With newspaper rumours going into overdrive regarding the ‘impending exit’ of Aston Villa manager Remi Garde, it’s important to remember that the Frenchman is still in the Villa Park hot seat and could well be taking charge of the club’s maiden season in the Championship (barring a miracle to end all miracles).
Here’s three reasons why the club should hang on to the ex-Lyon boss and give him a chance in English football’s second tier.
The club needs sustainability
Since the departure of Martin O’Neil just a few days before the start of the 2010/2011 campaign, Villa have had quite the array of managerial appointments with none of them sans Paul Lambert lasting any longer than a season.
Whilst Gerard Houllier left the club in mitigating circumstances, Alex Mcleish’s appointment was nothing short of a disaster and the rejuvenated start Villa made under ‘Tactics Tim’ turned out to be nothing more than a false dawn.
The amount of money the club has spent to appease said ‘managerial appointments’ after they’ve been shown the door prematurely must be in the tens of millions. And with Garde barely having half a season to prove his worth, the club should think wisely before it turfs out another manager who in our opinion, still could have a future at the club.
He hasn’t had a transfer window
Nothing got our blood boiling more than the club’s inactivity in the January transfer window. With the Villans on their knees, already drifting away from the rest of the pack in its all-too-familiar season-long relegation battle, the powers that be decided they would do nothing to wrest the club out of the black hole it found itself engulfed in.
But can you imagine how Remi himself must have felt? His hangdog look in last Saturday’s defeat to Swansea City told us all we needed to know. After inheriting a squad vastly inferior to the rest of the Premier League hierarchy and on top of that, not being given a single penny from the board to improve upon it, his disillusion at life at Villa Park is quite understandable.
French Ligue 1 side Lyon showed enough faith in Garde to handle transfer proceedings during his tenure at the club, so why shouldn’t we?
New board will help get the best out of him
As we tweeted the other day,
“Aston Villa saying they now have a ‘football board’ in charge is a bit like when Mcdonald’s said ‘our Chicken nuggets now have real chicken in them!’ It should have been that way from the start!”
But despite the organisational faux pas’ the club has made down the years, with the likes of Brian Little and David Bernstein now calling the shots in B6, it seems the club finally has the right personnel in place to move forward. 49-year-old Remi who was highly regarded as an exciting up and coming before his move to Aston Villa could get a new lease of life at the club with an experienced head such as League Cup winner Brian Little as his mentor.