Chapter 52: Never Mind

"Any manager who thinks he’s the only genius in the room eventually pays for it, and Saint Maddox will be no exception." Casapa said it with total conviction.

Compared to the Preston draw, Villa’s starting lineup showed real continuity; both Rocher and Lavelle, quiet in that last match, kept their places, and Rami earned his first competitive start of the season at the back.

"One draw clearly wasn’t enough to knock the arrogance out of this bloke." In Casapa’s telling, Saint’s confidence had crossed well past self-belief into something closer to delusion.

Curtis, sitting beside him for this broadcast, found the whole dynamic exhausting by this point. Since Saint’s appointment, the two men’s readings of the situation had drifted further and further apart with every passing week.

Curtis had settled comfortably into genuine support. Casapa had gone the opposite direction entirely, and four straight wins hadn’t dented his position in the slightest; if anything, he’d simply found new angles to attack from.

After the Millwall win, Casapa had argued on his own social channels that Villa only won because Barrow was too inexperienced to manage the moment. After the Wednesday win, he’d claimed Villa’s opponents simply hadn’t taken the fixture seriously.

By his logic, none of these four wins had anything genuinely to do with Saint at all, practically anyone could have delivered the same results with this squad.

Even Casapa’s read on Rocher’s breakout stayed grudging at best. Rocher had become a genuine fan favourite over these past weeks, widely regarded as the find of the season, and Casapa still found ways to undersell it.

By now, Casapa had gone fully, openly hostile. Curtis had actually asked the broadcaster to consider a different co-commentator, but the network declined, their reasoning being that a genuine believer paired against a genuine skeptic made for better listening either way.

Casapa, for his part, couldn’t have cared less about any of it. The more attention people paid to his provocations, the more inclined he was to keep making them.

In the away dressing room at the Madejski, Saint was making his final preparations before kickoff.

"Right, lads... you’ve all seen it, I’ve had a proper going-over in the papers this week." Saint held up a copy of Sky Sports Digital’s front-page piece for effect.

A major national outlet running its front page around a Championship manager’s Twitter feud said plenty about just how much Saint’s presence had come to dominate the news cycle, whether the coverage was kind or not.

For years, English football’s press ecosystem had operated on a fairly stable understanding; managers played nice, or paid for it quietly. No manager, however established, however decorated, had openly ignored that arrangement the way Saint had from day one.

And here he was, barely two months into his first job, having done exactly that from his very first press conference, and somehow still standing.

"Right now, it’s time to answer back properly. Go out there, win this, and prove that draw was the exception, not a return to normal. You lot aren’t the same squad you were before this run started."

"Because your manager," he said, voice dropping slightly, "is me." With that, he pushed the dressing room door open.

The moment Saint’s door swung open, Reading’s own dressing room opened almost in sync; the two squads meeting in the tunnel exactly as protocol demanded, neither manager avoiding the other.

Reading’s manager, Darren Ross, had stuck rigidly to the expected script in his own pre-match media duties; measured, professional, giving nothing away. The two men’s exchange in the tunnel matched that same flat, businesslike tone.

Saint had never once tried to needle an opposing manager, from his very first match onward. Partly because he understood from the start how little the press would ever give him the benefit of the doubt regardless. Partly, honestly, because most of these managers simply didn’t interest him enough to bother.

He had bigger ambitions than winning a war of words with the Championship’s current crop of gaffers. Somewhere down the line, he wanted to be mentioned in the same breath as the true greats of the English game, not spend his energy trading barbs with journeymen managers along the way.

Besides, the press had already done that particular job for him. After the previous rounds of criticism, Villa were walking into this fixture under real pressure; and if they lost, the coverage waiting on the other side would be brutal.

"Big shift in Villa’s back line today," Curtis said, running through the confirmed lineup. "Rami comes straight in, and that pushes Alves out to the bench."

Villa’s back four for this match: Cuddy, Rami, Loach, and Alves out, with Peña, still not fully fit, unavailable regardless.

"This looks like a purely defensive-minded back line on paper," Curtis added. Cuddy’s game had never really extended much beyond his own defensive duties, and Rami, for all his promise, was still raw enough that Saint wasn’t yet trusting him with much license to attack.

"Which means Villa’s attacking burden falls almost entirely on the front four today." Curtis wasn’t quite right about that... Loach still carried license to push forward when the moment called for it, but the broader point held: Saint had deliberately loaded his attacking intent into the front line for this one.

Rocher, Lavelle, and Rami had all been putting in extra work over recent weeks, and that effort had genuinely shifted Saint’s thinking. He wanted to reward it, give all three a real platform to prove themselves on the biggest stage they’d faced yet.

Young players need real opportunity to develop, full stop. Talent alone rarely gets anyone anywhere without a manager willing to actually trust it on the pitch; and how many promising careers had stalled out purely because nobody at the top ever gave them that chance, especially at the bigger clubs where patience runs thinnest.

On the pitch, both captains completed the coin toss, Villa won the choice of kickoff, and Saint and Ross exchanged the customary handshake before returning to their respective technical areas.

The moment Saint settled into his seat, the referee got the match underway. Okoro rolled it to Delgado, who found Whitfield.

Across these recent matches, Whitfield and Conlan had quietly become Villa’s most reliable partnership, the spine that had carried the team through this entire unbeaten run.

Conlan covered ground relentlessly at both ends of the pitch, while Whitfield dictated tempo from deeper, even Alves’s earlier set-piece goal against Preston had come off a Whitfield delivery.

Whitfield’s transformation had, inevitably, become part of the wider media conversation too; several outlets had gone looking for Ventham’s reaction to it, given how directly his own downfall connected to exactly this player’s turnaround. Whatever Saint had done, it had left Ventham looking worse by the week, and the press weren’t shy about pointing that out. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

There’d even been a report doing the rounds; unconfirmed, that Ventham had left the country entirely, unable to stomach the ongoing coverage.

Wherever Ventham had actually gone, it had nothing to do with Saint’s present concerns. Right now, his attention belonged entirely to the pitch in front of him, where Villa had just launched their first real attack of the match.

Whitfield held possession briefly, waited for his teammates to push forward, then found Rocher out wide, and the Frenchman took off down the flank.

"Can’t get near him... Reading’s defender simply cannot handle Rocher’s pace," Curtis called, watching Rocher beat his marker cleanly and cut in on goal.