Tim Sherwood is remembering the moment, almost 20 years ago, when he heard Bruce Rioch’s voice at the end of the phone and thought that his dream move to Arsenal was finally going through. Discussions had been going on for a while between the pair and Sherwood, who had won the Premier League title with Blackburn Rovers 12 months earlier, was waiting to be told to report to Arsenal’s training ground for a medical.
“We lived in Harpenden, in Hertfordshire, and it was summer time and I’d been talking to [Bruce],” Sherwood recalls. “The deal, for me, was done. We never spoke money, but it was Arsenal. I thought he was calling me to say what time to go to [Arse nal training ground] London Colney but he was ringing me to say he’d been sacked. They got rid of him and brought in some guy called Arsène Wenger. And he signed two players called Vieira and Petit, who no one had ever heard of. I was going: ‘Who are they?’”
Sherwood breaks into laughter as he finishes a story he is telling for good reason. Arsenal are Aston Villa’s opponents in the FA Cup final on Saturday and also the club that Sherwood grew up supporting, which is why there was such a frisson of excitement when Rioch showed an interest in signing him. “I’m an Arsenal fan as a kid, my Dad still goes to the Emirates every week, I love to see them do well,” Sherwood said many years later – and before he took over as Tottenham Hotspur’s manager. Arsenal fans, not surprisingly, lapped it up.
It is a subject that the Villa manager dances around with a twinkle in his eye. So was he really an Arsenal fan? “Nah, that’s a myth,” he says with a wry grin, before admitting that the Arsenal supporters at Wembley will enjoy reminding him of his true allegiances. “They will sing: ‘Tim Sherwood’s a Gooner’ for at least 30 minutes of the game,” the 46-year-old says, mimicking the song.
The reality is that the clues have been out there for a while. “I was from Boreham Wood, so you either supported Tottenham or Arsenal ... and I just supported football, can I say that?” Sherwood says, chuckling. “I went on [Sky’s]Soccer AM, they reckon I’ve got a tattoo of a cannon – I haven’t. I haven’t got any tattoos, but when I was at Tottenham there was all that [being said].
“So when I went on Soccer AM, Tim Lovejoy said: ‘Let’s have a look at this programme’. It was a Norwich programme. It said: ‘Favourite ground? Highbury. Favourite player: Liam Brady’... so he asked: ‘How are you going to answer this?’ So I replied: ‘the guy who worked in the commercial department at Norwich knew I was a Tottenham fan, so he changed all my answers’. So I got myself out of it.”
Sherwood has a knack of escaping from tight situations. Appointed as Villa manager in February, he took over a team that was 18th in the table and had won only two of their last 21 league games. Villa had scored just 12 league goals, at an average of fewer than one every two matches, confidence was on the floor and relegation beckoned. She rwood, by his own admission, was putting his neck on the line by taking the job.
It has been some turnaround. Villa have won five of their 12 league games under Sherwood – as many as Paul Lambert, his predecessor, had managed in the previous 25 matches – scored 19 goals, climbed clear of relegation trouble, reached their first FA Cup final in 15 years and produced some exhilarating attacking football, no more so than in the semi-final victory over Liverpool .
While Sherwood highlights the danger of allowing Arsenal to get into their rhythm at Wembley, he has no intention of changing the tactics that, with the exception of last weekend’s freakish 6-1 defeat at Southampton, have served Villa so well so far. “We’ve got respect for Arsenal, we know Sánchez is an extraordinary talent, Cazorla, Giroud can score goals – they’ve got talent all over the field, but so have we, we’ve got players who can hurt them,” he says. “There’s no point shackling ours and keep taking it on the chin until you get knocked out. I don’t think our fans want to go there and watch that, so let’s go toe-to-toe and see what happens.”
Listening to Sherwood talk with such passion and ambition at Villa’s training ground on Friday, it is easy to see why Kenny Dalgish made him captain of that Blackburn team that won the league in 1995. Sherwood is a born winner, which helps to explain why he can be so animated on the touchline at times and, when it comes to his mood at the end of matches, sound cock-a-hoop if Villa win and absolutely devastated if they lose.
“You can play a five-a-side out there [on the training pitches] and they all want to win. But it’s how much you want to win; there’s a different level of winning. I wanted to kill people to win,” Sherwood says. “I used to cry when I was a kid when I couldn’t win, now I cry to myself when we don’t win. It hurts me. But I also cry when we win. You talk about emotion, it means so much and it’s got to mean that much to them – I want it to but unfortunately we’re all different; we can’t all be the same.
“Players are different now. They’ve changed. We didn’t have to open a door, we took it off the hinges because we were head-butting walls: ‘Come on, get in there’. But there’s been an influx of foreign players and the type of player now is different. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to win any less. They still care, but I want them to care more than anything in the world to win because there are far too many losers in the game.”
Any players falling into that category at Villa Park will be told to pack their bags during a summer when Sherwood is looking to put his stamp on the squad. He has already given Randy Lerner, the Villa owner, a list of his targets. “We have to move out the losers,” Sherwood says. “Not to be disrespectful – I’m not saying that everyone who leaves here is a loser – but the ones we bring in have to be ones who want to achieve and move upwards. This cannot become a graveyard for footballers who want a last pay day. This has to be the birthplace of the new generation, and that’s what I’m trying to achieve here.”
Fabian Delph, whom Sherwood made captain, epitomises the qualities that the manager is looking for in his players. “He leads by example, he drives the team forward, and there’s a lot more to Fabian’s game than just someone who flies around and gets the odd red card, which is what some people have said to me about him. He’s actually a good technician. Whenever I’ve had conversations with Roy Hodgson, I think he’s probably one of the top three on his team-sheet.”
Sherwood admits he has been so preoccupied with keeping Villa up that he has not had chance to think much about leading the club out at Wembley, but he sounds genuine when he talks about it being a huge honour.
At the very least Villa will look the part on the day after Sherwood took it upon himself to organise their blue Paul Smith suits and he has even thought of an accessory to help with the tears of joy or pain at the final whistle. “We’ve got a hankie,” Sherwood says. “It’s claret. All sorted. I took care of that.”