The Saint Maddox Odyssey

Jasper’s sudden reappearance solved a genuinely useful problem for Saint: representation, both for himself and, more urgently, for his players.

Villa’s squad wasn’t exactly swimming in big-name agents circling for business. Rocher, Lavelle, and Rami; the three Saint had personally brought over, still had no formal representation at all, despite genuine interest building around at least one of them, Rocher especially.

Saint trusted Jasper for a simple reason: when they’d first met at university, Saint had been nobody worth mentioning; no money, no name, nothing an ambitious operator would normally bother with.

Jasper had approached him anyway, purely on the strength of the friendship itself. That kind of history counted for something.

Within a day of their reunion, England had a new licensed football agency, and its very first client was Saint himself.

The client list grew quickly after that. Rocher, Lavelle, and Rami all signed with Jasper within the week, and with representation now in place, the question of renewing their Villa contracts moved firmly onto the agenda.

Jasper wasted no time working the Villa boardroom either; Sallow, specifically, given how highly the club rated Rocher’s performances by now.

Saint’s own contract situation could wait. Right now, simply holding onto the job mattered more than negotiating better terms; any real conversation about a new deal would have to wait until the season’s end at the earliest.

Riding the momentum of two straight wins, Villa turned their attention to round twenty-six. The opponent wasn’t a heavyweight, but the fixture carried real significance; a genuine six-pointer against a team occupying the position directly below them.

Two wins had lifted Villa comfortably clear of Derby in the table, up to eleventh with thirty-two points. This round’s opponent, Rotherham United, sat twelfth, two points adrift. Lose this one, and Villa risked slipping straight back into the bottom half; possibly further than that.

Villa still sat a safe distance clear of the drop zone, but the gap separating mid-table from real trouble remained thin; Rotherham, Reading, and Leeds were all bunched within a single result of each other.

Rotherham weren’t a strong side on paper, but one name in their squad had genuinely caught Saint’s attention: Andrew Barzley, a young centre-back with real long-term promise.

Barzley was raw, still finding his feet physically, but Saint could see the shape of something excellent underneath it; sharp defensive instincts, genuinely good positional awareness, calm reading of the game well beyond his experience level.

Watching him operate, Saint found himself thinking Villa’s own back line was missing exactly this profile of player.

Loach’s attacking instincts, brilliant as they were in flashes, came at a real defensive cost. Rami had genuine long-term talent but was still too young and raw to trust with senior Championship minutes consistently.

Not that any of this mattered practically. The transfer window was months away, and nothing Saint wanted right now could actually happen before the season ended.

He filed Barzley away mentally regardless, with a quiet private note of regret; a player this promising, at a club this size, wasn’t likely to stay available for long once bigger clubs came calling after the season.

Saint pushed the thought aside. Right now, the only thing that actually mattered was winning this match.

”Shot... Delgado, denied again! Barzley reads that one perfectly.” Villa’s front line had been reshuffled once more for this fixture, with Delgado finally starting after weeks out of the picture entirely.

Twenty minutes gone, and Delgado had looked genuinely lively throughout, without quite finding the finishing touch to show for it yet.

The defensive setup had shifted too; Alves had come in for Peña at right-back, while the midfield stayed unchanged from the previous match.

Lavelle remained on the bench. Despite a genuinely impressive cameo the week before, Saint wanted to bring him along gradually rather than throw him straight into another start.

Villa held the balance of possession, but Rotherham weren’t rolling over quietly. Twenty-fifth minute, and they produced their best spell of the match.

A winger broke down the flank and delivered a dangerous ball into the box, met by a towering Bosnian striker whose header forced Pentland into a smart save, tipping it clear at full stretch.

”Loach!” A sharp shout came immediately from Villa’s technical area.

”Ha... looks like the manager’s not happy with something there.” Cameras swung straight to the touchline.

Saint had specifically tasked Loach with marking Rotherham’s towering striker for this match; but exactly as that striker rose for the header, Loach had drifted forward, well outside his own box, chasing an attacking impulse rather than holding his defensive line.

Rotherham’s striker stood at six foot six, and given the rest of Villa’s back line, Loach was genuinely the only player physically equipped to deal with an aerial threat that size.

Play restarted quickly, and after Saint’s shout, Loach stuck close to his man for the rest of the half, which went some way toward neutralising Rotherham’s central attacking threat.

Rotherham’s whole game plan clearly revolved around exactly this: using their striker’s height to bypass midfield entirely and go long and direct.

Villa, by contrast, played almost everything through the feet. Delgado and Okoro both stood well over six feet themselves, but neither played remotely like a target man; both were genuinely comfortable technicians, and combined with Rocher and Whitfield feeding them from deeper positions, Villa’s attack ran almost entirely on technical quality rather than physicality.

The opening goal proved exactly that. Conlan drove forward with the ball, drawing two defenders toward him before releasing it to Whitfield.

Whitfield laid it off to Rocher, and the two combined in a rapid one-two, with Okoro and Delgado both making runs that dragged Rotherham’s back line completely out of shape.

”GOOOOOOOOOAL! Thirty-fifth minute, and Villa finally break the deadlock!”

”Beautiful team goal... genuinely difficult to pick out a single player responsible, that’s a full unit move, start to finish.”

”Rocher! Two goals in as many games now... and he’s setting records for this club doing it.”

Off the back of Whitfield’s assist, Rocher had driven into the box, and facing Rotherham’s onrushing goalkeeper, he’d gone up on his toes and buried it low, hard, into the corner.