Sherwood - I cant play an injured player

Tim Sherwood laughed off press reports suggesting he is under pressure from the Spurs hierarchy to give some game time to Erik Lamela in his media conference today.

Sherwood - I cant play an injured player

Sherwood has been giving players opportunities, most recently Harry Kane and Milos Veljkovic. He gave Etienne Capoue an opportunity but he suffered an injury, Sandro is off the pace and unfit so Bentaleb has had chances. Townsend has been given chances but shown nothing, Naughton, through Walker's injury, has had a chance, Zeki Fryers has played. Emmanuel Adebayor of course was only given an opportunity under Sherwood.

The one thing he has done is give everyone an opportunity, it would be only natural and the obvious thing to do to give Erik Lamela some game time if he can gain a level of fitness but he doesn't start full training until next week. Sherwood hardly needs to be put under pressure to play anyone, it's what he does.

“There’ll be no chance Erik’s fit. I read in the paper, or someone told me, that the hierarchy are asking for him to get more opportunities. Chance would be a fine thing, he’s injured."


If Sherwood was under pressure he wouldn't need the press to tell him or to read it but that was obvious from the contradictory nature of the original article that the story was fabrication. he went on to look forward to next season and sat on the fence in his opinion of the 22 year-old Argentinian.

“Can he kick on and be a big player next season? You know what, I haven’t seen enough of him.

“I’ve got my ideas of who’s capable and probably who’s not. With Erik, the jury is still out because I haven’t seen enough of him. He’s been very unfortunate."

Clearly Sherwood feels some of our summer signing are not good enough and I couldn't argue with that, some are certainly not.

The Spurs faithful are divided as to whether we want to qualify for the Europa League or not and Sherwood went on to say he understood that but that the players will be trying to win every game to finish as high as they can.

“It gives you extra games, but we’re just focused on trying to keep ourselves as high up the league as possible. I know where you are coming from - people say that if you have less games you have more chance of emulating Liverpool this year.

“The stats don’t lie, it certainly is a benefit [not to qualify]. But I’m sure that everyone at this club wants to finish as high up as possible and we are certainly not going to go onto the field now with four games to go and try and lose a game so that we don’t qualify. That’s just is not going to happen.

“I’m not against it [the Europa League], it’s just the stats that are there say everything. The extra games meant I think we’ve ended up playing 12 more games than Liverpool this season and they’re challenging for the title because they didn’t have the Europa League.

“Is that why or is it because they’ve got a world-class striker like Luis Suarez that they managed to keep hold of? That always a factor.

“It certainly helps when you have a whole week to prepare for games. There is no guarantee, you still need good player to keep yourself challenging.”

The games we have had a week to prepare for like Crystal Palace at home we put in our worst display of the season in the first half. We made the worse in the league by a country mile look like Barcelona. It was only a hump forward and a defensive error that put us in front after half-time and enabled us to settle down. In all honesty the game should have been dead and buried by then.

Having time to prepare for games is great if you use the time to prepare, quite what we were doing when we had a week off goodness knows.

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The video on Gareth Bake scoring one of his trademark solo lung busting runs is above. He left the defender for dead as he scored the winner in the Copa Del Rey Final against Barcelona with 5 minutes left. Sherwood was asked about Bale and wished he and Modric were still at Spurs.

“It was business as usual for Gareth Bale. We saw what he did last year - he scored 21 goals for Tottenham, nine assists, he scored a winner in eight of our games. We could do with him now by the way.

“If you put those that he accumulated last year on top of what we’ve got we’d probably be challenging for the title. The two best players on the pitch last night were Gareth Bale and Luka Modric, and that says everything.”