Chapter 47: Doomed Opposition

"Bloody hell." Along the press row, the reporters couldn’t help themselves.

Since Saint took the job, this same group had been waiting for the collapse; waiting for him to look genuinely foolish for once. Instead, Villa had strung together two wins. No, by the time this match wrapped up, it would be three.

Stoppage time, and Villa were holding the ball comfortably. The scoreline stood at 2–1.

Worth remembering, this was Rotherham’s own ground, their own supporters watching this unravel in real time.

Villa had gone in 1–0 up at the break. Rotherham adjusted at half-time and levelled it in the sixty-fourth minute.

Two minutes after that equaliser, though, Villa were back in front; Delgado, restored to the starting eleven for this match, getting the goal.

The assist came from Lavelle, brought on the moment Rotherham had equalised; Saint’s first substitution of the match. In other words: the young Frenchman had been on the pitch barely a minute before setting up the winner.

"First off... congratulations on the three-game winning run." After the match, Reid, having finally worked his way to the front of the pack, got the first real question in.

Reid had already had his own moment with Saint before kickoff, cutting through a scrum of hostile national press to land a proper pre-match word.

What genuinely surprised Reid was the shift in tone the moment Saint recognised who he was talking to; the same guarded, needling composure Saint showed national reporters simply wasn’t there. In its place, something closer to warmth.

Reid felt something close to validation in that moment; two years of unglamorous, underappreciated coverage, finally paying off with an actual relationship rather than just access.

His questions weren’t especially sharp, if he was honest with himself, nothing that would make a headline on its own. But Saint answered every one of them patiently anyway, which only deepened the resentment simmering among the national press pack watching it happen. None of them had ever gotten this version of him.

There’s a particular kind of pettiness that surfaces whenever someone feels shut out of something they think they deserve; and plenty of the national press clearly felt exactly that, watching Saint give a regional reporter the courtesy they’d all been denied.

Saint, for his part, had no idea any of that tension existed. From where he stood, this was simply a reporter who’d covered his work fairly and honestly from the start, and courtesy in return felt like the obvious response.

The pattern repeated after the match too; once Saint finished with the assembled press, Reid again found himself with genuine room to ask a follow-up, and this time nobody from the bigger outlets seemed inclined to fight him for it.

That, in itself, told its own story. The national press had clearly decided there wasn’t much left to gain arguing over table scraps today.

Rotherham’s day got worse from there. Their manager, Gary Pilling, didn’t show up for his own post-match duties, his assistant fielded the press instead.

"Gary’s feeling a bit under the weather, unfortunately... I’ll be taking questions today." The assistant manager delivered the line without much conviction, and everyone in that room understood exactly what it actually meant.

Pilling had watched what happened to the last two managers who’d faced Villa and decided, quite sensibly, to sit this one out entirely.

Ducking the press doesn’t actually make the story disappear, though. With no manager available to absorb it, the assembled reporters redirected every ounce of their frustration onto the poor assistant instead; and by the next morning’s papers, Pilling was being torn apart in print anyway, criticised as much for avoiding the press as for the result itself.

Some pieces went further still, framing the no-show as a genuine breach of the profession’s basic standards.

Watching all of it unfold from close range left a mark on that assistant manager too; enough that, privately, he found himself wondering whether he actually wanted a manager’s job of his own one day, if this was the pressure that came attached to it.

"Mate, you’re doing things no sane manager in this country would ever risk." Back at Saint’s house, Jasper sat sprawled on the sofa the next morning, flicking through the papers with delight.

The fact that Jasper was there at all, the morning after a match, told its own story; he’d clearly stayed the night, which had become something of a habit lately. He’d even brought his sister along a few times, since the two had grown genuinely close over recent months.

Jasper had a bit of a reputation around Birmingham’s university crowd back in the day; good-looking, well-connected, never short of company. Saint, for his part, hadn’t been unattractive either, just far too consumed with badges and coaching manuals to notice.

"Honestly, if I had the choice, I’d rather be him than me right now," Saint called through from the kitchen, nodding toward the papers covering Pilling’s no-show.

He didn’t have that choice, though. Thirty-one, barely two years into proper coaching, and visibly out of step with what most of English football’s establishment expected a manager to look like; none of that was ever going to earn him gentle treatment from the national press.

Rather than wait around to be torn apart, Saint had chosen to strike first, take the initiative, control what he could, and accept that peace with the national media simply wasn’t on offer from day one anyway.

That approach had cost the press dearly so far, and left more than a few outlets genuinely embarrassed. But nobody wins forever in this sport, and every reporter waiting for Saint’s first real slip understood that patience alone would eventually be rewarded; no manager goes unbeaten indefinitely.

Walking a tightrope, in other words, and Saint knew it perfectly well. He didn’t expect this winning run to continue forever.

What he did believe in, increasingly, was the squad underneath him. Three games in, the shape of something genuinely good was becoming clear; a midfield and forward line that, on pure individual quality, looked comfortably better than most of this division.

That belief was exactly where his confidence came from, and three straight results had already proven the theory sound. Keep this group playing to their strengths, and Villa’s form wasn’t likely to fall off a cliff any time soon.

"Oh... by the way, you should look properly at that Rotherham centre-back, Andrew Barzley. If it’s possible, get him into the agency’s books early," Jasper added, between newspaper pages.

Jasper had spent much of the past week doing exactly that kind of legwork; alongside finalising terms for Rocher and the others, he’d also been quietly compiling a shortlist of names worth chasing.

Results had been mixed so far, but he’d landed two genuine prospects regardless. First was a young centre-back, Marco Gamble, currently out on loan at Villa’s next opponent, coincidentally enough.

The second name surprised Saint more. Ricky Mountford, currently on the fringes of a Premier League academy setup; a name that had drifted out of the conversation in another life, but one Saint remembered as genuinely gifted in his youth, before things fell apart for him professionally later on.