Chapter 13: Streak

"Rocher, Lavelle, Rami... I’ve noticed all three have really turned a corner." Cadman, watching the group work through a passing drill, said it almost to himself.

"That’s what winning does." Before Villa, Rocher had been scraping by in France’s lower divisions, Lavelle had been cut loose by Bordeaux, and Rami had been playing on rough pitches with no formal coaching at all.

Hard roads, all three of them, but the kind of road that tends to make a player value an opportunity properly once it finally arrives.

"Right. And the first team lost again." Cadman said it while watching Saint carefully, gauging the reaction.

A month or so into working alongside him, Cadman had a decent read on both Saint and the politics of the club by now, including exactly why Saint had ended up down here with the U21s in the first place.

"Not our problem," Saint said, expression unchanged. "First team’s first team. Our job’s this lot."

The previous day, round fourteen of the Championship had taken Villa to Ipswich Town, level with them near the top of the table and only a point apart before kickoff, a genuine six-pointer, the kind that shapes a table more than most.

Villa led at the break. By full time, Ipswich had scored twice in the second half to turn it around, 2–1. Ventham’s changes from the bench hadn’t shifted anything.

Fourth defeat of the season, and Villa slid further down the table, out of the automatic spots entirely now, though still close enough that one win put them right back in the mix.

The first team’s slide didn’t touch the U21s at all. Facing Ipswich’s own academy side the same week, Saint’s group delivered a statement result: 5–0, a genuine reversal of fortune compared to the senior side’s night.

Rami got his first goal in senior youth football in that match, heading home from a corner, the fourth goal of five, already comfortably out of sight by then. Rocher scored in his fourth straight game.

Mark Ashwell, still writing his column for the Midlands Sports Gazette, gave Rocher’s performance its own small write-up after the match. And, to his credit, Ashwell didn’t skip past Saint’s role in it either, anyone tracking the U21s closely could see exactly whose fingerprints were on the transformation.

A short paragraph praising Saint and the U21s. A much longer one taking Ventham apart. That was roughly the balance of the coverage these days, and it was a dramatic shift from a month earlier, when Ventham could do no wrong in print.

Ashwell didn’t hold back, either; stubborn, one-dimensional, a manager who refused to adjust no matter what the pitch was telling him. Harsh, but not inaccurate. Whitfield kept starting through poor form. Loach kept getting exposed at the base of a three-man defence built around exactly the kind of positional discipline he didn’t have.

Chaos in midfield meant the front line got starved of service, and Ventham, rather than owning that, had started publicly blaming his forwards for it; which had gone down about as well as you’d expect. Delgado, in particular, found himself dropped to the reserves after a visible clash with the manager.

Trouble from every direction, and it was hard to argue that was too strong a description of where Ventham and Villa now stood. As results kept sliding, the man who’d looked untouchable a month earlier had started to look, for the first time, genuinely worried.

Pedmore, meanwhile, had gone quiet. Sallow, who’d been on close enough terms with him to expect at least a phone call by now, hadn’t heard a word.

One director rattled, another caught somewhere between vindication and genuine worry, that was more or less Sallow’s state of mind. He took no real pleasure in Ventham’s struggles on a personal level; whatever the politics, he still loved this club too much to enjoy watching it lose.

What kept coming back to him, though, was something Saint had said months earlier, calmly, with total certainty; and everything unfolding now lined up with it almost exactly.

’Is this actually a genius sitting under my nose?’ Sallow found himself thinking it more than once, especially with the U21s’ form added to the picture.

He’d been watching that side closely, and he knew the numbers: four straight wins, and several of Saint’s own signings performing well above what anyone had expected of free transfers.

Sallow had half-convinced himself Rocher, in particular, deserved a real look with the first team; a natural fit for exactly the position Villa were struggling hardest to fill.

Ventham had brought in multiple wide players that summer, some with real Championship pedigree already, and not one of them had produced anything close to what Rocher was doing two levels down.

He talked himself out of raising it almost as quickly as the thought arrived. Recommending Rocher to Ventham now, with the current state of things between them, would go nowhere. Worse than nowhere.

A week crawled past under that same tension, and then Villa faced their next fixture.

Nottingham Forest. Top of the table after fourteen rounds, the division’s most fancied side, and the closest thing Villa had to a direct promotion rival.

Both sides played it tight, being cautious, careful, exactly the kind of match you’d expect between two teams with everything to lose. The scoreline reflected it perfectly.

When the referee finally blew for full time, Villa had won it, 1–0.

Six minutes of stoppage time; extraordinary, even by the standards of a bruising, stop-start Championship derby, and it was in that added time that Villa found their moment.

Ben Conlan, twenty years old, handed his first start of the season after Delgado’s fallout with Ventham, got the chance that mattered.

Sixth minute of stoppage time, the last kick of the match by any reasonable measure: Forest fouled just outside their own box, and Villa had one final free kick to decide the whole afternoon.

The night belonged, in the end, to a different twenty-year-old altogether. Whitmore stood over it, showed no sign of nerves at all, and bent it low and hard into the corner, ending Forest’s seven-match winning run in the cruelest possible way.