Chapter 5: France Trip

Boulogne-sur-Mer, a modest fishing port on France’s northern coast, wasn’t exactly a hard place to search. It was small enough that finding one particular young footballer didn’t take long at all.

Especially since Antoine Rocher wasn’t entirely unknown locally. Not just for his football, for the scar too, a jagged line down one side of his face that made him hard to miss on the street, let alone the pitch.

The scar wasn’t something Rocher had been born with. A childhood car accident had done it, and if there was a silver lining, it was that whatever had scarred his face had left his legs completely untouched. The injury had shaped him in other ways too; growing up different, growing up stared at, had toughened something in him early.

"This the Rocher place?" It wasn’t a house that suggested money.

"Can I help you?" A middle-aged woman answered the door.

"Afternoon... my name’s Saint Maddox, I’m with Aston Villa, in England." Saint left the word "coach" out of it. He knew exactly how young he looked.

The Championship didn’t carry the cachet of the Premier League, but Villa’s name still meant something; a club with real European pedigree, even mid-table in the second tier.

"Sorry, Antoine’s on site with his dad still, but they’ll be back for lunch soon." She waved him in anyway.

"I don’t mind waiting." Saint nodded, and she disappeared to fetch something, leaving a small boy peering round the doorframe at him.

It was a good twenty minutes before a young man came crashing through the door, dust and paint still on his overalls, breathless from the walk. He was of average height, a scar down one cheek.

Rocher looked Saint over, and Saint could see the calculation running behind his eyes, this bloke looked barely older than him.

"You’re actually from a club in England?" Rocher said, half-doubting.

"Here’s my ID, and my A Licence." Saint had come prepared for exactly this reaction.

"You’re a coach. At your age?" Fair enough, there wasn’t another coach like Saint anywhere in Europe.

"Assistant coach, Villa first team. I’m here because I think you could play in England." Saint could see he already had him.

"Yes... God, yes." Boulogne hadn’t renewed his contract that summer, and between building sites with his father, Rocher had spent every spare hour hoping someone, anywhere, would come calling.

His father and two older brothers arrived not long after, and there were handshakes all round before Saint was fed an honest, unfussy French lunch; simple, but good. Afterward, he said his goodbyes and caught a train toward Bordeaux.

Rocher, unprompted, offered to come along and make introductions, and Saint didn’t argue. It was Rocher, in the end, who made finding Yannick Lavelle almost embarrassingly easy.

Their academy sides had faced off years earlier in a regional youth tournament, and Rocher still had contacts in the Bordeaux setup. One conversation at the training ground gate was all it took to track down where Lavelle had ended up since his own release.

The rest fell into place fast. Lavelle, cut loose from Bordeaux and scrambling for a trial anywhere that would take him, didn’t need much convincing either.

With both signed on in principle, Saint sent Rocher and Lavelle home to sort their own affairs and pushed on to Bastia, the Corsican capital, because something he’d noticed in passing back in Bordeaux had jogged a memory.

Aldo Rami. A future French international defender, if the timeline held, and, before any of that, a teenage gardener. Saint had read the story once, one of those footnotes that stuck with him: a defender who very nearly never got the chance at all.

Bastia was a small enough town that Rami wasn’t hard to find, though nobody there thought of him as anything special yet, just a decent amateur player who’d taken a gardening job through a family connection.

It took the better part of a day, but Saint tracked him down: seventeen, from a family with even less money than Rocher’s, working full-time because nobody had ever suggested football might be a way out.

Whatever Rami’s employer had planned for him, it stopped mattering the moment Saint made the offer. Between a landscaping job in Bastia and a trial in England, Rami didn’t hesitate for a second.

All told, the trip took just under three days, and Saint came home having quietly signed three future full internationals, though at the time, not one of the three had the faintest idea what they were actually becoming.

Even Sallow, who’d backed the whole idea, privately wondered if Saint had lost his mind. He’d have said as much outright, if he’d had anywhere left to retreat to.

The trio didn’t come cheap in wage terms even without transfer fees attached, and Villa’s stretched budget made every signing a fight. But Saint’s next request left Sallow more uneasy still.

He wanted Villa to go after Tom Palfrey; a combative, versatile English midfielder whose contract at Blackburn had run down, with the club too consumed by its own troubles to bother extending it.

Palfrey wasn’t flashy. He tackled well, carried the ball forward when needed, did the unglamorous work most midfielders avoided. A younger, English version of the box-to-box profile clubs always claimed to want and rarely paid for. Get a player like that for nothing, and a club barely needed to think about that position again for the better part of a decade.

"He’s exactly what this squad’s missing," Saint said. "But if we sign him, Ventham won’t play him. Not with me pushing it."

"We’d also cut the wage bill doing it," Saint added, and that, more than anything, was what finally moved Sallow.

Saint had his own private reasons too, ones he kept to himself, not sharing with Sallow.

Getting Palfrey wasn’t going to be simple, either. Sallow still needed to sell the idea to Whitlock, and beat off interest from at least one Championship rival already circling the same free transfer.