Chapter 31: First Show

A week feels like an eternity to a supporter waiting for answers. Waiting always drags. For Saint, the same week had gone by in a blur, because there hadn’t been a single spare hour in it.

The Den, home of Millwall; Villa’s opponent this round, and Saint stood in the away dressing room with his squad gathered in front of him.

He’d done remarkably little in his first week as manager, at least visibly. Training had run almost entirely under Pratt’s direction, with Saint standing quietly on the touchline, watching more than intervening.

"A week of watching, and here’s what I’ve learned: every one of you is a genuinely good player. What this squad’s been producing on the pitch doesn’t come close to matching what you’re actually capable of." Saint said it plainly, looking around the room.

"I know what you’ve been thinking... why hasn’t the new manager actually done anything yet? Truth is, I know most of you already, but that was months ago, under different circumstances. I needed time to get a proper read on where you’re at now. And you need time to get used to a manager in the same age group as half this dressing room. That’s fair."

"Today’s your chance to show me something. Take it seriously, because chances like this one don’t come around twice." Saint said it with a small, genuine smile; not performative, just honest.

Tactically, there wasn’t much new to unveil yet. Saint had kept Ventham’s basic structure intact for this first match, unwilling to overhaul everything before he’d even had a full week of proper sessions.

In goal: Andy Pentland, a steady thirty-one-year-old veteran who’d joined the previous summer and hadn’t put a foot wrong since. Behind him, a back three of Loach, Milo Cuddy, and Diego Alves. Midfield: Whitfield, Conlan, and Colston, with veteran Paul Mannering holding things together alongside them. Up front, Okoro and Delgado led the line, with a fringe forward left out of the squad entirely and Peña named among the substitutes.

Compared to Villa’s squad on paper, Millwall’s starting eleven was considerably thinner. Scout’s Eye made that gap even starker to Saint specifically; barely one B-level player in the entire Millwall XI, the rest sitting at C-level or below.

Talent gaps don’t guarantee results, though, and Villa’s own season was proof enough of that already. Millwall, whatever their individual quality, had built a reputation for punching above their squad’s raw numbers under smart, disciplined management.

Millwall hadn’t started particularly well themselves, but scanning their bench, Saint’s attention snagged on one name he hadn’t expected to see.

Dominic Crichton. Seventeen years old, technically still a C-level player by current ability, but graded S-level potential; the rarest tier there was. A future top-class defender if the trajectory held.

Saint knew, from another life entirely, exactly how far that trajectory could go; a defender who’d eventually become one of the most technically gifted full-backs of his generation, comfortable at centre-back or out wide, genuinely elite level. In this timeline, of course, none of that had happened yet, and Crichton was still just a name buried on a Championship bench.

He filed the thought away for later. If Saint could actually keep this job past the season, Crichton was exactly the kind of long-term project worth revisiting; a player Villa could realistically pursue in a year or two, before his value climbed out of reach.

By the time Saint’s attention drifted back to the match itself, the game had already kicked off; though judging by the cameras, he was arguably more interesting to watch than the actual football.

"Villa’s young manager looks deep in thought over there," the commentator noted, cutting briefly to Saint on the touchline mid-broadcast.

This wasn’t a nationally televised fixture, technically, but the press turnout suggested otherwise. Close to a hundred reporters had shown up to a routine Championship match; genuinely unusual for this level of English football.

Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority weren’t there for neutral coverage. Most of that media pack had their cameras and notebooks trained squarely on Villa’s technical area, waiting for something to go wrong.

That level of attention hadn’t gone unnoticed on the other bench either. Millwall’s manager, Danny Barrow, wasn’t used to sharing the spotlight quite this dramatically at his own home ground.

Barrow had come up through coaching under Sean Dyche’s staff before earning his own chance at Millwall; a genuine disciple of that no-nonsense, defensively organised school of English management, and, at thirty-eight, one of the younger managers working in the division himself.

Before coaching, Barrow’s own playing career had gone nowhere much; journeyman lower-league stuff, nothing that suggested what came after. He’d retired early and pivoted into coaching almost immediately, and it had been the better decision by some distance.

Barrow had briefly held the unofficial title of "youngest manager in the Championship" himself, right up until three weeks ago; Millwall had sacked their previous manager over poor results and brought Barrow in as his replacement.

That title lasted exactly as long as it took Villa’s board to make their own announcement. Barrow’s first three games in charge had gone reasonably well; two wins, one loss, enough to lift Millwall above Villa in the table in the process.

Whatever irritation Barrow felt about losing that particular headline to Saint didn’t come from ego about the record itself. What genuinely bothered him was the way certain outlets had started drawing direct comparisons between the two of them; as if a proper, hard-earned coaching path and whatever Saint represented belonged in the same sentence.

Barrow had earned his stripes the traditional way; grinding through lower-league coaching roles, learning under a respected mentor, building credibility year by year. In his own mind, there wasn’t really a comparison to be made at all.

Not that any of it showed on his face. English football management has its own unwritten code, and Barrow, whatever he privately thought, wasn’t about to break it in public.

Composed, gracious, entirely professional; that’s the expected posture, whatever’s actually happening underneath it. And to his credit, Barrow held to it completely: nothing untoward at the pre-match press conference, a perfectly correct handshake at kickoff.

Saint, for his part, hadn’t given Barrow’s composure much thought either way. His attention, even during that handshake, had already drifted past the man in front of him toward the substitutes bench behind.

Whatever was running through Barrow’s head in that moment, Saint had no interest in it; his focus had returned entirely to the match itself.

What he saw over the following minutes was disappointing. Villa’s performance looked exactly like the version that had been losing games for weeks; the same hesitancy, the same lack of urgency.

A few words of encouragement in the dressing room clearly hadn’t been enough to shift a mentality that had been eroding for months.