Chapter 67: Poisoned Well

"Bloody hell! Reading were genuinely useless today." When the full-time whistle went and the wider results came through, Saint couldn’t help himself.

Both matches had kicked off at the same time and finished within minutes of each other. Saint had specifically told his players not to worry about Rotherham’s result during the match itself, to avoid any unnecessary distraction.

2–1... that was the final score between Rotherham and Reading, home win, played out at Rotherham’s own ground.

Compared to that tight scoreline, Villa’s own match had turned into a proper goal-fest. 2–1 at the break had become 4–2 by full time.

Villa added two more in the second half, both through substitutes; Whitmore and a young forward named Carus. Delgado had picked up a minor knock early in the second period, and rather than risk him, Saint brought Whitmore on as insurance.

Two minutes into his appearance, Villa won a free kick, and Whitmore stepped up immediately. The ball curled beautifully into the top corner, making it 3–1.

That third goal had essentially settled the match, and Saint made one further change shortly after, Carus replacing Whitfield, who’d already given the side everything he had that afternoon. Carus, fresh off the bench, got himself on the scoresheet almost immediately too.

Curtis found his usual reasons to keep the excitement flowing, even as Coventry managed a late consolation of their own, a goal that changed nothing about the eventual result.

Villa’s win, for all that, didn’t shift their league position at all. Rotherham had beaten Reading, and Ipswich had beaten a struggling relegation candidate elsewhere, every result falling exactly where it needed to for the table to stay locked.

The picture around the top six had genuinely tightened, though. With Reading’s defeat, third place had changed hands; Rotherham, Ipswich, and Villa were now bunched together, separated by the finest of margins.

This Championship season had turned genuinely brutal at the top. It wasn’t just the top six fighting for four promotion spots; behind them, Millwall, Leeds, Wednesday, and a resurgent Coventry side, freshly beaten today, all still harboured realistic hopes of their own.

Ten clubs, realistically, all with some genuine claim on those four places. Some had better odds than others, obviously, but the margin separating genuine contender from also-ran had shrunk to almost nothing this season.

Seven rounds remained. In the grand scheme of a full campaign, that isn’t much, but given how tight the table had become, seven rounds was more than enough time for the whole picture to shift completely.

"Boss... something’s not sitting right with the squad." Three days after the Coventry match, with the group back in for a normal training day, it was Cadman who raised it first.

"This lot are going to give me a heart attack before the season’s out," Saint said. He’d already noticed the same thing Cadman had, reading the papers daily had become a habit for both of them by now.

Since the Coventry win, every outlet had suddenly turned warm on Villa; genuinely complimentary coverage, front to back, Saint included.

His first reaction, honestly, had been satisfaction, two months of sparring with the national press, and here was proof they’d finally come round.

That read didn’t survive long, though. Reading the coverage more closely, the actual pattern became obvious fast. The hostility toward Saint personally hadn’t disappeared, it had simply redirected.

Because Saint himself hadn’t changed anything about his behaviour. And more tellingly, media turnout at the Coventry match itself had thinned out noticeably compared to previous weeks; fewer cameras, fewer reporters, less genuine interest in him personally.

Whatever warmth was showing up in print now, it wasn’t really aimed at Saint at all; the space actually being spent was on the players, particularly the younger ones.

"Bastards," Saint muttered, finally seeing the shape of it clearly.

A pivot, in other words. Saint himself had proven genuinely resistant to every angle the press had tried on him, public mockery, private pressure, nothing had cracked him. So the strategy had shifted to a softer target entirely.

Football media has a long, well-documented history of building players up specifically to knock them down later; sometimes out of genuine malice, more often simply because conflict and controversy generate readers far more reliably than steady praise ever does.

But this particular campaign, aimed squarely at Villa’s young core, had a deliberateness to it that went beyond the usual cycle. Two months of failing to land a real blow on Saint had clearly taught the press exactly where the actual pressure point sat.

They knew Saint too well by now to try that route again directly. So instead, they’d gone after the players; young, still building their sense of themselves, and considerably more vulnerable to flattery than their manager had ever been.

This winning run had already started shifting the squad’s collective mentality in subtle ways. Early wins had rebuilt broken confidence. This current streak, though, carried a different risk entirely, a creeping sense of entitlement starting to take root underneath the results.

Before, Saint’s own pressure and the promotion target had kept that instinct mostly in check. Now, with the press actively flattering individual players, that same instinct had real fuel to work with.

The younger players carried the most obvious risk. Rocher, Lavelle, and Rami were all more mature than most players their age, but that maturity didn’t make them immune to wanting recognition; if anything, it made the hunger for it sharper. And that hunger was exactly what the press coverage was engineered to exploit.

"What do we actually do about this?" Cadman asked, genuinely anxious. Villa were deep into the most important stretch of their season, and this was precisely the wrong moment for internal cracks to start showing.

"Nothing, really," Saint said, spreading his hands.

"Nothing?" Cadman clearly hadn’t expected that answer.

"Genuinely... there’s not much direct I can do about press coverage itself." Whatever Saint’s tone suggested, his expression stayed calm and unbothered underneath it.

"Paul... relax. If we can’t stop it happening, we deal with what it leaves behind instead. There’s an old saying where I’m from... when the road runs out, a bridge appears." Saint said it evenly, without a hint of real panic.

There’d been a stretch, early on, when Saint had felt exactly the same urgency Cadman was showing now. The Premier League mattered to him more than to anyone else at this club, arguably; everything he wanted out of this profession ran through getting there.

Saint wanted real success, wanted to be spoken of in the same breath as the game’s genuine greats; which meant, eventually, testing himself in the top flight against the managers who actually defined that conversation.

He was still young for this job, undeniably; too young, by most conventional standards. But that had never once felt like a reason to slow down. History had already been made once this season. Why not push further and make something even harder to repeat?

After a night spent turning the problem over properly, Saint had landed on something, not a guaranteed fix, but the best option he could actually see from where he stood.

Days passed, and the press campaign against Villa’s players continued unabated throughout. Watching the sheer persistence of it, Saint found himself with a grudging flicker of respect for their dedication, quickly buried under the more practical concern of what to actually do about it.

Through all of it, Saint kept working the problem quietly in the background, while preparing Villa’s next fixture in the meantime. Ipswich, this round’s opponent, weren’t a soft touch either; eighth in the table, only two points behind Villa’s own position.