Chapter 62: Sixth in the Relegation Fight

"Boss seems in a good mood today," Okoro murmured to Rocher on the team bus heading to the stadium.

"Mate, have you not seen the news this morning?" Rocher glanced toward the front of the bus, where Saint sat, before answering.

"Bit behind on it today." Checking the morning headlines had become something of a ritual for the squad since the season started.

"Boss’s girlfriend’s officially moved in with him," Rocher said quietly, leaning closer.

"Ah—" Okoro’s expression shifted immediately, the universal look one man gives another when he understands exactly what that means.

The exchange didn’t last long. The bus pulled up to Villa Park shortly after, and attention shifted straight back to the match ahead.

Saint’s mind was on the same fixture, if for slightly different reasons. Barnsley’s weak squad made this look like a genuinely straightforward opportunity to keep climbing the table, and Grace was coming to watch in person for the first time.

"Ooh... look who’s just walked in, Saint Maddox’s other half, making her Villa Park debut." Grace’s arrival got picked up by the cameras almost immediately.

A wave of genuine cheering followed, echoing round the stands. Whatever the tabloids had tried to make of it, Villa’s own supporters had clearly settled on full-throated approval; Grace, as Saint’s partner, had earned a warm welcome in her own right.

This week had been a genuinely strange one for Grace, her name had spread across the country’s entertainment and sports press alike at a pace she’d never come close to experiencing in her own modelling career.

"Genuinely stunning, no wonder she caught Saint’s eye," one commentator noted, watching the coverage cut to her in the stands. Her presence there did nothing but add fuel to a story that had already dominated the news cycle for a week straight.

"I’d wager Villa’s young manager has his mind elsewhere entirely today," Casapa said, right on cue.

Casapa’s own standing among Villa supporters had taken a genuine hit lately; once considered second only to Curtis among the club’s broadcast voices, his relentless, increasingly personal criticism of Saint had worn thin with most of the fanbase, leaving him closer to the least popular voice on the channel these days.

"This is exactly the moment for us," Barnsley’s own coaching staff reportedly believed, going into the match; the theory being that a distracted manager, fresh off a week of tabloid chaos, made for an easier afternoon.

Whatever Barnsley thought about Grace being a distraction, she was no ordinary presence to have in the stands, a model with a genuinely promising career of her own, and someone who’d handled the sudden attention with considerably more composure than most people would manage.

"Grace, I genuinely think you and Saint are a perfect match," Jasper said, watching her chat easily with Sofia despite the crowd of cameras nearby, entirely unbothered by the attention.

Grace carried on the conversation without missing a beat, unfazed by any of it. Across the pitch, Saint had already finished his own pre-match preparations and was running through final instructions; no room, whatever anyone in the press wanted to believe, for any sense of complacency going into this one.

Barnsley genuinely weren’t a strong side, and Saint knew it from close study. As long as Villa treated the fixture with the seriousness it deserved, this shouldn’t be a difficult afternoon.

That read proved accurate. Villa didn’t break the deadlock until the thirtieth minute, but they’d controlled the match comprehensively from the opening whistle onward.

In the dressing room beforehand, Saint hadn’t needed to say much, the players understood the stakes without being told. Grace’s presence in the stands, and by extension Saint’s own public profile that week, meant losing this one would come with consequences well beyond the table.

So even setting Saint’s own instructions aside, this Villa squad had every reason of their own to take the match seriously, nobody fancied explaining a poor result with the manager’s girlfriend watching from the stands and half the country’s press already circling.

Twenty-ninth minute, and Villa produced exactly the kind of move that had defined this run; a clean interception, a long ball forward, and a clinical finish. Rocher squared it for Okoro rather than take the shot himself this time, and Okoro made no mistake, driving it home.

Villa’s control only grew from there. Before the half was out, they’d doubled the lead to 2–0.

The second goal belonged to Delgado, since Saint’s arrival, his form had genuinely caught fire in a way few could have predicted back at the start of the season.

Where the opener had come off a quick transition, this one showcased the other side of Villa’s game entirely; a patient, technical move through midfield, ending with a low cross that Delgado met first time.

Half-time arrived with Villa comfortably ahead, 2–0, and the mood in the dressing room correspondingly relaxed.

Neither side made changes at the break. Barnsley had nobody worth throwing on, and Villa, despite the cushion, kept their strongest available eleven out to start the second half, no sense inviting a comeback by making early changes for their own sake.

Villa’s first substitution didn’t come until the sixtieth minute, and by then the game had already been settled further; Whitfield came off, his job for the day thoroughly done.

Just before that change, Villa had added a third. This one came from a corner; Rocher’s delivery from the flank was initially cleared by Barnsley’s centre-back, but only as far as the edge of the box, where Villa worked it back in. Lavelle whipped a fresh ball into the box, and Loach rose above everyone to head it home.

3–0 stood as the final scoreline. Once Loach’s goal went in, Saint began rotating his starting eleven freely, and Barnsley’s own manager made several desperate changes of his own in response.

None of it mattered. Barnsley never once threatened Pentland’s goal, and the referee’s final whistle confirmed a comfortable, uneventful win for Villa.

Six wins and a draw across Saint’s tenure so far, the unbeaten run intact, and the win rate genuinely remarkable for a manager barely two months into the job. The post-match press conference, notably, was a far quieter affair than usual.

At the pre-match briefing, several of the faces who’d become fixtures at every Saint Maddox press conference simply hadn’t turned up. Where there’d once been dozens of reporters crowding every session, this time barely twenty showed, and half of those belonged to smaller regional outlets that had followed Saint’s story from the very beginning.

Small turnout or not, someone still managed to land a genuinely sharp question. Villa, almost without anyone fully clocking it, had climbed from one place off the relegation zone all the way into genuine promotion contention.

After this result, Villa’s points tally stood at seventy-seven, good enough for seventh in the table.

Ahead of them sat Ipswich on seventy-eight, Rotherham on seventy-nine, Millwall on eighty-one, Reading on eighty-two, and Derby still comfortably clear at the summit on eighty-five.

"Relegation’s still technically mathematically possible; we’re currently seventh, and that doesn’t guarantee safety on its own." Saint’s answer to the question about Villa’s trajectory was, on its face, entirely reasonable.

Technically true, too; with eight games remaining, seventy-seven points still left Villa within reach of trouble if results collapsed entirely. The gap to the drop zone had widened enormously since those early weeks, but mathematics is mathematics.

From the press’s perspective, though, the answer read as pure theatre; Saint giving the media exactly the kind of guarded, faux-cautious non-answer that had become his signature, and offering them nothing genuine to work with in return.