Shakespeare working onVilla’s renaissance
VILLA are set to fight for a place in the Premier League’s top six and as the players return to Bodymoor Heath to begin preparations for the 2021/22 campaign, Dean Smith and his coaching staff are relishing the challenge.
Next season, Villa will seek to find a level of consistency capable of propelling them another step closer to European football after flirting with the prospect for much of last season.
They ended 2020 in seventh place in the Premier League, which after starting the calendar year in the relegation zone, went some way in proving the huge improvements staged at Villa Park and, of course, at Bodymoor too.
Leicester were the last Premier League club to achieve such a feat as they then went on to achieve the improbable five years ago – the common denominator for both clubs? Craig Shakespeare.
Fifteen years of coaching experience has taken him on Champions League nights in Madrid, national team duty in Slovakia and even to the summit of the Premier League with the Foxes.
Those 5,000/1 odds resonate with the very stories that shone a light on the magnitude of Leicester’s success in 2016. The likes of Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez and N’Golo Kante, all of whom were recruited from lowerleague clubs – Fleetwood, Caen, and Le Havre respectively – headed the Foxes’ assault on the title.
Shakespeare – who himself enjoyed spells at Walsall, Grimsby, Scunthorpe and even Telford and Hednesford – in many ways proves the archetypical journeyman, but after a playing and coaching career that spans over 40 years, he has since returned home eager to play his part in one of the more exciting projects in English football.
Like Smith, Shakespeare’s Great Barr childhood meant Villa was the first club for him, naturally. Born and bred a Villan, his knowledge of the club he’d never worked for might well have exceeded that of any coach who’s walked through the same doors of Bodymoor Heath in recent times.
“As a youngster, I was taken with my father down to Villa Park; the Andy Gray era and Dennis Mortimer era,” Shakespeare remembered.
“My earliest memory is actually going and sleeping outside Highbury in my brother-in-law’s car the day before we won the league. I can still see it now, waking up at seven o’clock in the morning, not having a good sleep, playing a little bit of football in and around Highbury and waiting for the game to commence.”
After a tumultuous six years at Villa Park that saw the club narrowly avoid administration, suffer Wembley heartbreak and ecstasy alike, Shakespeare has counted on every experience to make his mark at Bodymoor as the club embarks on attacking the upper echelons of the Premier League next season.
Smith, also a boyhood Villa fan, has already written his name in the history books by setting a new club-record 10-match league winning streak in 2019, achieving promotion and indeed survival before, last season, beating Liverpool 7-2 and defeating many of the league’s sternest of oppositions. Shakespeare is cut from the same cloth. He demands respect from his players and, in return, helps maximise their performance levels.
Smith was keen to add some topflight experience to Villa’s coaching ranks and Shakespeare was the ideal candidate.
“Craig is somebody I wanted to bring in previously,” he revealed. “I just wanted to add to the staff. I thought myself, Richard and JT were doing well, but I just felt I needed one pair of extra hands, and preferably someone who’d coached in the Premier League as well.
“He’s got that experience. I’ve known him an awfully long time, as has Richard, he played with him, I played with him, he’s just a really good coach, a really good guy.”
Shakespeare might well have played a bigger part in Leicester’s title win than he takes credit for – having overseen the club’s progression from Nigel Pearson in League One in 2008, all the way to Wes Morgan lifting the gleaming trophy eight years later.
The club recognised his value was irreplaceable, so when Pearson was sacked in 2015, Shakespeare was kept on to work alongside Claudio Ranieri.
He was often left to steer the ship himself, with Ranieri regularly flying to Italy to visit his sick mother before coming back for the final matchday preparations ahead of the weekend.
Leicester’s post-title hangover was rough. Ranieri lost his job and while the club scrambled to search for his successor, the trusty Shakespeare was chosen to cajole a misfiring squad, bereft of confidence at the time.
He got the players back to basics, earning the respect of a dressing room disenfranchised by Ranieri’s tinkering ways.
The 58-year-old has played against the mesmerising Paul Gascoigne, trained with the record-breaking Trevor Francis and even coached some of the Premier League’s past and present stars, such as Wayne Rooney, Vardy, Mahrez, and Kante. Now he’s assisting Villa’s resurgence.