. He will need it.
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