Chapter 116: Old Opponent

The international break had very little to do with Saint and Villa. Rocher had been brilliant in the Championship, but the Championship was still the Championship, and of the new signings only Jurek, Vacek and Rocher had been called up by their countries. Everyone else had been left at home.

For Villa that was a blessing, because it meant one more week of proper preparation for the second round.

Their opponents were old acquaintances. Derby County had also come up this summer, and when the two sides met in the Championship, Villa had beaten them. In fact, after the opening day, Villa’s next two fixtures looked far kinder than the first.

The third round brought Burnley, a side that had scraped survival by the skin of their teeth the previous season. The fourth, though, would be a real test, because Chelsea were waiting at the end of that run.

Saint intended to use that game as a touchstone for his young squad. That did not mean he took the first two matches lightly. On the contrary, he had spent the whole break studying Derby.

Compared with the revolution at Villa, Derby had changed very little. A promoted club has to buy and sell a few players, of course, but the spine of the team was still last season’s spine, especially up front, where the strikers had scored heavily in the Championship and had a reputation for sharp finishing. In midfield the same engine room kept turning, and the back four was exactly the one Saint remembered.

It was an experienced, settled group, and that was precisely why it deserved respect.

He sat with Cadman late into the evening, a laptop open between them and a stack of match footage on the desk. Every clip told the same story: Derby were organised, patient, and very good at punishing a side that lost the ball cheaply. Saint made Cadman watch the same free-kick routine three times, then drew it out on the whiteboard.

"They’ll sit deep and wait for us to get impatient," he said. "So we don’t get impatient."

Cadman smiled at that. It was the kind of sentence that sounded easy and was brutally hard to coach into twenty-two-year-olds.

The two weeks passed quickly. For the supporters, the time was swallowed up by the national team games. Everyone had a club of their own in the league, but when England played, the whole country became one. As for the players, Villa were buried in training, and nobody had much time to think about anything else.

Least of all the manager. Since Grace had left Birmingham, the two of them had not spoken once. Saint hadn’t rung her, and Grace, for her own reasons, hadn’t rung him either.

The press had noticed. Grace’s absence from the opening day was already suspicious, and the fact that she had flown in and then vanished again the very next morning had only fed the rumours. A few reporters tracked her movements and discovered that she was taking private time somewhere for the best part of a fortnight.

Notably, she was not spending it with her boyfriend. They were supposedly a couple in love, who had only got together a few months earlier. So the speculation ran wild, and a number of papers simply declared that the two of them had split up.

The rumours reached all the way to the restaurant. Linda rang first, then rang again.

Derek didn’t have strong feelings about Grace, but he did worry about the distance and the glare of publicity that came with her job. Linda had no such concerns. As long as the girl was kind to her nephew, she was satisfied.

Linda, like most aunts, loved a bit of gossip, and she went looking for Saint’s. She soon learned about Jasper, partly because Chloe had come home and talked about nothing else.

In Chloe’s words, a handsome blond fellow had given her cousin a sports car worth a fortune, and was forever turning up at his house. She had a great deal to say about it.

Chloe, of course, had been desperate to meet Grace. That wish hadn’t come true during her visit, and from the look of things it might not come true soon either.

After all, in a situation like this, if neither side bends, the end result is a breakup. Love, when you strip it down, is really about who is willing to sacrifice what for whom.

It was the only thing that truly weighed on Saint, yet he knew a way to push the worry out of his head, which was to throw himself into football.

When a person focuses on one thing, every other trouble seems to fade. You could also call that running away, of course.

Saint would never admit to running away. He called it commitment, even though the commitment didn’t really make him feel any better.

Time carried on like that. Soon the players who had gone away on international duty came back, all of them safe and healthy.

International football takes a lot out of players, especially older ones, so Saint decided Jurek wouldn’t start the next game. The other veterans would. The point of the first match had been to teach the young players their weaknesses. Now those lessons had been learned, it was time for the old hands to show what they could do.

In the dressing room before the coach left, he kept it short. Teale, Reyes and Pryce nodded along, and the younger lads, still stinging from the United defeat, listened harder than they ever had.

"Last time, you found out what you can’t do," Saint told them. "This time, show me what you can."

"Ron Rossiter is an excellent manager," Saint told the cameras as he brought his squad to the stadium.

"Hang on, why does that sound so familiar?" a reporter said. Saint had said almost exactly the same thing before United.

"Damn it, he’s going to flatter us like this every week from now on." As the press watched Saint lead his players onto the coach, their faces grew longer and longer.

Given everything they knew about him, he was quite capable of it.

Rossiter, after hearing what Saint had said, responded in almost the same words. He didn’t reach out an arm or smile any wider, either, because he had no confidence of winning, and he was still haunted by the memory of dropped points and the way the press had made him pay for them. He didn’t want to be remembered by the media for that.

So the build-up was quite peaceful. Both managers lavished praise on their opponent, and the pre-match interviews were so harmonious they were almost dull.

That, naturally, was only the surface. In private, when each man went back to face his own dressing room, it would be a very different picture.

On the opening day, Villa had met United. Derby’s first opponent had been Everton, a proud club that was struggling for talent and trapped in a difficult spell. Even so, a broken ship still has three spikes, and Everton’s strength was more than a newly promoted side could easily shake, let alone one led by Rossiter.

That was why this match mattered so much to both clubs. It was a chance to land the first win of the season, and promoted sides are always compared with each other.

Neither man wanted to be the one who failed to beat a fellow promoted side. Each of them wanted to stand on the other’s shoulders to taste a first Premier League victory.