Rémi Garde starts work at Aston Villa and declares: ‘I’m not a magic man’

Aston Villa’s third permanent manager of the year made no pretence that he will be the saviour of the Premier League’s bottom club. “I’m not a dreamer or a magic man,” said Rémi Garde as he was unveiled as Tim Sherwood’s replacement at Villa Park on Thursday. “But I have strong ideas.” They will need to take root swiftly for Randy Lerner’s latest managerial gamble to secure Villa’s top flight status .

It was the Villa owner’s love and long-term vision for the club that sold the job to the former Lyon coach, according to Garde, despite Lerner’s desire to sell up. The American billionaire has turned to a coach without Premier League managerial experience, and who has been out of the game for over a year due to personal reasons, to save a team that last won a league point on 29 August and has merely four in total with almost a third of the season gone. “I feel the club is in a hole,” said Sherwood shortly before he was sacked last month. A dreamer is the last thing Villa need in the circumstances.

“In football, things can change,” said Garde, who has signed a three-and-a-half-year contract and begins his reign at home to the leaders Manchester City on Sunday. “If I didn’t think I could change things I would have said ‘No, this job is not for me’, but I’ve got the hope that we can do it. I don’t know what happened before, I was not inside and I can’t judge. I can only focus on what will happen from now on.

“I haven’t the certainty we will stay in the Premier League because the situation we are in is difficult but I have strong belief we will do it.

Cristiano Ronaldo: I want to retire with 'dignity', not in USA, Qatar or Dubai

Cristiano Ronaldo said Friday that he wants to end his career “with dignity” and not playing in “the United States, Qatar or Dubai”. The Real Madrid and Portugal star, the subject of a new documentary that premiered on Monday in London, said Thursday in an interview on ITV’s The Jonathan Ross Show that he expected to play six or seven more seasons and hoped to finish his career at the highest level. The remarks ostensibly referenced the recent wave of top players who have finished their careers outside of Europe’s top leagues, among them MLS imports Didier Drogba, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Andrea Pirlo and David Villa, along with Xavi, the lifelong Barcelona midfielder who signed with Qatari club Al Sadd in May. “That does not mean it’s bad play in the leagues of the United States, Qatar or Dubai, but I do not see myself there,” Ronaldo said. Ronaldo, who turns 31 in February, became Real Madrid’s all-time leading goalscorer last month and has th...

Young people to lose access to unemployment benefits as part of welfare reforms

YOUNG people will not be able to get unemployment benefits until they turn 25 under reforms introduced by the Turnbull Government today. The coalition has unveiled wide-ranging welfare reforms in parliament today, including changes to the Newstart program. It hopes to stop people aged 22 to 24 getting Newstart or the Sickness allowance, and they will instead be shifted to the Youth Allowance payment. This will reduce the amount of money that they will be able to get, costing a single person living away from home about $90 a fortnight. They will also be required to study in order to qualify for the payments. “The key aim of this measure is to provide incentives for young unemployed people to obtain the relevant education and training to increase employability,” according to an explanatory memorandum for the bill. However, it says Youth Allowance does allow students to earn a higher amount of money from part-time or casual work than Newstart, before this begins imp...

Janitor earning $327,000 a year caught ‘slacking off’

THIS janitor clocked so much overtime that he took home $327,000 in a single year — but was allegedly caught out hiding in a closet for hours. Liang Zhao Zhang earned a base salary of $75,874 ($US57,945) in 2015 for cleaning San Francisco’s Powell Street station. But once overtime was taken into account, his salary and benefits added up to a whopping $327,000 ($US250,000)— giving his earnings a boost of $212,190 — revealed in public records released by Transparent California. An investigation by local broadcaster KTVU found that Mr Zhang was paid for working 17 hours a day for 18 days in a row in July 2015, and clocked fulltime hours during his annual leave. This superhuman feat prompted the station’s 2 Investigates program to take a closer look at just what Mr Zhang was up to during these marathon-length work days. What they say they found raised “serious questions” about the municipal transport authority’s oversight of its employee timesheets. Investigative reporters examine...

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