Chapter 22: Ventham’s Fight for Survival

Saint had no idea the chairman himself was weighing whether to hand him the first team; though he’d been keeping a close eye on that side’s results regardless.

Sallow hadn’t said a word to him about the conversation either. Right now, the priority was simple: keep the U21s performing. Even with everything Saint had quietly been building toward, tipping his hand too early could easily backfire.

"Aldo... commit to the decision, don’t second-guess it." On the training pitch, Saint was on Rami again, this time for hesitating in a drill after last week’s mistake had clearly gotten into his head.

While Saint worked through that with the U21s, Villa’s first team was scrambling in its own crisis. After the defeat to Leeds, Ventham knew, better than anyone, exactly how little time he had left.

There wasn’t much he seemed able to do about it, though. He cut an increasingly desperate figure on the touchline these days, shouting instructions that the players on the pitch seemed to have stopped hearing entirely.

Birmingham’s skies stay grey plenty of months of the year, but the mood around Villa Park had turned genuinely dark. A manager out of answers, a squad that had stopped believing him; that combination rarely ends well.

Not every player in that dressing room had checked out, to be fair. Rocher and Lavelle, freshly promoted from the U21s, hadn’t had time to lose faith in anything yet.

That first week had felt like a rollercoaster for both of them. The initial thrill of a first-team promotion had been real; genuine validation, the first real sign either of their careers was heading somewhere serious.

It hadn’t taken long for the shine to wear off. Ventham barely acknowledged either of them existed, let alone showed any interest in actually playing them.

It wasn’t just Ventham, either; the rest of the squad wasn’t exactly welcoming. Not out of any particular dislike for the two newcomers specifically; the whole atmosphere around the first team had simply curdled.

Villa sat one place above the relegation zone, and that gap kept shrinking by the week. With a manager offering nothing but mounting pressure and no visible plan, morale had collapsed almost entirely.

That pressure had started fracturing relationships throughout the squad. Even Whitfield; Ventham’s own marquee signing, the man he’d built the whole system around, had clashed openly with him in recent weeks.

"I genuinely wish we could go back to the U21s," Lavelle muttered to Rocher during a break in training.

"Be nice if Saint could take over the first team instead," Rocher said, glancing around before he said it.

"Yeah," Lavelle agreed.

Both knew, realistically, how unlikely that was. English football had its own share of unusually young managers, but even those cases had almost always started at a much smaller club, well outside the spotlight.

"If it were him in charge, I actually think this whole situation turns around." For the man who’d flown to France personally to find them both, Rocher and Lavelle carried something close to blind faith.

That faith didn’t count for much in a boardroom decision, though, and both of them knew it. So for now, the only thing either could control was showing up and working; hard training, every session, the same standard Saint had drilled into them from the very start.

Nobody in Ventham’s dressing room was paying much attention to two academy kids grinding through fitness drills, not with results this bad. But results like Ventham’s rarely fix themselves on their own; sooner or later, something has to give. And both of them, having finally earned their shot, weren’t about to waste it just because the manager wasn’t watching.

The days kept passing, and the mood around the first team only curdled further as the next fixture approached. Ventham grew visibly more anxious with every session.

He had a strong sense that the upcoming match against Bolton would decide everything. Win, and there was a chance; however slim, of buying himself more time. Lose, and someone else would be picking his successor by the weekend.

"Would it be worth giving the two young lads a run?" Ventham, out of options and running low on pride, finally raised it himself.

He knew exactly whose fingerprints were on both signings. What genuinely bothered him wasn’t the players themselves; it was the label attached to them. Everyone at the club knew by now: Rocher, Lavelle, and Rami, still down with the U21s, had all been personally scouted and brought in by Saint.

Some people click with someone instantly. Others take an instant dislike. Ventham had fallen firmly into the second category the moment he’d met Saint, and while some of that clearly traced back to the club’s internal politics, that wasn’t the whole story either.

Ventham simply didn’t rate him. In his eyes, Saint was a kid who’d talked his way into a coaching badge without ever proving himself on a pitch, propped up entirely by Sallow’s patronage. If Ventham had carried any real authority at the club beyond the dugout, he’d have pushed to have Saint removed the moment they first met.

Being a naturally cautious man, though, Ventham talked himself out of the idea just as quickly as he’d raised it. Whatever he thought of Saint’s protégés, he trusted the players currently on his books more than two teenagers he barely knew; even after those same senior players had dragged the club to the brink of relegation under his own management.

Survival instinct won out in the end. Ventham named both Rocher and Lavelle in his matchday squad; which meant, at minimum, both would be on the bench for the first time.

The afternoon of the match landed a week before Saint’s birthday; his thirty-second, though it barely registered on his radar.

Still single, still entirely absorbed in the job, Saint had never made much of birthdays even before all this. As head coach of the U21s, with a league fixture scheduled the very next day, there simply wasn’t room to think about it now even if he’d wanted to.

The U21s’ own starting eleven had changed shape with Rocher and Lavelle gone. Saint slotted in Marcus Kaba up front; a player who’d struggled for minutes all season purely because the space ahead of him had been occupied by two players clearly destined for bigger things.

Kaba made the most of it. A goal and an assist: he broke the deadlock himself on the counter, then set up a teammate in the second half to make it 2–0, the eventual final score.

The scoreline itself wasn’t really what mattered to Saint watching from the touchline. What he actually cared about was Rami’s performance; and this time, Rami didn’t let him down.