Chapter 115: Dull

In the end, the referee, Roy Collings, put the whistle to his lips and blew for full time. Villa’s opening home match against Manchester United was over.

Villa 0, United 2.

After Saint’s three changes, Villa had improved enormously, both in attack and in defence. At the back, Marchenko could no longer shoot as freely as he had in the first half.

Lindley still couldn’t stop him outright, but the teenager’s stubbornness made life uncomfortable for the Ukrainian, and after his injury problems of the previous season Marchenko was no longer chasing goals at any cost. He had a hat-trick in his sights for about five minutes, and then he decided that staying fit mattered more.

In attack, the arrival of Reyes and Jurek had transformed Villa. Jurek on the right almost cancelled out United’s left side, each of them forcing the other back, and Rocher on the other wing started to find some rhythm of his own.

Tomlin was no longer alone up front. Even so, Jonny Ashby was still Jonny Ashby, and a fit Ashby was almost impossible to shake off. Tomlin worked hard, but between Ashby’s positioning and Mikhail Brandt’s calm hands in goal, Villa never found a way through.

"Losing isn’t the frightening part. The frightening part is not knowing why you lost, and leaving with nothing learned." Back in the dressing room, Saint looked around at a row of long faces.

"And to be honest, I never expected you to win this game." The players looked up in surprise as he said it.

"The friendlies went so smoothly that you got a bit full of yourselves. You never found your problems. Now this match has found them for you, so I want every one of you to go home tonight and think about it." With that, Saint turned and left for the post-match press conference.

When he arrived, Garrity was still being interviewed, and anyone who hadn’t seen the match would have assumed from the stern look on his face that United had lost.

Garrity wasn’t annoyed at the performance. He had felt the idea was absurd at first, but by the end of the afternoon he was completely sure of it: Saint had used United to train his young players.

Garrity was a good-natured man, but good-natured men have tempers too, and he took the whole thing as a mild form of disrespect.

"Saint, you disappointed me." Garrity’s interview had finished by the time Saint walked out, so for the first time that day the two of them had a chance to talk. They hadn’t spoken properly at the pre-match handshake, because Saint had been in a hurry to get back to his dressing room.

"Hm. I hope there’s no next time." Saint was clever, but he didn’t fully grasp what Garrity meant right then. He would work it out later.

Not that he could have done anything differently. If the team’s problems had been solved in the friendlies, Saint wouldn’t have minded a proper fight with United. As it was, he cared far more about the shape of the whole season than about any single result.

"What do you make of this defeat?" The reporter, from a national daily with a reputation for needling managers, looked at him provocatively.

"What do I make of it? It’s normal. We were up against the best side in the country and the champions of Europe." Saint’s answer left the reporter speechless for a moment.

It was true, after all. Villa were a newly promoted side, and their opponents were the traditional giants of the league, last season’s European champions. Surely nobody was shocked when a promoted team lost to a giant.

Because of that one answer, the rest of the interview turned flat. Saint didn’t mind. Nobody enjoys facing the media after a defeat if they don’t have to.

"Hang on, something’s wrong." By the time a few of the reporters had worked out what had happened, the press conference was over, and Saint’s footsteps had long since faded from the corridor.

"Damn it, he’s played us again." Once one of them spotted it, the rest followed quickly.

There was a huge gap between the two sides. Even so, Villa had lost, and a loss is a loss. No excuse would change that.

There were also plenty of angles to attack. The starting eleven, the players’ performance, even Saint’s apparent stillness on the touchline.

The trouble was, it was too late. Saint had already gone, and by now he was probably on the team coach, heading back to the training ground.

Elsewhere in the country, plenty of supporters were questioning his judgement after watching the game. His starting eleven had been genuinely hard to understand, and the improvement after the substitutions seemed to prove there was a real problem with it.

Many fans believed that if Saint had started his veterans, the result might have been entirely different, since Villa looked so much better once Teale, Reyes and Jurek came on.

"This manager must have been bought." One fan posted that on a forum, and a Villa supporter hit back at once: "Then go and buy one yourself and see how you get on."

Clubs get sold all the time, but who in the world buys a manager’s job?

There were radical fans and sensible fans and, as always, self-proclaimed experts online, but none of it made any difference to Saint. A single phone call from his cousin carried far more weight.

"Winning or losing is just football," Saint told her. The league had started, and it was also the week Chloe went back to school.

"But people are saying nasty things about you at home," Chloe said, worried.

"They don’t understand football. They say it to get attention, to sell papers." Saint genuinely didn’t care for himself, and the way Villa had performed after going behind actually left him feeling the loss hadn’t cost him much.

He had seen the players change, and he had seen them realise what was wrong. That made the defeat worth something to Villa, perhaps even more than three points against United would have.

With the first round of fixtures complete, the summer transfer window had officially closed. It had been an unusual summer, with Saint himself an unpredictable factor in the market, but the overall picture hadn’t changed much.

Money had flooded into the game again. Several of the biggest clubs spent heavily, one or two of the continental giants reshuffled their squads from top to bottom, and across the division wage bills crept up another notch.

At United, the signing everybody had been talking about all summer had settled in almost at once. The young Brazilian had arrived in July and won Garrity’s trust within weeks.

Meanwhile, the big spenders elsewhere were already changing the shape of the league, and a few ambitious managers were quietly beginning to build the reputations that would define the next decade of English football.