Chapter 20: Change

Saint had already half-expected the call up for Rocher and Lavelle, so the news itself wasn’t a surprise. What genuinely interested him was what came next; how would Ventham’s dressing room react to two French teenagers walking in?

Would the senior players be impressed watching them train up close? And, more to the point, would Ventham actually use them, or bury them on the bench out of pure spite?

Time would tell, and time moved fast. By the time Saint had finished reshaping his U21 tactics around their departure, round twenty-two of the Championship had already arrived.

Villa’s opponent that week: Leeds United. Back in August, Leeds had been talked about as genuine promotion contenders. Half a season on, that conversation had flipped entirely; Leeds now sat four points behind Villa, deep in the relegation zone.

Fourth from bottom. Seventeenth in the table, with four teams going down at the end of the season, same as four going up.

Leeds’ situation ran deeper than Villa’s, though. The club was tangled in deep financial trouble; genuine, public speculation that administration might be around the corner again.

None of that stopped them beating Villa comfortably. Final score, 2–0, and the scoreline told most of the story on its own.

As for Rocher and Lavelle, the two everyone had been waiting to see, Lavelle didn’t even make the matchday squad. Rocher made the bench, and stayed there for the full ninety minutes.

Ventham’s stubbornness had never been more visible. Two players personally pushed into the first team by the club’s own chairman, and Ventham hadn’t used either one; not even after Whitlock’s message had come with something close to a warning attached.

Time’s up? The press ran that exact framing again after the match, and this time there was no cushion of goodwill left underneath it. Even a section of Villa’s own supporters had started chanting for Ventham’s head by full time.

Fans are emotional, but they’re not blind to results either. At the start of the season, the same supporters now calling for his exit had genuinely celebrated Ventham’s return.

The Villa Express ran one of its usual reader polls after the match; a staple of English football coverage, everyone’s opinion measured and printed. Back in August, something like eighty-five percent of respondents had called bringing Ventham back the right decision, the missing piece the club needed.

Now, after Leeds, that same fanbase had turned entirely. The chants after the final whistle made it unmistakable.

"Genuinely, there’s no obvious replacement lined up yet." Sallow, in Whitlock’s office, sounded uncharacteristically uncertain.

Names with real reputations weren’t interested in walking into a relegation fight this late in a season. Names without reputations weren’t going to inspire much confidence either. And Ventham himself, whatever his flaws, had been a name with some standing in English coaching; now presiding over a team one place off the bottom four.

"What’s the press saying?" Whitlock had already spotted the clipping on his desk.

Sallow had brought it in himself. The photo on top showed the same young, dark-haired face as before; frowning this time, clearly unhappy about something.

It was Ashwell’s latest column for the Midlands Sports Gazette. Ashwell wasn’t a household name outside the region, but locally, few reporters carried more weight than him; and few had better relationships inside Villa Park.

What made this particular piece notable was the subject. Ashwell had built his reputation praising attacking football, flair, entertainment. This time, he’d spent an entire column praising defensive organisation.

English football has its own long-running romance with defensive solidity; not quite the mythology Italian catenaccio carries, but a real cultural instinct all the same, the idea that a well-drilled back line is its own kind of art.

The problem is that kind of discipline is brutally hard to maintain, and even the sides famous for it slip eventually.

Villa’s U21s, by Saint’s own assessment, simply didn’t have the individual quality to run anything resembling that classic model consistently. So rather than force it, he’d built something looser.

What Saint had actually implemented borrowed from Simeone’s Atlético; compact, aggressive pressing built around defined zones rather than pure man-marking, adjusted so it didn’t ask more of these young players than they could realistically deliver physically.

He’d debuted the system against Leeds’ academy side, timed deliberately; Saint had seen Rocher and Lavelle’s promotion coming weeks out, and had already been drilling the shape in training well before it became official.

Atlético’s real pressing system demands three compact lines working in total synchronisation, and asks an enormous amount of running from midfielders and full-backs especially. Villa’s U21s, without Rocher and Lavelle carrying the attacking weight anymore, simply didn’t have that same physical foundation to draw on.

So Saint widened the zones slightly; a version simplified enough that his players could actually execute it reliably, and one that cost them less physically over ninety minutes.

Losing his two best attackers changed the whole identity of this U21 side overnight. The fluid, front-foot football that had carried them through the winter was gone, at least for now; replaced by a compact defensive block and whatever they could manufacture on the counter.

That counter-attacking approach did produce an opening goal against Leeds’ academy, in genuinely classic fashion; soak up pressure, break with pace, and punish the gap.

The lead held until the final ten minutes of normal time, when a defensive mistake undid it completely. Final result: 1–1.

The mistake belonged to Rami; not through poor positioning himself, but through a miscommunication while organising the players around him.

Saint had handed Rami a new responsibility that match: organising the back line as its on-pitch leader. For the first eighty minutes, he’d handled it well.

Saint had reshaped Rami’s entire trajectory, not just his game. In another life, this same seventeen-year-old had spent his most crucial developmental years playing on rough pitches with no structured coaching at all; years that, once lost, don’t come back for any player.

That Rami had arrived at this level having missed all of that, and was already performing to this standard, said everything about how much raw talent had been sitting there untapped.

It was exactly that trajectory that had convinced Saint to hand him more responsibility now; command of the back line, in a match this important, was no small vote of confidence for a player his age.