If Remi Garde has an equivalent in popular culture it is Disco Stu from The Simpsons: suave and stylish yet largely irrelevant among the wider scope of things.
Garde was parachuted aboard a Villa ship that was sinking quickly under the stewardship of Tim Sherwood and has won just two of his twenty games in charge. The Guardian are today reporting that Nigel Pearson is lined up as his replacement in the summer.
Virtually the only thing the Frenchman has achieved is a fulfilment of his name - nominative determinism - by helping create the avant-Garde notion that human life is utterly futile and meaningless; that we are all hurtling relentlessly towards an inevitable end.
He has facilitated the transformation of Villa Park into a kind of modernist stage, consistently putting flesh on that notion: presiding over a precise reduction of the beautiful game to a yawning, soporific and stultifying arena of nothingness in which Jores Okore runs around as a kind of existential nightmare.
This nothingness is at least something; Tim Sherwood, for instance would probably not be able to produce anything theatrical as he would decry a lack of characters.
With Villa doomed to move this theatre to the Championship next season, Villa look set to act and put Garde out of his misery in the next 48 hours. Garde is understood to be extremely disappointed with the club's failure to back him in the January transfer window. Villa's new chairman Steve Hollis is understood to be reviewing the entire club - that could take a while - and has accepted that there is nothing to be gained from stringing Garde along any longer.
Kevin MacDonald and Eric Black are likely to take caretaker charge of the club for the rest of the season.
Garde is a fine manager and Villa a great club so we hope both bounce back soon. Because watching them at the moment is a manifestation of all of the anxieties of humankind. If Pearson does take over, at least we are guaranteed that something will actually happen.
[Guardian]
