Do you trust the judgement of the man who said this?

[Francis Gibbs]

If there's a chance for a spot of Levybashing, i'm all for it, i'll put the boot in good and hard where I think its deserved. But in this instance, I just can't. It's one of them where he's not going to keep everyone happy however he words phrases it and nobody took issue with it at the time. In this instance i'm on Levy's side of the fence in that it don't bother me none.

God help me.

Splitter

 

[Bus-Conductor]

But do you think the way we handle managers affects our ability to recruit more effectively?

Case in point - Rodgers?

Do you mean what Rodgers said about dodging a bullet ?

 

[Spurger King]

No, the point I'm making was it had been speculated that he was being groomed for the future....not to step in half way through this season. Obviously that wasn't the plan at the outset of this season. So qualifications would of come in due course.

I still think that this was the perfect opportunity for Tim to come in as a genuine caretaker manager, state that he'd just be here until the summer, and would be trying to steady the ship in the meantime.

It would have taken the pressure off him, allowed the players to relax instead of thinking that this guy might actually be their new boss, and (I think) created a better relationship with the fans. A bit of a dress rehearsal, before going off to manage another team. That would have left the door open for him to take the job full time in the future.

Unfortunately for him, the players, and the fans, he just had to insist on getting a full contract. Maybe he thought he would lose respect by being given the title of 'caretaker', but for me it would have had the opposite effect.

So for me, Sherwood was a twat for insisting on being given a full managerial contract, when a caretaker role would have been far more beneficial for his career. However Levy was an even bigger twat for not telling Sherwood to fuck off as soon as he started banging on about not taking a temporary role.

Just to continue my rant about Sherwood...it occurs to me that Levy has somehow managed to find a manager that combines the worst attributes of the previous two managers. Sherwood has the man management skills, team flexibility, and game changing skills of AVB, whilst also having the verbal diarrhoea, outdated old fashioned view of football, and inferiority complex of Harry.

 

[yankspurs]

Do I trust Daniel to pick a head coach? Absolutely not. His track record since he's been chairman does not exactly inspire confidence in him to appoint the right person this quote aside.

Personally, I believe Levy had it right 3 times. Jol, Harry and Andre. Its ashame things worked out the way they did with AVB because I personally believe we were on the right track and things were beginning to improve. I believe he wanted to sort the defensive issues out first then he'd begin to loosen the noose, which I think was the right call. He was a bit stubborn and made mistakes but he should have been given at least until the end of this year to make it work.

When he was sacked, hiring Sherwood was absolutely not the right call no matter how you shape it. Dont give me the "there was no one else available" bologna. There was. Pleat and Hoddle both publicly said they'd accept a caretaker position, IIRC. And both would have been an infinitely better choice than appointing Sherwood full time.

 

[TheSecretNonFootballer]

"We fucked the season. Here's a clown to distract you until the Summer"

 

[ardiles]

If there's a chance for a spot of Levybashing, i'm all for it, i'll put the boot in good and hard where I think its deserved. But in this instance, I just can't. It's one of them where he's not going to keep everyone happy however he words phrases it and nobody took issue with it at the time. In this instance i'm on Levy's side of the fence in that it don't bother me none.

God help me.

So, you've finally come out of the closet, admitting you're a BSoDL!

 

[allatsea]

We have a great squad and we owe them a Head Coach who will bring out the best in them and allow them to flourish and enjoy a strong, exciting finish to the season.

"We are in the fortunate position of having within our Club a talented coach in Tim Sherwood.

"We believe Tim has both the knowledge and the drive to take the squad forward."

Sherwood is getting abused left, right and centre (much of it deserved I have to say), but let's focus for minute on the man who appointed him and reflect on the statement above. I thought the bolded statement was at best very optimistic at the time, given Sherwood's complete lack of experience; now it seems positively deluded.

How has Sherwood, at best out of his depth and at worst a complete embarrassment, come to be so highly regarded by Levy? Given Levy's track record of hiring managers is mixed at best, do you you trust his judgement in recruiting the next manager (or god forbid keeping Sherwood on)?

I think overall Levy has been a decent chairman but in this area I now have zero confidence in the man.

Levy has an almost 100% record of failure in selecting his managers/head coaches. The only possible exception was Harry and even he had to go in the end. Levy needs to man up and let someone else do the selecting as he is no good at it.

 

[nidge]

If there's a chance for a spot of Levybashing, i'm all for it, i'll put the boot in good and hard where I think its deserved. But in this instance, I just can't. It's one of them where he's not going to keep everyone happy however he words phrases it and nobody took issue with it at the time. In this instance i'm on Levy's side of the fence in that it don't bother me none.

God help me.

The end is nigh if you're taking Levy's side in anything.

We should all be afraid, very afraid.

 

[onthetwo]

Levy has an almost 100% record of failure in selecting his managers/head coaches. The only possible exception was Harry and even he had to go in the end. Levy needs to man up and let someone else do the selecting as he is no good at it.

absolutely spot on IMO......he acts like a mafia hitman when things arent quite going to plan, rather than actually finding out what the problem is and trying to FIX IT!
SO frickin tired of it.......GroundHog Hotspur.

 

[worcestersauce]

Maybe he should have just said " we have spoken to van Gaal but he won't come until after the world cup, won't do the two jobs together and doesn't want it to be a distraction during the WC and there is no point hunting round for someone on a six month gig so we've appointed from within. Please bear with us at this transitional time"
I think we're all grown up enough to accept that; ooh I dunno tho'

 

[CoopsieDeadpool]

No, the point I'm making was it had been speculated that he was being groomed for the future....not to step in half way through this season. Obviously that wasn't the plan at the outset of this season. So qualifications would of come in due course.

But he's been with us since October 2008 and, I think, retired from playing in 2005? How much "due course" does he need?

 

[pablo73]

@ all of those who have responded that these are just typical soundbites and what else was Levy supposed to say etc....

If you take the statement without the bold part, I agree, it's all standard stuff - Tim's great, we have confidence in Tim, Tim's a winner etc etc.

However, if we talk about the part in bold: 'we owe them a Head Coach who will bring out the best in them and allow them to flourish and enjoy a strong, exciting finish to the season.' then I completely disagree.

Bear in mind, this is a statement to justify reluctantly making a change mid season and replacing AVB with Sherwood. If we'd replaced him with a much more experienced/successful manager, then fair enough. Given that he was talking about Sherwood, with zero experience, it's an unnecessarily strong (and as it turns out very foolish) thing to say. I thought so at the time and that's why I went back to it.

Maybe we should give Levy the benefit of the doubt here. Perhaps he'd drafted that statement when he thought Van Gaal was coming in and forgot to change it.

The real issue here though, given the complete car crash Temmy is turning out to be, how is it that Levy apparently rates him so highly? Certainly highly enough that he caved in to Temmy's insistence on not being Intertim by giving him an 18 month contract. Like it or not, Sherwood's behaviour is reflecting on Levy and every time he opens his gob I question Levy's judgement a little more.

 

[pablo73]

Maybe he should have just said " we have spoken to van Gaal but he won't come until after the world cup, won't do the two jobs together and doesn't want it to be a distraction during the WC and there is no point hunting round for someone on a six month gig so we've appointed from within. Please bear with us at this transitional time"
I think we're all grown up enough to accept that; ooh I dunno tho'

I think Sherwood's insistence on having an 18 month contract has muddied the waters a lot and made things much more complicated than they needed to be. As Spurger King (I think) has said, if Sherwood had accepted the role as interim until the end of the season, it would have made a lot more sense all round. He would have got a chance to cut his teeth in management at a very high level, before continuing his learning process elsewhere. His ego seemingly got in the way, but why the f*ck Levy agreed to it I'll never know.

 

[Japhet]

I think the mistake was giving Sherwood the job instead of keeping him as a stand in. I presume Sherwood demanded it and now think he will suffer the consequences in the long run. I think sacking AVB was a nightmare for Levy which he never anticipated but something obviously went seriously wrong there. With no obvious candidates Sherwood was given the reigns and after a brief upturn in fortunes was rewarded with a contract. It would have been better all round if he had maintained his 'caretaker' status but I don't think Sherwood's ego would stand that. For me, Levy's big problem is that he doesn't trust his managers. He never gave Jol control and wouldn't let Redknapp loose with the chequebook (who would?), but when he did give AVB more power than previous managers it went bad pretty quickly. Must be a very hard and probably embarrassing situation for Levy and he has my sympathy.

 

[dudu]

if Tim was being groomed then he'd be qualified

If he was being properly groomed he'd be wearing a suit

 

[dudu]

Levy has an almost 100% record of failure in selecting his managers/head coaches. The only possible exception was Harry and even he had to go in the end. Levy needs to man up and let someone else do the selecting as he is no good at it.

Depends how you rate failure - If you are looking at literal success then funnily enough the only right choices he made were Graham and Ramos....

Weird!

 

[shelfboy68]

I'm a fan of Levy and there's no denying that he runs this Club exceptionally well all things considered but he has to take a good whack of the responsibility for this. Of course if AVB wanted to leave it reduces the responsibility somewhat but we'll never know the exact determination of such.

All we can go on is what officially happened and of course what officially was said, so I think the OP is quite right to highlight those comments because after all it got me thinking about Levy's judgement regarding managerial appointments. Not just his judgment but his patience threshold as well. We hand a remit to a manager to take us into the CL when we're not competing on a level playing field.

That being said we have punched above our weight and a lot of that is down to Levy, but I guess he wants the same from a manager. Problem is that it takes time to get a team to be greater than the sum of its individual parts - a concept Levy seems to struggle with and that's no slight on his other areas of expertise we benefit from but its a recurring theme and one that is starting to wear thin.

I also suspect that the internal structures blur a lot of the lines and that affects the managers capability and partially accounts for the high turnover.

Yeah you can argue those comments are standard lines to fire out, but then again maybe they should of been more considered.

I mean its pretty laughable now reading them. He's demonstrated anything but having the 'knowledge' to take this squad further.

He's looked totally out of his depth. 'Drive'? Some will say yeah but he couldn't even be bothered to analyse our home battering to Liverpool in order to prepare for the away one. Again, do me a favour. All hindsight of course but it does sort of raise an eyebrow, as its clear Levy rated him highly.

So yeah, perhaps our inability to identify the right managerial qualities and characteristics are part of the problem. But then again, those things might not be the issue and any manager might find it difficult to work under Levy and the constraints that exist in the internal set up.

The worrying thing about when avb left was the rumour that he wanted to go the question is why, was he lied to over transfers maybe or something else.
Maybe more concerning is that the club have gagged him from talking, what the Fuck are Levy and Co hiding the existence of alien's or the identity of Jack the ripper.
Why can't in a free society a man speak freely about what went so wrong so quickly at his previous job very strange

 

[Mullers]

So far he's picked mangers that have got us achieving par or hovering above par for where we should be for most of the last 8 years. The year we didn't we won a cup.

I think sacking AVB when he did was a grave error, possibly his gravest, but his track record isn't too bad. He hasn't found us a Wenger or Mourinho (or if he has he's sacked him before he had chance to prove it) but he hasn't turned us into Leeds so far either.

The soundbites that went with Sherwood's appointment are just typical Chairman announcing manager stuff.

He employs managers that he thinks can get us CL football, so on that basis he has employed one manager who has got us one season of CL football, during his 13 years at the club that isn't nearly good enough.

And I am judging him by the standards that he judges other manage by.

 

[double0]

I think the appointment of Sherwood at the time of the rudderless ship syndrome was correct. Here was an in house person aware of the players brought in, the logic was sound from Levy. Sherwood would be able to get an immediate response which was needed and so it was. What we have now is an inexperienced coach showing some strain with high profile players not really taking enough responsibility and more experienced players such as Dawson and Lennon not setting good examples. Sherwood has been forced to push forward younger players like Bentaleb but anyone who thought that wasn't going to happen is deluded, imo a style of play a topic of debate is difficult to put in place when players are making so many individual mistakes however credit is due to Sherwood for having the foresight of integrating Adebayor and Bentaleb to the group as well, getting better performances from Eriksen and Naughto, there are signs to be optimistic. I still think given time he could be a success... I like Sherwoods views, it was/is brave correct imo some might think stupid of his explanations as to why his taken a high position to assess the team that wasn't his in the first place.

 

[Bus-Conductor]

He employs managers that he thinks can get us CL football, so on that basis he has employed one manager who has got us one season of CL football, during his 13 years at the club that isn't nearly good enough.

And I am judging him by the standards that he judges other manage by.

Not quite Mullers, because he hasn't always made qualification for CL a prerequisite for keeping the job. If he had Jol and Redknapp would have been sacked after a year. Redknapp after year 3.

Personally I have mostly seen logic in the hirings and firings. Haven't always agreed but could at least understand. I even see the logic in hiring Sherwood and Ramsey as guys who know the club and youth group etc.

I just don't agree at all with the sacking of AVB.