EXCLUSIVE
GABBY AGBONLAHOR: Players and managers fall out, nobody liked Remi Garde and here’s what happened when one boss tried to send me to Rangers
Managers losing the dressing room is nothing new, sometimes players and bosses just don't see eye to eye.
This season a record number of Premier League bosses have lost their job, with many chairmen looking to make quick fixes and get that new manager bounce.
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Sam Allardyce to Leeds is the latest example of an impact manager taking charge on a short-term basis, but while many clubs change managers in the hope of an immediate upturn in form, Gabby Agbonlahor remembers the appointment of Remi Garde being quite disastrous.
Garde got the Villa Park job in November 2015 and it wasn't good.
“He was a French manager and we had a lot of French speaking players and even they couldn’t stand him," Agbonlahor said.
“He was a really bad man manager, very grumpy, zero tactical awareness. You may as well have got Postman Pat to come and be a manager!
"He was one where players really didn’t enjoy their football under him.”
Garde left Villa in March 2016 with the club suffering relegation and Roberto Di Matteo was given the task of getting the club back to the Premier League.
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Having previously won the Champions League during an interim spell with Chelsea, the Italian had a big reputation but that didn't stop him from immediately getting on the wrong side of Agbonlahor in the build-up to their big kick-off in the Championship.
"The season we got relegated I got myself so fit in the summer. I wanted to get the club back up in the next season.
“I’d done a whole pre-season with the team and was looking forward to the start of the season and two days before the opening game in the Championship Di Matteo calls me into his office.
“I thought he was going to say ‘I want you to play here’, but he said: ‘I want you to leave’.
“I was confused, I thought ‘leave where?’ because I’d been there since I was 12 so it didn’t make sense.
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“He was like ‘yeah, it’s not going to work I think you should go, Rangers and Reading are interested’, but I was like ‘I’m not going to Rangers or Reading’.
“I said, ‘I’m here, use me or don’t use me, but I’m here’.
"I told the chief executive that, so it was kind of 'if you don’t want to use me, I’ll still be here because it’s my club.'
“I was part of the reason we got relegated because I was part of the squad and I think Di Matteo lasted 10 or 15 games.
“Even when you speak to players who were under him at Chelsea they say that the players they had won it [the Champion League], not the manager. So even for them he wasn’t popular at all.”
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