Chapter 69: Championship Contender

"Enjoying yourselves criticising my players?" In the post-match interview, the corner of Saint’s mouth curled, somewhere between pride and open mockery, his eyes doing most of the talking.

"Absolute bastard." More than one reporter’s expression soured on the spot. They’d known better than to expect anything gracious from him after a 6-0 win, but knowing it didn’t make it sting any less.

There wasn’t much they could do about it, either. Saint had made that clear from his very first press conference, and nothing about winning had softened him. If anything, victory only sharpened the edge.

The strange truth was that both sides needed each other by this point, whether either wanted to admit it. The press needed a story, a flashpoint, something worth clicking on. Saint needed the exposure, and Villa needed the eyeballs that came with it.

Mutual hostility, mutual benefit; an arrangement built entirely on spite and utility rather than anything resembling goodwill.

Saint wasn’t ever going to bow his head to that pack, not publicly. But behind the sharp remarks, there was a genuine flicker of concern on his face as he walked away from the podium, because he knew exactly what this win meant for his own dressing room’s ego problem.

Going the other way; leaning into the hype rather than fighting it, had cut both ways, and Saint knew it better than anyone. Beating Ipswich 6-0 had done wonders for Villa on the pitch.

In the table, the result had real consequences. Villa had leapfrogged both Rotherham and Ipswich outright. Elsewhere that same round, Rotherham had stumbled to a draw against a side already safely clear of the relegation zone, and even Reading, who’d looked so sharp earlier in the season, had drawn as well.

Which meant Villa hadn’t just overtaken two direct rivals. They’d closed the gap on everyone still above them in the process.

"The Wolf Has Arrived," read one national back page.

Villa had finally shown their teeth. Eight wins and a draw across this remarkable run, and the club hadn’t just caught the leading pack, they’d officially entered the title conversation.

The next day brought exactly the kind of coverage Saint had been dreading. Six games left in the season, and Villa now sat within genuine touching distance of the summit, the kind of gap that gets closed in a matter of weeks if form holds.

"Championship Contenders... Villa" ran across the Midlands Sports Gazette, and beyond it too. The wider national press, having spent two months hunting for a crack in Saint’s armour, had suddenly found a far juicier angle: the once-doomed club now genuinely chasing the title itself.

Under ordinary circumstances, that kind of external pressure might have sharpened a squad, given them something concrete to chase, another gear to find.

But this squad had already been softened by weeks of flattering coverage aimed squarely at its younger players. Layer a title race on top of that, and the effect was closer to poison than motivation. Villa’s players had started to take the climb for granted, treating the gap to the top as something that would simply close itself.

Arrogance. Complacency. And worse than either, the early edges of genuine contempt, the sense that no opponent left on the fixture list was worth taking seriously anymore.

Handled badly, that mentality wouldn’t just cost Villa a title push. It could cost them the automatic promotion spots entirely, or even a top-six finish outright.

Not that Saint’s private worries counted for much once the press had gotten hold of the story. Whitlock, watching the coverage build week after week, was clearly no longer able to sit back and treat this as simply a good season.

The Championship title itself wasn’t the Premier League, not remotely, but Villa hadn’t lifted anything worth calling silverware in years, and the fanbase’s hunger for it had been building quietly the whole campaign.

"I’ll do everything I can." Whitlock didn’t look especially satisfied with that answer, but there wasn’t much else to be extracted from Saint, not without looking genuinely unreasonable about it.

As it turned out, Saint’s private concerns weren’t misplaced at all. Round thirty-three brought Villa’s next fixture; away at Blackpool, second-bottom of the table, and the performance that followed proved every worry justified.

Villa won the match in the end, but it was an ugly, undeserved kind of win. Without Alves producing a genuinely brilliant late save, this run could easily have ended right there.

From the opening whistle, Villa’s body language told the whole story; sloppy, indifferent, treating Saint’s pre-match instructions as background noise rather than a plan.

Blackpool, by any measure, were the worst side left in this division. Going into round thirty-two, they’d won just four matches all season, sitting bottom with twenty-two points and already, for all practical purposes, relegated with six games still to play.

And yet Villa never once looked comfortable against them. Worse, it was Blackpool who broke the deadlock first.

Thirtieth minute, and their full-back made a driving run into the box, no Villa defender within ten yards of him, and finished cleanly past Pentland.

Villa’s eventual win owed more to fortune than anything resembling control. Blackpool actually out-shot them across the ninety minutes, hitting the woodwork three separate times.

Whatever luck Blackpool had spent, it seemed to run out exactly when Villa needed it most. Villa’s equaliser was pure comedy by comparison.

Okoro’s speculative effort had nothing on it; no real pace, no angle, no genuine threat behind it at all.

And yet, miraculously, as Blackpool’s keeper set himself for an easy save, one of his own defenders arrived at the worst possible moment, a knee clipping the ball just enough to send it spinning past him into the net.

The winner came with its own slice of fortune too. Eightieth minute, and Saint made a substitution that told its own story; Rami off, replaced by Alves, purely because his performance simply hadn’t been good enough on the day.

Substituting a defender mid-match against opposition this weak sends a very clear message: the manager’s patience has run out, and only a genuinely poor showing forces that kind of change against a side this far below Villa in quality.

Eighty-eighth minute, and Villa won a corner. Alves rose highest in the box and got a head on it; under real pressure from a marking defender, the power was there, but the angle wasn’t, and the header cannoned off the crossbar.

Whatever football gods had abandoned Blackpool all afternoon decided to have one final laugh at their expense. The rebound dropped straight down onto their own goalkeeper’s back and rolled agonisingly over the line.