Chapter 39: Rocher

"Let’s take a look at Villa’s starting eleven." Round twenty-five of the Championship, and Villa were hosting Derby County; currently sitting third, one of the season’s genuine promotion favourites.

At the start of the season, Derby would have been Villa’s most direct rival for a top-two finish. Nobody at Villa Park had been thinking in those terms for weeks now, though; survival, not promotion, had been the only conversation that mattered since Christmas.

The media circus that had followed Saint’s appointment had quieted somewhat over the past few days; a rare stretch where nobody was chasing him for a quote.

But as the next fixture approached, the cameras and notebooks came back in force. Derby’s form this season made them heavy favourites on paper, and plenty of outlets were happy to say so outright.

Where Villa had gone unbeaten across seven straight games under Ventham earlier in the season, Derby had gone unbeaten across their last six. Villa’s win over Millwall had been put down, by more than one pundit, to a fluke; a one-off, not a genuine shift. Repeating it against a side this good, the argument went, simply wasn’t realistic.

Saint had no real interest in engaging with any of that noise. A few days removed from his own press conference stunt, he understood exactly how limited his actual leverage with the media still was; not worth spending energy on people who’d already decided the story.

He’d been genuinely buried in work these past few days regardless; one-on-one conversations with half the squad, drilling in a new tactical shape, and, notably, pushing Rocher into his first Championship start.

Rocher’s timing had finally aligned. Ventham had never once given him a real chance, and the ten minutes he did get; the substitute appearance that ended up costing Ventham his job, had turned out to be the closest thing to poetic justice the whole saga produced.

If nothing else, it was fair to say Rocher’s cameo had done more to end Ventham’s tenure than almost anything else that happened that week.

"Big changes to the Villa lineup compared to last time out," Curtis said, calling the match for viewers who couldn’t make it to the ground.

Saint had switched to a 4-4-2, adding a fourth defender to what had been a back three under Ventham. Loach partnered Alves at centre-back, with Cuddy on the left and Peña given license to attack down the right.

The real shift sat in midfield, though, where Rocher’s inclusion on the left wing meant a genuine reshuffle. Peña’s natural attacking instincts made him a defensive liability if left unchecked, so Saint had paired him with a more disciplined midfield partner alongside him centrally, freeing Rocher to focus purely on his strengths out wide.

Up front, Delgado had been recalled from his spell out of the side, but weeks out of first-team rhythm meant easing him back gradually rather than throwing him straight into the top job. So the striking pair for this match remained Okoro and Whitfield’s usual partner up top.

Reaction to the reshuffle, both from supporters and the press, was cautious at best; especially coming off the back of a genuinely good result the week before.

"Feels like Saint might be moving a bit fast here," Curtis admitted, watching the new shape warm up.

"Maybe he thinks one win means he’s already got this squad figured out," Casapa added, characteristically unconvinced.

"We’ll know either way in ninety minutes," Curtis said, cutting the exchange short before it turned into another round of the same argument they’d been having all week.

Curtis could rein in his own broadcast partner easily enough. He had no such control over the press pack lining the touchline, and today’s turnout was, if anything, larger than the week before; including a noticeably different mix of faces along the media row.

Alongside the usual national press, a cluster of reporters from smaller regional outlets had shown up too; outlets that, unlike most of the national coverage so far, had been genuinely warm toward Saint since day one.

That divide had become obvious over the past week: national press mostly hostile, a small pocket of regional and specialist outlets; the Midlands Sports Gazette chief among them, considerably more sympathetic, and increasingly vocal about it.

English football media has never been short of factionalism, and this particular story had split it right down the middle; some treating Saint’s appointment as a joke worth mocking every week, others treating it as the most interesting managerial story of the season.

Saint had no real read on the internal politics of who was covering him and why. Even if he had, there wasn’t much he could actually do about it; he had no more control over the press narrative today than he’d had a week earlier.

After the customary handshake with Derby’s manager, Neil Whitby, Saint returned to his position and turned his full attention to the pitch.

The match was already underway by the time he’d settled; Derby had strung together their first real attack, a shot from their striker forcing a save.

The buildup had come through Derby’s midfielder, a player who’d actually spent the previous season on loan at Villa before Ventham’s summer rebuild pushed him out entirely.

That move to Derby had worked out well for both parties; Derby were genuine promotion contenders, and Villa were fighting to stay in the division at all.

"Pentland! Comfortable save there, no real venom on that effort." Villa’s goalkeeper gathered it cleanly, no real danger in the shot.

Villa broke quickly from there with Pentland rolling it out to Loach, who carried it forward and found Whitfield. The transformation in Whitfield over the past week had genuinely unsettled half the division’s scouts watching this match.

A player who’d spent most of the season visibly going through the motions had, in the space of one conversation, turned into something closer to his old self. Genuinely strange, watching it unfold; and inevitably, curious, because it didn’t take long for people to connect that shift directly back to Saint.

Threats alone don’t usually produce this kind of relationship. Whitfield and Saint had been seen sharing an easy laugh on the training pitch more than once this week; hardly the body language of two men locked in a power struggle.

What did that actually mean? It suggested something closer to a genuine understanding between them; that Saint had found a way to fully win back the player Villa’s whole system had been built around in the first place.

The press, predictably, had picked up on the shift almost immediately, and more than one outlet had gone looking for Ventham’s reaction to it; a fairly uncomfortable question for a man barely a week removed from losing this exact job.

On the pitch, Whitfield took possession and didn’t rush it; two composed touches forward, and in that instant, he’d already set up Villa’s opening goal without anyone quite realising it yet.

While Whitfield carried the ball, Villa’s left flank had already come alive; the scarred, unmistakable figure of Rocher had crossed halfway and was driving deep into Derby’s territory.

Whitfield clipped a low ball exactly into Rocher’s path; precisely the pattern they’d drilled all week in training.

"GOOOOOAL! Two minutes on the clock, and Villa strike first!"

"Rocher! Whitfield with the ball into his path, Rocher cuts inside... Derby’s defence had absolutely no answer for that pace, none at all!"