Chapter 6: An Optional Casualty?

Saint, it turned out, had been a touch too confident. Sallow talking Whitlock round was one thing. Getting Palfrey to actually sign was another.

"Bloody hell—" Sallow didn’t often swear in front of the coaching staff, but the message from Palfrey’s agent had done it.

Palfrey had turned Villa down.

Whitlock, for his part, had spent months preoccupied with something else entirely: the long-running question of what to do with the North Stand.

English football grounds don’t belong to clubs the way American stadiums do club owners in some sports, but the costs of maintaining an ageing, part-empty stand fall on the club regardless, and Villa Park’s upper tiers had been looking sparser every season since the drop.

Championship attendances were healthier than most of the division could dream of, but even Villa’s loyal support couldn’t fill a stadium built for grander days.

Whitlock had spent the better part of a year chasing financing to redevelop the ground properly, and it had eaten most of his attention; which, as it happened, was exactly why Sallow’s request to sign a couple of unfancied free transfers had sailed through with barely a second glance.

Maybe, too, Whitlock felt he owed Sallow something, after cutting his authority down so publicly the summer before.

None of that helped with Palfrey, though. He’d chosen Nottingham Forest instead, no great surprise, in the end. Villa could talk about history all they liked, but Forest had two European Cups sitting in a trophy cabinet not so many miles up the road, and if the wages were comparable, why would a decent midfielder choose the club a division below in prestige over the one a division below in name only?

Villa had been champions once, seven times over, and European champions in 1982. But that was decades gone. Forest’s history ran deeper still, and everyone in the Midlands knew it.

Missing out on Palfrey stung Sallow, and it did something else too; it reminded Pedmore and Ventham that, whatever the chairman had signed off on paper, Sallow still had real roots at this club.

To avoid a repeat, Pedmore and Ventham pushed the summer’s recruitment along faster than planned, with results that were, in the circumstances, about what you’d expect from a rushed squad-building job.

Missing Palfrey stung, but it hadn’t broken anything Saint had actually been counting on. He went back to the day-to-day: training sessions alongside Pratt, plus his own private project which was keeping close watch on the three young signings he’d brought back from France. He’d even moved all three into his own house before the club sorted their official digs.

Saint had bought the place himself a while back. It was nothing extravagant, just shy of seventy grand, more space than one person needed. Adding three more bodies wasn’t exactly a squeeze.

He came to regret the arrangement fairly quickly, though, because not long after the move was confirmed permanent, Rocher’s girlfriend turned up from France to join him, which took the household from four to five, and meant Saint, Lavelle, and Rami were now living with a couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other at the dinner table.

Of the four young men in the house, Rocher was, by any objective measure, the least conventionally handsome, scar included. And yet he was the only one engaged to be married.

Saint had no complaints about the arrangement itself, really. Camille kept the place tidy, had dinner on most nights, and the other three were more than happy to let her mother them a bit. Behind every quietly successful footballer, there’s usually someone doing the unglamorous work of keeping his life together.

Whether Rocher would stay faithful once the money and attention started rolling in... well, that was a question for another day. Most men weren’t as clean as they liked to think. But that was a future problem, and Saint wasn’t about to lecture a nineteen-year-old about it before he’d even played a competitive match in England.

The days settled into rhythm. All three trainees worked hard under Saint’s programme, Rami especially. Before Villa, the lad had never had a single day of structured coaching in his life.

English academies were stacked with promising young defenders already, but Rami was seventeen, exactly the age where the right environment could still completely reshape a career, and Saint intended to make the most of every one of those years.

The first team was a different story. Once pre-season properly began and the squad reassembled, Ventham made his position on Saint unmistakable: total silence. No eye contact in meetings, no acknowledgement in the corridor, and never once, in team talks, did he address Saint directly.

Every other member of the coaching staff had a defined role. Saint had nothing that came from Ventham... only what Sallow and Pratt quietly found for him.

Thirty years old. There wasn’t another coach like it anywhere in the English game, and Saint knew exactly how that read from the outside, not as a prodigy, but as a mascot in someone else’s turf war. More than ninety percent of Villa’s first-team squad were older than their own assistant coach. It was, by any measure, an absurd situation to be standing inside of.

Players, old heads and new arrivals alike, clocked it fast: how young he was, and how completely Ventham froze him out. Word travelled through the dressing room quickly after that, and mostly what came back to Saint was sympathy.

In most eyes around the training ground, he was simply the fall guy in someone else’s boardroom fight. An expendable pawn, useful only as an irritant, tolerated because getting rid of him would cost Ventham more political capital than leaving him be.

That was more or less the read, and not an unfair one. A month in, and Ventham hadn’t exchanged a single real word with him.

Saint didn’t lose sleep over it. He wasn’t about to keep knocking on a door that clearly wasn’t opening. Ventham had a decent reputation in the English game, for now, but Saint knew things about how that story eventually turned that nobody else in the building had any way of knowing yet, and none of it changed his opinion of the man’s ceiling as a coach.