Chapter 29: My Name Is Saint Maddox

Dozens of reporters packed into the press room, and counting club staff and photographers, well over a hundred people crammed into a space that was never built to hold this many. The noise, even with everyone trying to keep it down, was constant right up until a single figure appeared at the front.

Young. That was the word that landed first, before anything else, before the suit, before the posture, before anything about the man himself. Young, and clearly aware of exactly how young he looked to this room.

Saint wore a plain dark suit, tall enough to carry it well, though nobody in that room was thinking about tailoring in that moment.

’Calm. Confident. Steady.’ Saint repeated it to himself on the short walk to the podium, and whatever nerves lingered underneath, none of it showed on his face.

He reached the microphone, took it from the press officer, and let his eyes move slowly across the room once.

"My name is Saint Maddox. Aston Villa’s new head coach." Nothing more than that.

The moment the sentence landed, the room started to stir; questions already forming, hands half-raised, and then everyone froze, staff and press alike, at what happened next.

Saint turned. One step. Two. Three. And with over a hundred pairs of eyes fixed on him, he simply walked off, disappearing from the room entirely.

The silence lasted maybe two seconds before the room erupted.

"Did he actually just leave?"

"Is that meant to be some kind of statement?"

"Has this bloke lost the plot entirely?"

Chaos, total and immediate. None of it touched Saint, who was already halfway down the corridor. Whatever storm that walkout kicked up, it was only getting started.

"Lee... what!... what was that?" Sallow caught up with him moments later, barely able to get the sentence out.

"What about it?" Saint asked, entirely unbothered.

"God’s sake... do you have any idea what you just did?" Sallow’s frustration was real.

"Derek, relax. I know exactly what I did, and I know exactly what it’s going to cost me." Saint put a hand on his shoulder, steady as anything.

"No... you don’t. You genuinely don’t understand how bad this is going to get." Sallow shrugged the hand off.

"Bad how? I’ve just handed the entire national press a reason to go after me tomorrow. That’s the size of it, isn’t it?" Saint said it back to him plainly, not arguing the point at all.

"You knew that, and you did it anyway." Something in Sallow’s tone shifted; not quite calmer, but genuinely trying to understand now.

"Derek...would they have gone easy on me tomorrow if I’d sat there and answered every question politely instead?" Saint asked.

"That’s..." Sallow stopped, because he already knew the honest answer. Even a perfectly composed, endlessly patient version of Saint wasn’t walking out of that press conference with kind headlines waiting for him tomorrow.

"So if the coverage was always going to be bad either way, why sit through an hour of it being thrown in my face first?" Simple logic, laid out flat. "You know exactly how much English football likes tearing down anything it doesn’t understand yet."

There wasn’t much left to argue with in that.

"If they were never going to give me anything, I wasn’t going to hand them the satisfaction of watching me squirm for it either." Saint had been turning this exact plan over since the night before.

"Half these outlets treat access like currency; the second your results start speaking for you, every single one of them will be back, cap in hand, asking for the exclusive." Saint had thought about this longer than Sallow realised.

Sallow didn’t have a comeback for that either, mostly because it was true.

The whole thing hinged entirely on one condition, though; Saint’s results actually needed to justify it. If they didn’t, there’d be no shortage of coverage waiting either, just none of it kind.

The two men parted ways after that, Sallow heading straight to his office to brief Whitlock, who hadn’t been present for any of it.

"Well... sounds like Lee’s not short on self-belief," Whitlock said, after a pause, once the picture became clear.

Saint had no idea that call was even happening, and wouldn’t have cared much either way. What was done was done, and there wasn’t any point second-guessing it now.

He changed out of the suit back in the manager’s office; the second time he’d sat behind that particular desk. The first had belonged to Ventham, all the way back at the start of the season.

Back in training kit, Saint returned to the pitch quickly enough that it caught both players and staff off guard.

He didn’t offer an explanation, and didn’t plan to. By tomorrow morning, none of them would need one, the papers would make the reasoning obvious on their own.

The first day’s session went smoothly enough, mostly because Saint didn’t get involved much; barely at all, in fact. Morning through afternoon, he mostly just stood on the touchline, watching.

That pattern held for the next several days too. Tactical work fell almost entirely to Pratt in that stretch, and even so, Saint’s presence on the sideline was impossible to ignore.

Because by the second day, the coverage had arrived in force; an unprecedented wave of national criticism aimed squarely at English football’s newest, youngest permanent manager.

Saint had managed something genuinely rare: breaking the record for youngest permanent manager in the modern English game, and simultaneously picking a fight with nearly the entire national press corps on day one.

"Arrogance dressed up as ambition" — Sky Sports Digital.

"Aston Villa’s Championship gamble looks like a joke waiting to land" — talkSPORT.

"Youngest manager in the modern game? Might also be the shortest-serving" — The Athletic ran a poll alongside the headline, asking readers how many games they gave him before the sack.

It wasn’t just the sports press, either. A couple of tabloids got in on it too, one running a genuinely bizarre story claiming Saint had once turned down a trial with a League Two club purely out of arrogance; entirely fabricated, as far as anyone at Villa could tell, but printed regardless.

Whatever else came of it, Saint was now, undeniably, a name. Not a flattering one, not yet; but recognisable well beyond the Midlands, and well beyond football-specific coverage. National radio picked the story up within the week, and it kept circulating from there.