21 November.
Melwood Training Ground.
The morning sat low and grey over the Merseyside rooftops in the particular way of a Liverpool November with just a damp, settled heaviness that worked its way into your shoulders and stayed there.
Out on the training pitch, players moved in pairs and small groups through their warm-up laps, breath clouding in front of their faces, boots leaving soft imprints in turf that had held too much rain.
After the dispersal of the international window, bodies scattered across a dozen different countries, different climates, different pressures were reassembling at Melwood cautiously while finding their footing again after time apart.
The Merseyside Derby was in two days.
Klopp had told them before stretching even began that today would be light, recovery-focused, and rhythm-finding.
The World Cup play-offs had only concluded on the twentieth, and even the players who hadn't been involved in qualifying football had been playing international friendlies.
Three days between a qualifier and a derby.
The fixture calendar, as always, showed no particular interest in the human beings living inside it.
When the warm-up finished and the squad gathered for the formal session, Klopp opened with something that perceptibly shifted the room's energy before a ball had been kicked.
"Good morning. I have something good to tell you." He paused just long enough to enjoy having their full attention.
"Luis joins us back today. The club arranged a private flight from Uruguay—one less day of long-haul travel means one more day of rest before Saturday. He'll be here this afternoon."
There was no response for a while.
Uruguay to England was not a short journey under any circumstances, and for South American players based in the Premier League, the international calendar hauled out a physical cost that their European friends simply didn't face to the same degree.
The scheduling showed no interest in this disparity. Suárez arriving even slightly fresher than he would not have was a real variable—his presence alone would change Everton's defensive thinking, and against a hostile crowd at Goodison Park, every edge was worth protecting.
Julien processed the information and allowed himself one private, dry thought about the financial sort you had to be in to charter a transatlantic flight without a second thought.
Midway through the session, Klopp gathered the squad in a half-circle around the tactical board at the side of the pitch, uncapped his marker, and began sketching Everton's 4-2-3-1.
"Some of you know the Merseyside Derby better than I do—I'm not going to pretend else." He looked around the gathered faces. "But what I want everyone to understand, whether you've played this derby twenty times or you're about to play it for the first time: there are no weak opponents here. That's not something I say about every game. It's specifically true about this one."
He pressed his fingertip to the left side of the Everton shape.
"Leighton Baines. Three assists already this season and the campaign is barely into November. Left foot delivery that is among the best in the league accuracy, variety, the ability to bend it early or hold it late depending on where the runners are. Forward runs that arrive often enough and late enough to be a pattern you have to plan around."
He stepped back slightly and added the numbers for those who hadn't spent the week watching footage.
Last season, Baines had made forty-four appearances for Everton. Seven goals from left-back. But more significant than the goals was the chance creation: one hundred and sixteen across the campaign, more than any other player in Europe's five major leagues.
PFA Team of the Year for the second time. The only outfield player in the entire Premier League who had started and completed every single match of the 2012/13 season without missing a minute.
"He is not a full-back in the traditional sense of the word," Klopp said. "He is a midfielder who starts his runs from a defensive position. Treat him accordingly, or he will hurt you."
He turned to Henderson and Sterling, standing together at the edge of the group.
"Jordan, Raheem—I haven't made a final decision on the right side yet, but whoever plays there, the instruction is the same. When we are out of possession, you track Baines all the way to the ball. You do not let him receive it facing forward.
You position yourself between him and the central midfield passing lane so that his options are backward or sideways—you force him to recycle rather than progress. That buys Glen the time to recover his position. If Baines gets to the byline with his head up and time on the ball, the danger is instant and we will not be able to recover it."
Both players nodded.
"Central midfield—this is where we control this match or we lose it." The marker moved to the heart of the board.
"Their double pivot will almost certainly be Barry and McCarthy. Barry is their metronome with exceptional pass-completion rate, very good at managing tempo, always finding the angle that gives Everton the time and space to settle and build.
McCarthy is the destroyer—high energy, aggressive in the challenge, excellent at reading where a counter-attack is developing before it fully develops and putting himself in the way of it."
He looked directly at Kanté. "N'Golo, your job is Barry. You shadow him from the first minute. If he spends the afternoon playing backwards and sideways because you are in his eyeline every time he wants to receive, we have disrupted half of what Everton want to do before we have even started thinking about our own game."
Kanté gave a single, quiet nod.
"Steven, you run the tempo from our side, but you are also the cover when McCarthy pushes forward. N'Golo owns the Barry side of the midfield, you fill the spaces McCarthy vacates, and between the two of you we do not give them a clean transition."
Klopp continued through the forward line.
Jelavić as the physical anchor through the middle, five goals already this season, strong in the air, capable of holding position against most Premier League center-backs and drawing defenders out of shape; Mirallas as the secondary threat, the kind of player who could be quiet and peripheral for seventy minutes and then settle a game with a single run timed off the last defender's shoulder.
He went through the entire Everton shape position by position, every threat, every tendency, every specific adjustment required.
Then he turned to the attack, noting the one significant gap in his preparations.
"Suárez lands tonight. The club has arranged a private flight so he gets as much rest as possible before Saturday."
He said it straightforwardly, though everyone in the group understood what Suárez's presence in a derby fixture meant.
"He won't be in this session but he trains tomorrow. So today, Daniel and Julien—I want you running the attacking patterns without him. The movements need to be automatic by Saturday regardless of who is playing alongside you."
Julien had listened to the entire briefing with complete attention.
Klopp was never abstract, never theoretical and certainly did not plan a generic system fitted over an anonymous opponent. Every instruction was grounded in a specific player on the other side, a specific habit or physical tendency or positional pattern, and a specific solution designed for that particular problem.
It was a game plan built around this opposition, this week, these eleven men, and nothing else.
Klopp capped his marker and swept his gaze across the group one final time.
"Goodison is going to be loud in a way that some of you have not experienced before. Their crowd at home in a derby—I want to be direct about this: it is one of the most intense atmospheres in English football, and that is not an accident. It is a weapon they use consciously and effectively.
They will come out at full pace in the first ten minutes trying to use that energy, trying to put us on the back foot before we have settled. Our answer is to press higher and faster than they expect from the very first whistle. We take that atmosphere and we turn it against them by making them play under pressure before the crowd noise has had a chance to give them confidence."
He gave a pause to let them absorb his words. "But ninety minutes is a long time and we do not burn everything in the first twenty. We manage our energy intelligently. We stay disciplined when they push back. We make the right decisions in the moments that matter and we do not give them anything cheap."
He looked, briefly, at the league table that existed only in his mind. One point behind Arsenal.
"Three points. That is the objective. Everything else is noise."
After training, as the squad dispersed in ones and twos toward the changing rooms, Steven fell into step beside Julien and they walked together without any particular urgency, letting the rest of the group move ahead of them.
The Melwood pitches stretched out quiet and empty behind them, the November light was beginning to thin toward afternoon.
Gerrard had been thinking about this for a few days knowing Julien was about to play his first Merseyside Derby and that he was French, and that there were things about this fixture and this city that didn't transfer through briefing documents or tactical boards. Things that needed to be spoken out loud by someone who had lived them for twenty years.
"You know how the city divides," Gerrard began, not totally as a question. "Red or blue—there is no third option. No neutral ground, no position in between. In Liverpool, people choose one and they choose it for life, and usually they choose it because of who they were born to."
Julien listened without interrupting.
"What people outside Merseyside sometimes don't fully understand," Gerrard continued, "is that these were not always two separate clubs. Liverpool came from Everton. Literally."
He walked a few paces in silence, letting the words settle. "Everton were founded in 1878. From 1884, they used Anfield as their home ground. The man who owned the stadium, John Houlding was also involved in running the club at committee level, helping to manage its affairs.
For several years that arrangement worked well enough with arguments about rent, disputes over ownership of the ground itself, the relationship between Houlding and Everton's leadership was deteriorating until there was nothing left to salvage. Everton left Anfield and moved to Goodison Park. Houlding was left with a stadium, a lease, and no football club."
"So, he built one," Julien said.
"So, he built one. He originally wanted to call it Everton Athletic but the Football Association wouldn't allow it, it was too similar to the existing club's name. So, he named it after the city instead."
Gerrard gave a faint smile. "And here is the detail that most Liverpool fans would quietly prefer not to think about too carefully: to run this new club, Houlding went and hired William Barclay, the man who had been Everton's first-ever manager, to come and do the same job at Anfield. Which means that both clubs in their entire histories, from their very first days, share the same founding manager. The same man built both sides of this rivalry."
He paused to let that sit, then continued with another figure, Gary Ablett, a name that carried little weight to anyone outside Merseyside but considerable weight within it.
Ablett had played for both clubs across his career, and had won an FA Cup winner's medal with each of them becoming the only player in the entire history of the rivalry to have won the FA Cup with both Liverpool and Everton.
After retiring, he had managed Everton's under-17 side and Liverpool's reserve team. He had earned, over the course of a career spent moving between both sides of the city, the genuine affection of fans on both banks of the divide. It was a rare achievement that the city had acknowledged in its own way by calling him the Son of Merseyside.
Gerrard's voice became slightly more careful when he came to the part about Ablett dying the last year.
It was blood cancer at Forty-six years old. He didn't linger on it just said it briefly and moved through it.
"Dalglish was at the funeral. John Barnes. Roy Keane. A few of the rest of us." He walked another few steps in silence. "At the service, they played You'll Never Walk Alone—our anthem, the song Liverpool is known for around the world. But when the service ended, when people were making their way out, the music that played was Z-Cars."
Julien knew Z-Cars—the brass fanfare, the old television theme tune, the music that plays over the speakers at Goodison whenever Everton's players come out of the tunnel before a match.
"Everton's entrance music. At Gary Ablett's funeral. Because he belonged to both clubs, and both clubs belonged to him." Gerrard said it simply and left it where it was.
They walked in silence for a moment.
"He was a good man," Gerrard said eventually. "A genuinely good man."
"Merseyside will remember him," Julien said as it was the only right thing to say, and he meant it.
Gerrard nodded. Then, conscious of the somberness that had gathered over the conversation, he shifted his tone slightly to honor his memory without letting it press so hard that it closes the conversation down.
"Right—let me tell you something else about Ablett," He said, and his tone came up just enough.
"1994/95 FA Cup Final. Everton against Manchester United at Wembley. Paul Rideout scores in the thirtieth minute—a goal that turns out to be the only one of the match. Neville Southall, who was arguably the best goalkeeper in the world at that point, wents to keep a clean sheet for the remaining sixty minutes while United throw everything they have at him.
Everton win one-nil. It is the biggest moment the club had in the entire decade, their first major trophy in years." He glanced sideways at Julien.
"After the match, every journalist in the stadium is looking for Rideout, or for the Everton captain Dave Watson who had won the Man of the Match award. But half of them end up surrounding Ablett, because he is the story—he has just become the only man in history to win the FA Cup with both Liverpool and Everton. No one had ever done it. No one has done it since."
"What did he say when they surrounded him?" Julien said.
Gerrard's expression was blank. "The reporter asks him what it feels like to have won the Cup with both clubs across his career.
And Ablett looks straight at him and says: 'You could put it another way—I messed up the blue first, then I messed up the red. But I didn't do it alone. That belongs to everyone.'"
Julien just laughed softly at this answer.
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