Chapter 24: I’ll Do Better Than Ventham

The walk wasn’t long, but Saint’s mind had run through it a hundred times already; what to say, how to carry himself, what tone would actually land in that room.

Nervous. For the first time in longer than he could remember, Saint felt genuinely nervous, because he understood exactly what this meeting represented. Not just his standing at Villa, the entire shape of whether he’d ever get a real shot at managing a first team at all.

Approaching the office building, he spotted a familiar figure waiting outside; Derek Sallow, the man who’d opened every door Saint had walked through so far.

"Lee... I think you’ve already worked out why the boss wants to see you." Sallow had come to walk him in personally.

"Yeah." Saint nodded.

"God, is that actual nerves I’m seeing? First time in years." Sallow hadn’t seen that particular expression on Saint’s face before, not once.

"I get nervous same as anyone," Saint said, though the truth was more complicated than that, and he wasn’t about to explain why.

By the time they’d walked through the doors, the tension had mostly settled. His expression evened out, the nerves folding themselves somewhere he could work around.

"Absolute freak of a man," Sallow muttered, half to himself, watching the shift happen.

Truthfully, Saint had stopped being nervous the moment he reminded himself there was no retreating from this. This was a genuine once-in-a-lifetime opening, and if he let it slip through his hands out of hesitation, there was no telling when, or if, another one would come.

Whitlock’s office sat at the top of the building; not a tall building, three floors at most, but the walk still felt longer than it was. Almost eight years at this club, and this was the first time Saint had ever actually been inside it.

Whitlock himself was younger than Saint had pictured; not yet fifty, sharp, and clearly a man who ran his club exactly the way he wanted to, with no patience for being talked around.

"Saint Lee Maddox... genuinely glad this club has a coach like you coming through the ranks." Whitlock opened with real warmth, once the introductions were out of the way.

"If the club hadn’t taken a chance on me, I’d probably still be looking for my first real break somewhere else entirely." Saint meant it, and it came through.

"Unfortunately, the club’s in real trouble right now," Whitlock said, moving straight to the point.

"Two months watching the first team up close, and honestly, the squad itself isn’t the problem." Saint chose the words carefully. It wasn’t a throwaway line.

If the squad wasn’t the issue, the obvious next question was who was.

"Interesting. Where do you think this squad should realistically be sitting in the table?" Whitlock’s tone sharpened with genuine curiosity.

"Top of the table, fighting for automatic promotion." At the start of the season, that had been the consensus among pundits and bookmakers alike, Villa had been widely tipped as genuine contenders.

"And if you were in charge right now... where do you think you could actually take this squad?" Whitlock’s question landed, and Saint felt his pulse spike involuntarily.

He forced himself to settle again before answering. The room went quiet for a moment while he worked out exactly how to phrase it.

Whitlock didn’t rush him. Sallow, standing off to the side, was quietly hoping Saint wouldn’t overplay his hand and say something that read as arrogance rather than confidence.

"I’d rather not put an exact number on that... not yet." Saint finally shook his head.

"But I can promise you one thing: whatever I deliver, it won’t be worse than what Ventham’s given you." He said it plainly, without flinching.

Whitlock didn’t respond immediately, and his expression gave little away; clearly not the answer he’d been hoping for, though given the circumstances, it was about as strong a claim as anyone reasonably could have made.

"If you wanted something more flattering, I could give you that instead," Saint added, a little dry. But underneath the joke, the point was real: nobody, however good, could guarantee results with this squad’s current morale; not even the best manager in the country walking in cold.

The current group had real problems that ran deeper than tactics. Confidence had cratered under the weight of the losing run, and that kind of damage doesn’t fix itself with one team talk.

"Why exactly are you confident you’d manage this squad better than Ventham?" Whitlock asked, once he’d gathered himself.

"Because I’m not as rigid as he is." Stubborn was the polite word. Two months inside that dressing room had given Saint a very clear read on exactly how Ventham operated, and where it broke down.

"And because I actually watch how these players play, rather than forcing them into a system regardless of whether it fits." Two months embedded with the first team hadn’t been wasted time, whatever it had cost him personally along the way.

"I’ll never match his experience... not yet, anyway. But I don’t think experience alone is the thing that actually decides whether a manager succeeds. Ventham’s own results this season are the clearest proof of that." Saint didn’t dress it up. He had no particular fondness for the man, and the feeling ran both ways.

Everyone loves kicking a man once he’s already down, and that was exactly the position Ventham found himself in at Villa right now; whatever personal history sat underneath it.

"Sounds like there’s genuine history there," Whitlock said, something knowing creeping into his expression.

"In that case... I’ll give you the chance to actually prove it." Whitlock extended his hand, and this time it carried an entirely different weight than the handshake at the start of the meeting.

Saint hesitated for half a second, genuinely caught off guard by how fast the decision had come. Then something closer to elation broke through, because that handshake meant exactly one thing: he was about to become Villa’s next head coach.

He steadied himself quickly, though, refusing to let the moment slip before it was properly locked in; making sure, before he left that office, that Whitlock’s decision was actually final and settled.

None of the three people standing in that room fully understood, in that moment, what that single handshake was about to set in motion.

That same night, Villa’s official website confirmed the news everyone had already half-expected: Terry Ventham had left the club by mutual consent.

Nobody was particularly shocked. After weeks of results sliding and speculation swirling in the press, it had been clear for a while that Ventham’s time at Villa was measured in days, not months.