Well, Remy Garde, it all turned out just as we feared it might; very, very badly.
Announced with a phrase turned in as mournfully appropriate fashion as any ditty could be, Garde and Aston Villa have this week parted ways “by mutual consent”, just as a mafia victim, at some point before drowning, must come to a mutually consensual agreement with the cement shoes he’s wearing to descend to the bottom of the harbour.
And that’s all this was; a painful, harrowing descent, that began before Garde unwisely tethered himself to it, and will continue on now that he has escaped.
Garde leaves with the lowest win percentage (ten) of any permanent Villa manager in the Premier League era. His tenure lasted 147 days. He squeezed 12 points out of this pitiful Villa squad, from the 63 that were available to him.
When he left Lyon – the club he had managed before he came to Villa – in 2014, he took more than a year off; he’ll need a holiday after this separation as well, one assumes.
Garde’s reign at Villa makes a mockery of the so-called “new manager bump”, the idea that, regardless of the incumbent’s actual talents as a football manager, just the change in scenery alone will provide some measurable lift in morale, and thus performance.
Villa had garnered four points in the ten matches before the Frenchman arrived; they managed the same amount in the first ten games of his stewardship.
If we assume – and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to do so – that Garde was trying his very best to defibrillate this obese corpse of a team, trying every trick he knew, what he managed was simply to keep this immolating blimp steady on its downward course. All of his strength was applied to the yoke, and all he could do was prevent the nosedive from steepening.
There is something rotten in the club, a pestilence utterly unshakeable, an affliction for which there is no cure but a mass blood-letting in the lower league. Garde cannot be held responsible for this, although his reputation may well carry the stench of it around, infected by proximity but asymptomatic.
There is a compelling argument that his failure to make even the slightest positive impression over these last 147 days is largely not his fault either, such is the severity of the problems at Villa. But then whose fault is it?
It is the manager’s job to motivate the players, this must be agreed upon. But then it’s difficult to point precisely at the reason for Villa’s deathly sluggishness. Yes, Garde clearly had major difficulty energising his team, but they’ve been adrift at the bottom of the table since Matchday 10, which would sap the spirit out of you faster than a degradation (yes, that is the correct collective noun) of Dementors.
Even when Garde did manage to urge out an active performance, as he did in the opening stages against West Ham in February, Villa self-destructed. Jordan Ayew’s wholly unnecessary red card in that game, 17 minutes into proceedings, ended their chances just as they were looking promising.
And besides, Garde’s predecessor, Tim Sherwood, has built his rather unlikely career in management largely on an ability to, if nothing else, motivate his players, and he failed to impel anything substantial at Villa too.
Is it towards Randy Lerner, the absentee American owner, that we should be pointing? It’s no secret that Lerner is very keen to offload the club, he said so in 2014, eight years after he purchased it largely from Doug Ellis in 2006.
Lerner’s time as chairman and owner stands as the exemplar when it comes to uninterested, fiscally reckless foreign ownership. He pumped 200 million pounds into the club when he took over and was probably shocked that that only bought him three consecutive sixth-placed finishes in the league, results that look positively jewel-encrusted in harsh light of today.
Martin O’Neil, a fine, steady manager, was at the helm then, but when he was denied any meaningful investment in 2010, he quit.
An ageing Gerard Houllier was next, a man who literally had to walk away from the job because it gave him chest pains, and then, horror of horrors, Alex McLeish was brought in, signed fresh from rivals Birmingham.
All the while, investment had dried up and players were being sold; James Milner, Gary Cahill, James Collins, Ashley Young, Gareth Barry, Christian Benteke, all Premier League fixtures and all sold under Lerner, only to be replaced with untested, fretful ersatz substitutes.
Paul Lambert had a crack and spent two seasons watching his team much in the manner a father might watch his toddler draw on the walls having been locked out of the house. A short, blustery sojourn with Tactics Tim, the brutal reward of an FA Cup final appearance ending in a 4-0 hammering, and here we are.
Lerner has, all the while, been slowly backing away, face a frozen grimace, to the United States, consoling himself with the raucous success of his other sporting investment, the Cleveland Browns… oh, no, wait… they’re absolutely terrible too.
So what now, with relegation all but assured? Well, the aforementioned blood-letting must indeed occur, in the form of a mass squad clearout. Of the relative marquees, only Rudy Gestede, a man purpose-built for and tested in the Championship should remain.
As much money must be made from the sales of the impulse buys of the last few seasons – Jordan Amavi, Jordan Veretout, Ayew, to name a few – and reinvested on reliable soldiers, it is all easier said than done. A decision must be made over the future of Jack Grealish, a player around whom Villa could build a stylish team, but a lad with, apparently, considerably less self-discipline than is desired.
Finally, the academy – a highly successful one over the last decade – must be sourced from, enthusiastically and with the promise of support. Oh, and a manager. Nigel Pearson, the man who oversaw Leicester’s rise to the Premier League, if not quite to the very tippy-top of it, would be a fine choice.
Garde accepted not just a poisoned chalice, but a poisoned chalice inside a cyanide drinks cabinet, in a house made entirely of exposed asbestos, on an island made of arsenic in the middle of a lake of battery acid. In the second tier, Villa can wash all of this away. Simply put, they have to.
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