Chapter 26: Help From Friends

He woke at eight the next morning. Since arriving in Birmingham as a boy, Saint had never once slept this long; nearly eleven hours straight, door to door.

Those eleven hours had done something for him, though. He felt clearer than he had in weeks, and for the first time in a long while, none of the restless dreams that had been chasing him for months showed up.

A shower, then his phone; an old, battered thing that still ran on buttons rather than a touchscreen. He’d never seen the point in upgrading it.

"Turning it off before bed was clearly the right call." Dozens of missed calls stared back at him the moment it powered on.

He didn’t bother scrolling through who’d called. Got dressed, went straight downstairs, and started on breakfast. Cooking well was one of the few things the old Saint had picked up properly from his father, and it had transferred over cleanly along with everything else.

Running a Chinese restaurant in Birmingham for years had meant some concessions to local taste, inevitably; but his father had always drawn a hard line on the food itself staying properly authentic, whatever else changed around it.

After a quiet breakfast, Saint drove to the training ground. His car was nothing flashy; a Ford Fiesta, common enough across England that nobody looked twice at it in a car park.

Reliable, cheap to run, unremarkable. Exactly what he wanted. Whatever money Saint actually had, none of it was going toward a car, it was working a great deal harder somewhere else entirely.

He didn’t get far before someone stopped him at his own front gate. Three familiar faces, standing directly in his path.

Silence. Complicated silence, on both sides; nobody quite sure how to open this conversation.

"I know what Villa means to you lot, and I know exactly what you’re thinking right now. As friends, I’m not asking you to back me blindly. Just give me time... three rounds of league football. If, after three games, you genuinely think the results say I’m not up to it, I won’t need convincing. I’ll step aside myself." Saint finally broke the silence, still sitting in the car, addressing all three through the open window.

"Alright." Danny answered first.

Danny, Marcus, and Owen; almost ten years now since Saint had first crossed paths with them at Villa Park, back when he’d just landed his C Licence and was making his very first appearance around the club’s coaching staff.

"You a scout, then?" Danny’s opening line to him, all those years back, watching Saint scribble notes into a battered notebook.

"No... coach, actually." The answer had genuinely stunned all three of them at the time. Saint had been barely into his twenties even then.

"We’ll give you your three rounds. And in the meantime, I’ll do what I can with the rest of the fanbase," Danny added, before Saint pulled off toward the training ground.

"Cheers, mate." Whatever brewing anger existed outside Saint’s front door that morning, there’d been none of it; Danny and the others had made sure of that.

Older than Saint by a few years each, but their standing among the supporters ran deep; lifelong Villa fans, families that had followed the club for generations before any of them were born.

"Mark, you sure about this?" Marcus asked, watching the car disappear down the road, clearly uneasy.

"Aren’t we his mates, though?" Danny turned to the other two.

"Course we are. Saint’s a good bloke." Whatever calculation had gone into Saint’s approach that morning, none of them doubted the friendship itself was real.

"So if we’re mates, we back him. Simple as that."

"But—"

"No buts. He’s asked for three rounds. So we make sure he gets three rounds without the whole fanbase burning the place down first."

"Straight up, Cario... Villa might actually need something like this," Danny said, still staring off in the direction Saint had gone.

"God, Mark... you actually think he can pull this off?" Owen and Marcus both looked genuinely stunned.

"No idea. All I know is Saint’s not like anyone else I’ve ever met." Danny shook his head.

Neither of the other two argued that point. Whatever doubts they carried about the appointment, none of them doubted that Saint himself was something out of the ordinary.

Fan sentiment doesn’t decide club policy, but it isn’t nothing either; and with these three quietly working the phones and the pub crowd, the loudest edge of the backlash had already dulled considerably by the time Saint reached the training ground.

He arrived at Bodymoor Heath in reasonably good spirits, given the circumstances. He knew this place better than almost anywhere else in his adult life; but nothing about today felt like any other morning he’d driven in.

"There he is... there!" The training ground gates were mobbed, and not with fans. Press, almost entirely; the youngest permanent manager in the modern history of English professional football had shown up for his first day, and the media clearly weren’t going anywhere.

Saint didn’t move to get out of the car straight away. He knew exactly what kind of questions were waiting for him out there, and none of them were likely to be friendly.

If he’d had the choice, honestly, he’d have skipped this entirely. Not out of nerves, just an unwillingness to hand them an easy soundbite before he’d even set foot on the training pitch.

With the security team’s help, his car eased through the crowd and in through the gates without incident.

"Bloody hell, is he not even going to face us?" someone in the press pack muttered.

"Scared of a few cameras, probably. Bit much for the kid, I’d imagine." A few heads nodded along; there were easily thirty or forty reporters crammed around the entrance.

Not everyone in that crowd shared the sneer, though. Ashwell, watching from the edge of the group, kept his own read to himself.

Ashwell knew Saint better than most of the press pack ever would. Months of covering the U21s up close had taught him something the rest hadn’t clocked yet: whatever his age said on paper, there was nothing remotely uncertain about the man himself.

Saint’s car disappearing through the gates didn’t send the press pack home, either. Kickoff on the official unveiling was still a while off, and in the meantime, there was always a Villa player arriving to badger for a quote.