As the ball crossed the line, Julien did not look back at the goal. He did not turn toward the teammates already breaking into sprints behind him. Instead, the instant the net moved, he was already running not toward the Liverpool corner, not toward Klopp on the touchline, but straight toward the heaving blue end of Goodison Park.
He ran until his boots hit the advertising hoardings at the edge of the pitch.
Then he stopped.
He turned his back to the goal he had just scored, on his celebrating teammates, on the away end erupting behind him. He turned instead to face the blue ocean directly—the packed, roaring, furious mass of forty thousand Everton fans who had spent the entire match making sure he understood he was unwelcome on their ground.
For one moment he simply stood there, looking out at them, taking it in without flinching.
Then, slowly—so slowly that it read as deliberate, as chosen, as the opposite of impulse, he spread his arms.
Both arms opened to their full span. It was a gesture that in another context might have read as surrender, as an appeal for calm, as an invitation to be embraced.
Here, ten meters from the hostile blue end of Goodison Park, it read as something altogether different. It read as ownership. He was not asking for their acceptance. He was claiming their fury, folding their hatred into the moment and making it part of what he possessed.
He was telling them without words that their noise was not an obstacle to his celebration but the very substance of it—that he had run toward them specifically because this was where the feeling was most concentrated, most worth standing.
The booing swelled immediately becoming louder, sharper, more concentrated than before.
It was 2–0!
Blue scarves were whipped furiously above the heads. Fans screamed at him. Some made sweeping gestures of dismissal. Others simply stood and stared with the hollow, helpless intensity of those who cannot quite believe what they are seeing.
Not a flicker of expression crossed Julien's face. His eyes, which had been open and steady, slowly closed. His head tilted back, chin rising toward the grey Merseyside sky. And at the very corners of his mouth—the faintest trace of a smile settled and stayed.
He just stood there.
Arms open. Chest out. Head back. Eyes closed. Still as stone in the middle of a storm that had been built specifically to move him.
The jeers continued to crash over him in waves, and he let them, the way a sea wall lets the tide crash against it, as though none of it could reach him.
This was not the celebration of a player performing for cameras or for the appreciation of teammates.
What he was embracing with those open arms was not applause or validation. It was the full weight of what he had just done—the right-flank burst that had left Jagielka turning in the wrong direction, the patience to wait for Howard's commitment before nudging the ball away from him, the cool composed side-foot into the empty net—all of it, executed in a derby, away from home, under forty thousand hostile pairs of eyes, at eighteen years and however many months.
He was holding all of it at once: the achievement and the atmosphere, the goal and the fury it had produced, the proof that the pressure had not touched him.
He was standing inside the fullest possible version of what this moment was.
The booing raged. His head stayed back. His arms stayed wide.
The cameras stayed locked on him, the broadcast was holding the close-up because nothing else in the stadium was worth looking at.
And the image that formed was this: a boy in a red shirt, arms flung to their full span, head tilted back, eyes closed, the faintest smile on his face, standing with the most audacious posture imaginable in front of an entire stadium's fury.
Then Suárez arrived, at full speed, and pulled him into a fierce embrace. Behind him came Gerrard, and behind Gerrard the rest of red shirts flooding around the figure at the hoardings, every face burning, every voice raised, the tight cluster of joy standing directly against the vast blue wall of displeasure behind it.
The cameras finally pulled back, panning to the stands, to the touchlines, to the Everton players still gathering themselves on the pitch.
But the image was already fixed in time: that split-second of a boy with his arms flung open, welcoming the hatred directed at him.
It was Julien's moment. The most vivid, most alive expression of youthful audacity.
Win or lose had nothing to do with it. This was about confidence. About an open, brazen self-confidence.
In the commentary booth, any remaining pretense of professional neutrality had been abandoned some time ago. Martin Tyler leaned into the microphone, took a breath, and let the words come.
"My God—JULIENNN!"
The name landed like a verdict.
"This is what the Premier League's top scorer looks like! An away derby, a stadium full of hostile blue, and he answers with a goal that had no answer — and then that celebration."
His voice carried genuine heat beneath its composure. "We've seen him do it before, but always facing his own fans. Not today. Today he turned and did it in front of the Everton fans!"
He paused for less than a second. "Brazen. Magnificent. Standing there with his arms wide open, head back, eyes closed, completely unmoved by the noise. As if the forty thousand people screaming at him were simply part of the scenery."
He shifted gear, moving from description into something more considered.
"This isn't arrogance—let's be clear about that, because the distinction matters. What we are watching is not a player taunting a crowd out of contempt. This is absolute self-belief. This is the spirit that only the very young can carry with them so freely, before experience teaches them caution, before they learn to protect themselves from exactly this kind of exposure."
He let that land. "And he has earned the right to celebrate like this. From the volley off the bar in the opening minutes to the assist that broke the deadlock for Suárez, to this solo run and finish. Julien has been untouchable today. Dribbles, technique, composure, presence. There is nothing here that resembles a newcomer finding his feet. Only a top-class player's ease and authority, worn as naturally as a second skin."
His voice dropped by a fraction, taking on a tone closer to wonder.
"Under this grey sky, that red figure is the brightest thing on the pitch. The boos? The hostility? They have become nothing more than the backdrop to his triumph—the frame around the painting, not the painting itself."
He took a deep breath and spoke. "There's no such thing as a wrong nickname if you've truly earned it—and this is Julien the Conqueror."
He paused, and when he continued summing up.
"Scoring here, in this fashion, Julien has proved he can do more than find the net. He has the heart to carry a derby on his shoulders, to thrive under pressure, to announce himself in the loudest possible way.
Eleven rounds, nineteen goals—that's history now. He's on twenty. And pulling further ahead of everyone. But it is today's match that is his truest credential: the link-up play, the selfless assist when the selfish option was right there in front of him, the solo runs past senior international defenders, and the mental strength to stand in front of a hostile away end and smile with ease.
A player like this—there is no ceiling in sight."
Then Tyler exhaled and added quietly: "We must congratulate Liverpool. They've found their cornerstone."
On the technical area line, Klopp left the ground the instant the ball hit the net in a low, compressed leap.
A fierce roar tore out of him as he landed, and he pumped his fist once, hard and sharp, before turning around and pulling every one of his assistant coaches into a single crushing collective embrace.
He was pounding their backs with both hands, laughing as though he needed to transfer every ounce of his excitement somewhere physical.
"Incredible!" The word came out between breaths, aimed at no one.
"Julien—Incredible!" He pulled back just enough to look directly at the people around him, his face was fully open, nothing holding back.
"This kid — he's a genius. Ability like that, and a mentality like that—at his age—" He shook his head. "He is going to be a world-class star. There is no other way it goes. No other destination for a player like that."
The coaching staff nodded and agreed without reservation, and the agreement was genuine. They had watched this boy train every day. They knew what they were looking at.
The youngest France captain ever, and already performing like this in a Premier League derby away from home—Julien was simply extraordinary, and the feeling in the technical area was less the excitement of surprise than the satisfaction of being proved right.
When the embrace settled, Klopp remained at the edge of the technical area, watching the direction Julien had come from, the warm, proud smile still fixed in place. He spoke softly, just to the moment and himself.
"Unbelievable. I knew he could do it." He shook his head once more, slowly, and added: "With a player like him in the squad—there is nothing to be afraid of."
Across the pitch, Martínez looked like a man who had been quietly hollowed out from the inside.
Both hands hung loose at his sides, utterly still. His face had gone the color of the sky above him.
The sequence played and replayed behind his eyes: Jagielka committed and beaten outside, Howard coming off his line with full conviction and beaten by a single stutter-step, the ball rolling into the empty net with a simplicity that made the defensive structure he had spent the entire week constructing feel, in reconsideration, almost theoretical.
He had prepared for dribbles. He had prepared for the long shot, having watched the post incident in the opening minutes. He had prepared for Julien operating in tight spaces with his back to goal.
He had drawn up a plan for each of these. And the plan had dissolved—not through any tactical error, not because his players had failed to execute, but because the boy had simply chosen, in real time, the correct response to every single decision his defenders made, as though he were reading answers off a page that no one else could see.
Martínez shook his head slowly in a quiet, helpless gesture.
He muttered something under his breath that the cameras couldn't capture and the people around him couldn't make out.
Then he straightened. He walked to the edge of the technical area, and his voice reassembled its authority from wherever it had retreated to, and he began waving his players back into shape because the job wasn't over, and he was still the manager, and this was still a match.
But as his players responded and jogged back to their positions, his eyes drifted once more to the red-shirted figure being surrounded by celebrating teammates near the hoardings. He watched for a moment.
His expression was complicated in a way that was painful to look at—frustration and helplessness were on the surface, forming the visible face of a man who had just been beaten.
But beneath those layers, buried and barely visible and clearly not something he wanted visible at all, was something else: a reluctant, resentful, entirely involuntary recognition of what he had just witnessed.
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