9) Sherwood needs more strings to his bow
For all the hype about Tim Sherwood, for all the sound-bites and quotable lines, it’s clear the former Tottenham Hotspur boss needs more strings to his bow. Once upon a time, it was enough for managers to just be motivators and inspire a group of lesser players to something miraculous in a big game like this, but one feels now that it will take much more than that to beat a team of Arsenal’s quality. We know it can be done, as sides have shown down the years, but Villa did not look like having a coherent game plan at all at Wembley, rushing their passing and looking very one-dimensional in attack, often just lumping it into the box with the hope that Benteke would do the rest. Defensively, there may not have been a great deal more they could do against a rampant Arsenal, but one could still argue they didn’t show enough aggression to try and disrupt the flow of their opponents’ game, something many teams have used to good effect against the Gunners down the years.
Sherwood has done well to help Villa survive this season, but at the moment he doesn’t look a significant upgrade on Paul Lambert and it’s not certain he’ll last long next season.