They had reached the far edge of the training pitch. Gerrard stopped, and Julien stopped beside him, both of them were looking out across the empty ground for a moment before Gerrard continued.
"The thing I want you to understand about this derby," He said, "is that it is not like other rivalries. Glasgow, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Rome—those derbies carry religion, class, politics, histories of violence that go back centuries and extend well beyond anything that happens on a football pitch. Here it is different."
He considered how to explain the specific texture of it. "There are families in this city where the father has been Liverpool his entire life and the son has been Everton his entire life, and they sit in the same living room and watch the derby together and they are still family when the final whistle goes. It is not unusual. It happens in house after house across this city."
He let that picture form before continuing.
"But do not make the mistake of thinking that means it is soft. On the pitch—at Goodison, at Anfield—it has always been absolutely ferocious. More red cards than any other derby in the history of the Premier League. Challenges that have ended careers. It has atmosphere that can physically shake someone who is not prepared for it."
He paused. "Ronnie Whelan played his first Merseyside Derby in November 1979 and talked about it for the rest of his playing days. An Everton player tackled him so hard in the first twenty minutes that he needed five stitches in his shin when he came off. He said he carried the scar for the rest of his life and considered it a souvenir of the occasion."
Gerrard shaking his head continued. "He also said that in the days before the match, it was impossible to go anywhere in the city without hearing people talking about nothing else. The anticipation was unavoidable. He said he'd never felt anything like it and he had absolutely no idea what was coming."
Julien absorbed the peculiar double nature of the whole thing, the warmth and the violence sharing the same geography, the families divided by color sitting in the same living rooms, the funerals where both anthems played back-to-back.
He had lived in England long enough to understand the general shape of football passion here, but this was something with more specific depth to it.
"And there's more to it than just the competition," Gerrard continued. "These two clubs have been through things together that go beyond football."
He spoke about Heysel—1985, the European Cup Final, the stadium disaster that killed thirty-nine people before a ball had been kicked.
UEFA's response was to ban all English clubs from European competition for five years. The consequence for Everton was particularly bitter—they had just won the First Division title that season, which meant they should have been competing in the following year's European Cup.
Because of what happened at Heysel, at a match involving Liverpool fans, Everton completely lost that chance. Some Everton fans never fully forgave it, and for a period the relationship between the two sets of supporters dropped to its lowest point in the rivalry's history.
But then came Hillsborough, four years later—1989, the FA Cup semi-final, ninety-six Liverpool fans were crushed to death in the disaster at Sheffield Wednesday's ground.
And in the aftermath of that tragedy, the response from Everton fans was something else.
They stood alongside Liverpool. They joined the campaign against The Sun newspaper, which had published fabricated stories blaming Liverpool fans for their own deaths. They sent messages of condolence and support, publicly and repeatedly, and the relationship between the two halves of the city changed again, toward something that had been tested by catastrophe and had, in its own complicated way, held.
The gestures had continued down the years. In the 2006 derby at Anfield, with Liverpool named European Capital of Culture for 2008, both Gerrard and Everton's Phil Neville wore shirts with the number eight printed on the back to mark the occasion.
In 2007, an eleven-year-old Everton fan named Rhys Jones had been shot and killed in a senseless act of street violence in Croxteth. Liverpool invited Rhys's parents and his brother to Anfield as guests for a European fixture and before You'll Never Walk Alone played, the club played Z-Cars instead, Everton's anthem, for the first time in Anfield's history.
The ground stood in complete silence for it.
And the last year, the independent report into the Hillsborough disaster had finally been published, conclusively establishing the truth of what had happened and clearing Liverpool fans of the blame that had been falsely assigned to them for over two decades.
When Everton played their next home league match, before the kickoff, two ball boys walked out of the tunnel together—one wearing an Everton shirt, one wearing a Liverpool shirt, the numbers on their backs reading nine and six to represent the ninety-six who had died.
The stadium announcer at Goodison Park read out all ninety-six names. The Everton fans stood in silence for every one of them.
"That is the relationship," Gerrard said, after he had told all of it.
"On the pitch, both clubs go at each other with everything they have for ninety minutes and there is no mercy in it and there never has been. But when the whistle goes, they stand together. They always have."
He paused for a while. "Liverpool people and Everton people will never be friends in the way that fans of other clubs can be friends with their rivals. They will never sit down together over a drink and make light of it.
But the Merseyside Derby has never been purely about hatred. There is something else in it—something that comes from sharing the same streets and the same history and the same tragedies. It doesn't cancel out the rivalry. It just means the rivalry has a different quality to it than most people outside this city ever understand."
He looked at Julien directly. "Their fans will boo me from the first minute I touch the ball at Goodison. That is simply what happens, and I made my peace with it years ago.
After the last few weeks with France, the coverage, and everything—I would expect you'll get some of that too. Be ready for it. It is not personal. It is Goodison."
Julien nodded.
"In this city," Gerrard said finally, "you either put on the blue or you stay true to the red. That has always been true. It will always be true."
He held Julien's gaze. "Go out there and fight for the red."
There was something Julien did not say in response. Something the club doctor had let slip during the session, it was a brief, careless remark, clearly not intended for Julien's ears, but lodged now in his mind.
Gerrard had played through the entire international window on injections.
A pain-blocking shot administered to the injury site before matches and training, silencing the body's signals long enough to allow him to perform at the level required while the underlying damage continued unresolved beneath the temporary numbness.
He would play the derby on injections too.
Julien had been around professional football long enough to understand exactly what that meant and what it cost.
The injection was not a treatment—it healed nothing. It was a transaction: you borrowed against your body's future to fund your presence in the present, and eventually, without question, the debt came due.
For a player in the middle of his career, in his mid-twenties with years still ahead of him, it was a risk that could be weighed and managed. For a player in the final chapter of his career, it was something else.
The question was never whether the pain was there. The question was always whether the will to play through it was stronger than the pain itself, and for Gerrard, anyone who had watched him play already knew the answer.
Julien said nothing. It was not his to say or to share. But he thought about it as he walked back toward the changing rooms.
The courage of a man filling himself with temporary numbness and then walking out at Goodison Park in front of sixty thousand people to compete at the highest level of club football, without anyone in those stands having any idea of the full cost of his presence on that pitch.
That too was part of what it meant to pull on the red shirt.
That too was the game, in its fullest and most cruel sense.
Out in the city itself, Merseyside had already moved well past anticipation and arrived somewhere closer to the feeling that precedes ceremony—that specific, humming tone like it knows something significant is about to happen and has decided to inhabit the feeling of waiting for it.
The streets around both grounds wore their colors without any self-consciousness.
Scarves in shop windows. Arguments at bus stops that were half-genuine and half-ritual, the same points rehearsed between the same pairs of people who had been rehearsing them across the same bus routes for years, the way the city always did in derby week, the argument itself was functioning as a kind of tradition that both sides participated in regardless of whether they expected to change the other's mind.
Pubs were filling steadily from lunchtime ahead with a crowd noise.
The blue half of the city had things to say.
"Klopp's high-press doesn't work at Goodison—never has. Our defensive structure handles it. Come and find out."
"Home advantage. That's our foundation and we're building on it Saturday."
"One result. One. We take Liverpool down."
The red half answered.
"We have Julien. What exactly is the concern? We haven't lost a Merseyside derby in over a year—seven wins, five draws, one defeat across the last thirteen in the league. We keep winning."
"One point behind Arsenal. This is where title races are decided. Three points. Don't overthink it."
The media, naturally, had no intention of remaining on the periphery of any of this.
The Liverpool Echo argued that the tactical collision between Klopp's high-pressing system and Everton's compact, disciplined shape would determine the outcome of the match before any individual moment of quality had a chance to intervene—that the contest between the two defensive and pressing philosophies was itself the story, and that whichever system imposed itself on the other in the opening twenty minutes would likely hold the advantage for the remainder.
The Times identified a specific duel as the match within the match: Julien against Baines. The free forward who had just spent an international window announcing himself on the largest possible stage, against the attacking full-back who had quietly been one of the two or three most effective defenders in the league for the better part of three seasons. A contest worth watching entirely on its own terms, the paper argued, regardless of everything surrounding it.
Sky Sports ran the numbers directly: a Liverpool win would close the gap on the summit and potentially push them to the top of the table depending on other results. An Everton win, and the Blues currently sitting on twenty points to Liverpool's twenty-two would leapfrog their rivals.
This was a genuine six-pointer, the kind that still shows up in end-of-season calculations.
The Mirror, cutting cleanly through all the tactical analysis and statistical modelling: that for the people who had grown up living this derby, none of the above particularly mattered when the whistle went.
The table, the tactical systems, the individual matchups all of it was context, background noise surrounding the thing itself. The thing itself was the oldest fixture in the city. Red against blue. Belief against belief.
The annual public reckoning of a rivalry that had been running since before both clubs shared the same founding manager and neither of them had thought to wonder what that might eventually mean.
The waiting, as it always was before something that mattered, felt very long.
But time is always fair.
The 22nd arrived.
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