The moment the two teams emerged from the mouth of the tunnel, Goodison Park detonated.
The sound arrived before the light did or so it seemed.
A wall of noise so dense and instant that for a split second it was the only thing that existed. Then the grey afternoon sky opened up above them, and beneath it, a blue wave broke across every stand simultaneously.
Forty thousand Everton supporters rose as one surging up, scarves snapping above their heads, the terraces were dissolving into a heaving, churning ocean of blue and white.
The opening bars of Z-Cars rang out across the public address system and the crowd swallowed it whole, singing in unison, forty thousand voices were pressing the notes into the clouds.
Banners unfurled across the upper tiers, enormous hand-painted sheets reading:
"ONCE BLUE, ALWAYS BLUE!"
"DEFEND GOODISON!"
"SEND THE REDS BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM!"
The drapes rippled and snapped in the cold air like battle standards.
In the tight pocket of the away end hemmed in on all sides by hostile blue, Liverpool's travelling supporters stood their ground. And they began to sing.
"You'll Never Walk Alone."
The hymn rose above the jeers, fragile and unbreakable at the same time carried by a few hundred voices into a space occupied by tens of thousands who wished them silent.
As Julien walked out through the column of players and into the full force of the Goodison atmosphere, both long stands erupted again.
The boos were not merely noise, they were specific, targeted, aimed directly at him who had scored nineteen goals in eleven league games and whom Everton's fans had decided with the derby-day conviction that they absolutely could not afford to like.
"Get out of Goodison!"
"You won't win today!"
Some fans waved him off with long sweeps of the arm, gestures of supreme, performative dismissal that showed without any ambiguity, precisely what they thought of his presence on their ground.
Gerrard, walking at the head of the column, absorbed the first and most concentrated blast of that hostility without altering his expression by a single degree.
Julien, in the middle of the line, heard the noise as though it were ambient sound. His eyes moved calmly across the stands.
Both teams took their positions. The coin had been tossed. Everton would begin.
Julien walked to his station and placed one foot on the turf, feeling the give of the pitch beneath his boot.
He was aware of something. It was the accumulated significance of a place that carries more history in its soil than most people live in a lifetime.
Because Goodison Park is not merely a football ground. It is also, in a very real and literal sense, a burial place.
Beneath the pitch, beneath the tended grass over which footballers have run and tumbled and celebrated for over a century lie the ashes of countless devoted Everton fans.
Men and women who worshipped this club through the whole span of their lives and asked, as their final request, to remain here in death as they had been in life: under this sky, beside this pitch, inside these walls.
Many believed, some only half-jokingly, but with a stubbornness that showed genuine faith that this was partly why Everton had not been relegated from the top division since 1954. That the fans watched over them still.
Between Goodison and Anfield lies Anfield Cemetery, one of Liverpool's great municipal burial grounds, broad and well-maintained, occupying the land between the two stadiums as a kind of neutral territory of the dead.
But many of the fans buried beneath Goodison's pitch had made their wishes known clearly. They would not rest in the cemetery, however peaceful. They would rest here, under the turf with their club.
Along the edge of the Goodison terracing, cut from stone that runs beneath the lower stands, names are etched, those deemed, in the long memory of the club, to have been among the truest supporters, the most legendary devotees.
Only they earn a place along that edge. It is an honor without equivalent in any other currency. It is what Everton fans, and football fans across England, are perhaps most proud of—this culture of belonging.
England gave football to the world. And with it, this.
BOOM
BOOM-BOOM.
The stadium's sound system drove two bass pulses through the air, snapping Julien back to the present with the precision of a slap. The Liverpool players gathered in a tight circle at the center spot, arms draped over shoulders, foreheads almost touching.
"Liverpool!!"
The shout was raw and unified. They broke apart spread across the pitch to their positions.
Oliver raised the whistle to his lips, glanced at his watch. It was one o'clock precisely.
PHEEP!
The Everton fans began chanting:
"Come all ye faithful,
Royal Blue and faithful,
Come ye, come ye to Goodison Park.
Come and behold them,
The pride of our city,
The People's Club we all adore.
O come let us sing for Everton,
O come let us sing for Everton,
O come let us sing for Everton,
The Royal Blue!
Sing, choirs of Goodison,
Sing in exultation,
Sing all ye Blues who stand and roar.
Toffees eternal,
Forever and always,
Everton, we love you more!"
The stadium roared back into life.
Everton took the kick-off without aggression. There was intelligence in their caution, they had studied Klopp's high press, understood its demands, knew that the worst thing they could do was to meet Liverpool's intensity with their own.
Instead, they settled into a patient rhythm, holding the ball carefully in their own half, recycling short passes between the central defenders and the deeper midfielders, coaxing Liverpool's press forward and up searching for the gap that would open behind the advancing red line.
Liverpool obliged. The press arrived exactly as Everton anticipated, and Klopp's players executed it with urgency.
Luis Suárez and Daniel Sturridge pushed high and persistently, their constant movement was denying Everton's backline a moment of comfort; Julien covered both the left channel and the central lanes simultaneously, keeping close enough to Barry's distribution options to limit his vision; Henderson's engine drove him toward the ball carrier.
In the midfield, Gerrard and Kanté had dropped deeper, forming a compact defensive screen across the center of the pitch, deliberately obstructing the route through the middle, funneling Everton's build-up toward the flanks where, isolated from support, their attackers would have less room to damage.
For a time, the shape held. Everton cycled the ball. Liverpool pressed.
The tempo of the opening exchanges was high and persistent, two sets of players were feeling the edges of each other's structure, looking for the fault line.
Then Everton found it.
Gareth Barry experienced, technically disciplined in the way that only veteran midfielders can be shook off Henderson's press with a smart half-turn and did something unexpected. Rather than continuing the short circulation of the ball, he drove a direct, weighted long ball over Liverpool's advancing line, dropping it precisely into the right channel where Kevin Mirallas was already beginning his run.
Mirallas brought it down cleanly, his first touch killed the pace of the ball and settled it perfectly for movement. Two sharp, efficient touches to adjust his body angle, and then with Jon Flanagan caught in recovery, scrambling desperately to close the space Mirallas rolled a firm, low first-time cross across the face of Goodison's penalty area.
Nikica Jelavić was already arriving at the near post, reading the delivery, leaning into the movement.
Goodison Park surged to its feet in a single deafening movement. The noise reached a register that had physical presence, it pressed against the chest, constricted the throat.
The roof of the stadium felt, for one instant, genuinely at risk of detachment.
But Daniel Agger was already moving.
The Danish center-back had read the cross from the moment Mirallas' foot connected with the ball, not a reactive read, but a predictive one. He stepped across Jelavić's line at precisely the right moment and cut the ball away cleanly.
A clean intervention. The danger was gone.
The roar turned to a groan. Forty thousand people exhaled simultaneously. It was the sound of an entire stadium releasing a breath.
Jelavić turned away from the goal, dropping his chin toward his chest. He stared at the turf for a moment looking frustrated.
Julien watched him briefly.
Before he could think further, Liverpool's counter-attack was already moving.
Klopp's doctrine, instilled in the weeks since his arrival, was simple in principle and demanding in execution: fast to defend, immediately fast to attack.
The transition from one to the other was not meant to be a gear-change. It was meant to be seamless an unbroken current of intensity that never allowed the opposition time to reset.
Gerrard received the ball deep in his own half, took one touch to control it, and within perhaps a second and a half of Agger's intervention drove a flat, incisive pass down the length of the pitch.
A rapid, precisely weighted ground ball that arrived at Suárez's feet.
Suárez took it as the pivot point, the conductor of the move. He didn't hold it. He didn't look. He simply controlled and laid it off first-time rolling the ball into the path of Julien, who was arriving at pace from deep, timing his run to meet the ball in full stride without a single wasted movement.
What Julien did next took perhaps seven-tenths of a second from the moment the ball left Suárez's foot.
He didn't break stride.
He didn't set his feet.
He didn't look up to assess angles or check the goalkeeper's position.
He simply met the ball on the volley, right foot, full swing, all the accumulated momentum of his run was channeled through the contact.
THUD.
The sound of the strike cut through the noise of Goodison Park.
CLANG.
The ball cannoned into the post with the ringing of a struck bell, rebounding hard off the upright and back into the chaos of the six-yard box.
Sylvain Distin, Everton's towering center-back, threw himself at the loose ball and hacked it clear for a corner, scrambling it away.
Goodison Park fell silent.
For a second, forty thousand people simply stared. Several stood with their hands on the tops of their heads, eyes fixed on the replay board above the far end as it began to run the strike back in slow motion.
Some had not quite recovered. They were still processing what they had nearly seen.
On the pitch, Julien shook his head once and turned to find Suárez, holding out a firm thumbs-up. The layoff had been perfect. The run had been perfect. The connection had been as true as he could manage at full pace with no time to set his feet, driving off the half-turn in one continuous movement.
There was only one honest explanation for why the ball hadn't gone in. Howard had got to it. The faintest, most minimal brush of a glove, it was barely a touch, really, but enough to redirect the ball's trajectory by the fraction of a degree that made the difference between the corner of the net and the inside of the pole.
Klopp, on the touchline, had been absolutely certain.
His arms were already rising in celebration before the ball struck the post. He caught himself mid-gesture as the clang registered.
Both hands went to his face. He pressed them flat against his cheeks and held them there, head bowing forward over the technical area line, breathing through the non-goal.
Martin Tyler's voice, slow and urgent and precise, filled the broadcast feed:
"Incredible! Look at that shot! Julien surges in from the center without hesitation, volleys it on the half-turn—sheer power! Agonizingly close. But what a statement from the man who has scored nineteen goals in eleven Premier League appearances to lead the top scorers' chart!
The speed of connection, the precision under pressure, this is the instinct of a world-class striker, laid bare for the first time in a Merseyside Derby.
On the slow-motion replay, we can see that Howard got a crucial touch, without it, that ball was in.
And it is worth taking a moment to recognize Tim Howard. This is his 272nd Premier League start for Everton surpassing Unsworth to set a new club record. The American has earned every game of that record, and he has just reminded us exactly why: a reflex save that may well have preserved Everton's opening here today.
Julien did everything right. So did Howard."
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