Chapter 44: The Effort Behind It

"Congratulations. Lucky win again, I suppose?" After the match, Saint found himself surrounded by the press once more.

"Very lucky, yeah. Lucky to score once. Lucky to score twice. Lucky to score a third, fourth, and fifth time." Saint nodded along, counting each one off on his fingers as he said it.

5–1. Final score. Derby had finally found a consolation goal nearly eighty minutes in, right after Whitfield’s fourth.

That goal didn’t change much beyond sparing Derby a slightly worse scoreline; because barely three minutes later, Villa scored again anyway.

With Villa’s fifth in the book, referee Pieri blew for full time almost the instant stoppage time expired, and nobody from Derby was in any mood to argue about the timing.

Tonight was a genuine nightmare for everyone connected to Derby; the kind of result nobody involved would ever forget, and everybody involved would rather never discuss again. Whitby included.

"There are reports you’ve forced players into celebrating with you specifically; orchestrated it, even. Any truth to that?" A reporter from Sky Sports asked it, with a colleague from talkSPORT nodding along, clearly primed for the same line of questioning.

The two outlets rarely agreed on much, but where Saint was concerned, they’d found common ground fast. In fact, outside the small circle of regional and sympathetic press, nearly every national outlet had settled into the same adversarial posture toward him.

"Funny thing about rumours; where I’m from, we’ve got a saying that time eventually proves a lie for what it is. Looking at you specifically, though, I’m starting to think that one doesn’t quite apply." Saint held the reporter’s gaze for a long moment before saying it.

Whatever the exact phrase meant to someone unfamiliar with it, the tone did the job on its own. Saint’s expression made the point plain enough without needing translation.

He didn’t wait for a follow-up. He turned and walked off without a backward glance, exactly as he had the week before.

"Bloody hell." Denied their moment with Saint, the assembled press pack turned their frustration toward the nearest available target: Whitby, who’d just emerged from the tunnel.

Whitby caught the collective look aimed at him and immediately sensed where this was heading; some part of him screaming to turn straight back around and skip the whole thing.

He couldn’t, of course. English football management carries its own unwritten obligations, and ducking the press after a result like this simply wasn’t an option, however brutal the next ten minutes were about to get.

"Blimey... is all of this actually real? This is properly mad." A few steps away, watching Whitby get swarmed, Reid stood with an expression somewhere between disbelief and delight.

Reid had wanted his own moment with Saint too, but faced with dozens of national reporters all fighting for the same quote, there wasn’t much room for a regional paper to squeeze in. Months of being talked over by bigger outlets had taught him exactly how that particular hierarchy usually worked.

What happened next completely rewrote his expectations, though. A manager decades younger than most of the room, standing in front of dozens of national reporters; several from outlets that could make or break a career with one bad headline, and not backing down an inch.

Nervous? Not remotely, as far as Reid could tell. Saint had stood his ground against the entire national press pack and come out the other side having landed the better line.

"Right... next time, I’m getting the proper one-on-one. Whatever it takes." Reid said it mostly to himself, already thinking about how to pitch it to Doyle.

Saint had no idea any of that exchange had happened, and wouldn’t have cared much either way. Villa was the only thing that actually held his attention right now.

Two wins on the bounce, and not just any two wins. A 5–1 demolition of a genuine promotion contender, third in the table, on the back of last week’s comeback.

"Lee... you’re an absolute genius, you know that?" Sallow pulled him into a hug the moment he got near.

"Is ’genius’ the only compliment anyone around here actually knows?" Saint muttered, only half-joking.

Villa’s two-game run had done wonders for more than just Saint’s own standing. Sallow’s authority at the club had strengthened right alongside it; Saint’s success was, in a very real sense, Sallow’s success too, and everyone at the club understood that connection clearly.

The benefits went beyond Sallow, of course. Every win added another layer of stability to Saint’s own position; more trust from the players, more goodwill from a growing share of the fanbase, less room for anyone to seriously argue he didn’t belong in that dugout.

5–1 stood as the biggest league win Villa had recorded all season, by some distance. Across Ventham’s twenty-three games in charge, his best result had been a narrow 2–0 win in round fourteen.

Across those twenty-three matches, Ventham had managed only six wins total; one by two clear goals, one by a single goal margin of two, the rest all narrow 1–0 scrapes. It painted a fairly complete picture of how uninspiring Villa’s football had actually been before Saint took over.

"One day off, as agreed" — the standard policy Saint had instituted from his very first week in charge, and one he stuck to religiously.

Proper rest mattered, and Saint understood that better than most. Training, day after day, wears a professional down in ways that don’t always show on the surface; the public only ever sees the highlight reel, never the accumulated grind underneath it.

Much like anyone in the public eye, footballers pay a cost that’s invisible from the outside. Two wins on the bounce had made life genuinely pleasant for Saint; certainly in the Midlands, and certainly in every exchange with a press pack that had, until recently, treated him purely as a punchline.

But nobody watching from the stands or reading the papers could see what had actually gone into producing those two results.

Since taking the job, Saint had barely left the training ground except to sleep. Long after players and staff had gone home for the evening, his office light stayed on.

Poring over formations, trying to find the exact shape that let every individual player express themselves fully. Studying opposition footage deep into the night; for the Derby match specifically, he’d spent the better part of three days going through nearly every match Derby had played that season.

It wasn’t passive viewing, either; genuine research. Logging tendencies, strengths, weaknesses, even studying the opposing manager’s own habits: preferred formations, substitution patterns, whether they liked to rotate heavily, when in a match they typically made changes.

Villa’s two-game run, in other words, was the direct product of obsessive, borderline unsustainable preparation. Credit belonged to the coaching staff too, of course; Pratt, Cadman, and the rest hadn’t had it easy either, even if none of them were putting in quite the hours Saint was.

Three good staff members are worth more than one exceptional manager working himself into the ground alone, and Saint hadn’t fully appreciated that lesson before taking this job. Now, more and more, he found himself wishing his support staff ran considerably deeper than it currently did.