Tim Sherwood apparently has one game left to save his job after Aston Villa’s latest defeat, at Chelsea on Saturday, but I don’t understand why the club’s board is surprised at the position they are in.

From what I hear the players at Villa like Sherwood as a manager, so he hasn’t lost the group. Villa are where they deserve to be in the table simply based on the squad they have. When I was at QPR and we got promoted to the Premier League, we went into that season knowing we would be in a relegation fight. I don't understand why Villa are not in that mindset, or what gives them the arrogance to think otherwise.

My first dealings with Sherwood were when he was doing his coaching badges at Spurs. He wanted to become a manager and you could tell he had the credentials for it. I was immediately impressed by the way he tried to reward players who he thought were working hard in training. He was the one person who always stood up to Harry Redknapp and told him who he thought should and shouldn't be playing.

Harry surrounded himself with a lot of people to get different points of view, but not many others were prepared to go against the grain. Tim took an interest in me from an early stage, especially when I went through a period of not playing. He instilled a belief in me that I had lost a little bit in myself, and after working with him in the Under-21s I got back into the first team and was playing in the Champions League.

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Sherwood is an emotional manager and that can bring huge benefits. When Villa got to the Cup final that was largely due to his passion, energy and belief in players like Jack Grealish, Fabian Delph and Christian Benteke, who all improved after Sherwood arrived. He’s proved that when he works with good players, he can make good things happen.

The only time I’ve seen Sherwood’s emotional side have a negative effect is when Tottenham lost a game at Chelsea and he dug out a few people publically and questioned some of his players’ “mentality”. That’s about as bad as it gets for a player because it implies you are weak, and that rant upset some of Tottenham’s squad. But he’s still developing and learning as a manager – this is only his second job, and his first one didn’t last long - and I think he learned a lot from that.

Not that he won’t still have those types of discussions with players to their faces. There was an incident at Tottenham, at a time where he wasn’t even manager, when he was watching a game against Chelsea from the stands and Benoit Assou-Ekotto did something that severely annoyed him. We were in the dressing room after the match, having lost, and suddenly Sherwood came flying through the door.

I can’t remember what Benny had done exactly, but Sherwood was angrily letting him know what he thought about it. I was taken aback because he wasn’t the assistant manager or manager; he was mainly brought it to observe. But he showed he was prepared to say the things that others maybe weren’t. He’s argumentative, but sometimes it’s good to have an argument.

You won’t ever take that emotion out of him. That’s why he throws his jacket around and screams and kicks. One of the things that used to frustrate him was how simple the game really is, and how complicated people make it. He’s a massive believer in working harder than your opponent, which was also what his game was about as a player. He would get frustrated if players weren’t prepared to do a bit of extra work in training, and especially if that then translated onto the pitch.

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