Chapter 138: Ticket

"Let’s call it a day."

A day had passed since Imogen Vale’s arrival, and it had shown both of them that the feeling and the spark from their last meeting were gone.

In truth, Saint had been thinking very clearly through that day. He had been lonely for a long time, and with Rocher’s wedding approaching and Whitlock fussing over him like an old aunt, he had wanted a girlfriend badly.

Imogen, for her part, did like him, but she had no wish to live in the glare that came with him. A year earlier he had been a Championship manager, and even then the attention he drew was more than most Premier League managers could dream of. Now it was worse.

There was no quarrel, no mess, nothing dramatic. They both seemed oddly calm about it.

"Are we still friends?" Imogen asked, looking at Saint just before she left.

"Of course. As long as you’re willing to call me one, I’ll always be your friend," Saint said, nodding.

"Saint, you’re a good man." Hearing that, he knew exactly where he stood.

"I just don’t know whether that girl will be lucky enough to deserve you," she added, and hugged him tightly.

Her arrival and departure were noticed by the press only in passing. Everyone else was too busy reporting on the clash at Stamford Bridge, so the story ran only in a few gossip columns.

She had come alone and she left alone, without even taking her luggage, because Saint had asked her to leave it for later. He was standing at the centre of a storm, and a break-up announced now would only drag her into it, so he meant to keep it quiet for a while.

Her coming and going made no difference to his life, and neither did anything else outside the training ground, even though he was one of the main figures in the whole affair. Every day he trained the players, and every night he studied opponents.

Villa, however, had been turned upside down because of him. For days the club had been locked in an argument with the Football Association and with Chelsea.

The Football Association had leaned towards awarding the match to Chelsea outright. Villa refused to accept it. Strictly speaking, they had no standing to take on the FA and a club like Chelsea, but what followed had gone beyond anyone’s expectations.

With Whitlock’s complaint now on the table, the Football Association’s indecision began to tilt towards Villa.

The club’s request was simple: either replay the match, or resume it from the moment of the stoppage at the existing score.

In the end, the Football Association decided on a replay, and the whole match would be played again from the start.

It would be played behind closed doors. The venue would still be Stamford Bridge, but neither set of supporters would be let in.

Even so, the matter was far from over, because the punishments for Strickland and Saint had not yet been announced.

On Chelsea’s side, anxiety was growing. Once Whitlock had made his move and the argument turned to the way managers were treated, the damage to their image multiplied without anybody having to say a word.

Then it was the players’ turn to speak. Plenty of them had been targeted at one time or another, and many had views on how the game treated its people.

Cutting quickly, the Football Association knew by now that it could not drag things out any longer, and soon the sanctions were announced.

Villa’s manager, Saint Maddox, was fined thirty thousand pounds and banned from the touchline for five league games.

Heavy? To Saint and to Villa it was a heavy punishment, and not because of the money. Five games without their manager on the touchline was no small thing. For the next five matches, he would not be allowed to stand in the technical area.

Nobody could say how those games would turn out, and the players and the fans were all gloomy about it.

But before long the gloom lifted, because the notice of Strickland’s punishment arrived, and when they read it, Villa’s mood improved a great deal.

Strickland’s punishment was far heavier than Saint’s. He was fined sixty thousand pounds and banned for fifteen league games.

What did fifteen games mean? There were twenty clubs in the league, each playing every other twice, so thirty-eight rounds in total, and now they were only at round four.

Counting it up, Strickland would miss everything until well into the winter, and could only watch from the stands for most of the first half of the season.

"Go to hell!" At Strickland’s house, the elegant pride of London was seen shouting the words at the wall, without any trace of dignity, when the letter arrived.

Actually, that sentence was already a gift. The Football Association had shown restraint, and if Chelsea and Strickland had not stepped forward and admitted their mistake at the same moment, he might have been out for far longer.

The influence of the whole affair had simply been too large. Famous names from every corner of the country had stepped forward, and even ordinary supporters, with no particular reason to take Saint’s side, could not bring themselves to stand with Strickland.

Strickland’s ban also brought a knock-on punishment for Rennick, and it was hard to find anyone more unlucky in that brawl. He had gained nothing by charging in to defend his friend, and had ended up with a punishment of his own.

The papers were merciless about it. One columnist wrote that Rennick had come off the bench of his own temper and into the history books as the answer to a pub quiz question: who threw the worst punch of the season, and missed. Another asked whether the genius of English football could be trusted to keep his head for ninety minutes, let alone ten.

Leaving aside the punch he had taken, Rennick had become the backdrop to Saint’s performance. Footage of Saint’s sidestep, away from Rennick’s flying lunge, was broadcast by one channel after another, and some self-styled martial arts experts even popped up to analyse it.

One journalist dug out the story of Saint’s boxing lessons, and the old amateur boxing club in Handsworth where he had trained as a boy suddenly found its phone ringing off the hook.

Rennick was fined ten thousand pounds and banned for three games.

Rennick said he was depressed, but there was somebody in London far more depressed than Rennick.

That was Hallam. In his system there were two positions that could not be replaced, Strickland, who played just behind the striker and linked everything together, and Okafor, who anchored the midfield.

Now Strickland was banned for half a season, and Rennick for three games on top. The Chelsea attack had been brought almost to a halt.

Hallam and Chelsea were deeply unhappy, and there were people who were delighted by it all, namely Chelsea’s most direct rivals for the title. Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool all had reasons to smile.

There was no question that Chelsea were strong, and no question they were a threat to the big sides above them.

But the happiest of all were not those clubs, because standing in front of them was a neighbour who had spent years in Chelsea’s shadow. Tottenham supporters, who had worked very hard through the past two seasons, finally felt a little warmth come back to them, courtesy of Chelsea’s misfortune.

In the Villa dressing room, Cadman folded the letter and tossed it on the table with the others.

"Five games," he said. "We’ll manage."

"You’ll manage," Saint corrected him. "You and Pratt. I’ll be in the stands telling you off through a headset."

"That’s the part I’m dreading," said Cadman, and for the first time in days the room laughed.