Chapter 3: Scout’s Eye

Saint had genuinely thrived with the U18s. Part of that was down to Ray Sandford, the long-serving academy coach who was a decent old boy, well past the point of chasing his own ego, happy to hand real responsibility to someone younger and hungrier.

So while Saint was technically only an assistant, he’d been running most sessions like a head coach for the better part of a year. Anyone who followed Villa’s academy closely knew the young Chinese-English coach standing on the touchline most weekends was doing a lot more than "assisting."

Saint wanted the top job eventually. Playing had never been on the table for him since he had no real talent for football and had started too late, so coaching was the only route left. And now he had something no other coach in the world had: the system.

The reward he’d been given for taking the coaching role was called Scout’s Eye. Exactly what it sounded like, the ability to see a player’s ceiling, not just their current form.

Potential broke down into five tiers: D, C, B, A, S.

A few years of quiet observation had taught him roughly what each tier meant in practice. D-level players scraped by in non-league. C-level suited lower-league football, and Villa’s current Championship squad had a handful. B-level was proper top-flight quality; Villa had a few of those too, on a good day.

A-level meant genuine elite, the kind that ends up at the biggest clubs in Europe. S-level was reserved for the very few, true global superstars.

It was a blunt tool in some ways. Potential wasn’t the same as output, since a high ceiling meant nothing if a player never got near it. But as an edge, it was enormous.

Saint had followed football his whole life in his old one too, but even the most obsessive fan doesn’t remember every name that ever came through a youth system. Scout’s Eye let him see clearly and objectively, which kids at Villa actually had something rare in them.

Two of the U18s, in fact, graded out at A-level. Under any normal circumstance, that should have meant Saint recognised the names already, since future stars leave a mark. But he didn’t recognise either of them. Which told him something important: potential and ability were not the same thing at all.

He’d tried everything with those two over the past year; shifting positions, building bespoke training plans, and neither had moved the needle much. Talent needs more than talent. It needs effort, timing, and no small amount of luck, and an enormous number of gifted kids simply never get all three at once.

There was another boy in the group. A proper hard worker with decent talent, but nowhere near A-level, who’d made real strides under a plan Saint built for him, then plateaued hard after a fast start. Improvement wasn’t linear. Saint had learned that the hard way too.

---

"Lee, you reckon we’re actually going up this year?"

Early in the evening at Saint’s garden, him and Danny were sorting the fish delivery into something barbecue-shaped while the other two got the grill lit.

"Who knows," Saint said. He did, in fact, know quite a lot about Villa’s first-team situation.

The forward line had real Championship quality, arguably promotion-calibre; Delgado, Whitmore, and Okoro could all do a job, and Delgado and Okoro both had the tools to eventually reach A-level if things broke right for them.

But everyone at the club knew the problem wasn’t the front three. Midfield and defence were painfully average, and it showed in the results over the past two seasons.

What Villa actually needed was someone to unlock that forward line. The kind of signing that arrived a year or so down the line and, almost single-handedly, dragged the club back up. A proper old-school number 10, the sort of player who splits a defence open with one pass.

England had a rich tradition of that kind of player, if you went back far enough. Gascoigne, in his own chaotic way. Le Tissier, criminally undervalued outside Southampton. The middle generation had Scholes threading passes nobody else could see, and Lampard arriving late into the box like clockwork.

And now you had Eriksen doing something similar at Spurs, David Silva pulling strings at City, even a mouthy, brilliant kid like Grealish, if he ever got his head fully sorted, had that kind of range in him.

"Oi, Lee... aren’t you with the first team now?" Danny asked, genuinely curious. As a Villa season-ticket holder, he’d clocked the move already.

"Moved up, yeah. But mate, assistant coach, not manager." Sallow had pushed Saint’s promotion through partly to needle Pedmore and Ventham, and everyone involved knew it.

There was already an assistant in the first-team setup. A long-serving figure named Colin Pratt, who’d been around the club for years in various roles. Pratt wasn’t Ventham’s man, which meant no built-in hostility toward Saint, and he was easy-going by nature besides. The two got on fine so far.

"I reckon we go straight back up," said the big lad, Marcus, this one was called. "Ventham’s done it before. He knows how to get a club out of this division."

"Same," said the third, Owen, quieter than the other two, but just as devoted. All three worked the fish trade, all three bled claret and blue, and the friendship had held solid for years because of it.

"Fancy a bet, then?" Saint said, mouth twitching.

"Hang on, what, you don’t think we’re going up?" The three of them knew Saint well enough to catch the shape of what he wasn’t quite saying.

"Didn’t say that." Saint shook his head.

"You didn’t say it, but you meant it." Marcus was already indignant. Championship survival was one thing; these three had been dreaming about the Premier League again for months.

"Fine," Saint said, shrugging, not denying it.

That shut all three of them up for a moment, they’d been burned enough times by Saint’s uncanny sense for how things would turn out. Danny, after all, was still working off a lost World Cup bet.

The silence didn’t last, though, because three more people came through the gate, arms full of shopping bags, one of them hauling half a lamb over one shoulder.

Farming brothers, these three ran a smallholding out past Sutton Coldfield, different trade entirely from the fish crowd, but cut from the same claret-and-blue cloth.

Different lives, same club, same friendship with Saint holding it all together.