In the stands behind him, the Everton fans were experiencing their own versions of the same confrontation with reality.
Some had their faces buried in their hands, elbows on knees, shutting the pitch out entirely, needing a moment away from it before they could look again.
Others were wiping slowly at their cheeks with the backs of their wrists. Others simply stared, flat, unblinking, wearing the expression of not fully accepting what is happening in front of them and are still, on some level, waiting for the moment it stops being true.
It was the 221st Merseyside Derby, and Liverpool had come with the full weight of history on their side: 87 wins across all competitions to Everton's 67, with 66 draws in between.
In the league alone Liverpool had won 72 times. In the previous thirteen Premier League derbies, Liverpool had managed 7 wins and 5 draws, losing just once—a 2–0 defeat at Goodison in October 2010, the very first match under John W. Henry's ownership.
Last season's two meetings had ended 2–2 at Goodison and 0–0 at Anfield—results that Everton could point to with something like pride.
But the reason the blue half of the city had come into today with genuine belief was not history. It was form.
Everton had gone unbeaten in 14 consecutive Premier League home matches ten wins and four draws—the longest such run the club had produced in 51 years.
Goodison had become a real fortress. There was evidence for that belief, solid and recent evidence, and it had given fans something more than just hope. It had given them expectation.
Now they were losing 2–0. The fortress had not held.
And the belief that had felt so solid over breakfast, so grounded in evidence, was becoming an increasingly difficult thing to locate.
They kept telling themselves to trust the team—that there was time, that games can turn, that Goodison had seen stranger things. But their reason, quietly and without cruelty, was telling them something else.
In the Boot Room pub, the second goal did not produce a celebration so much as a detonation.
Those who had been shouting since the first goal were already hoarse. When the ball went in, they surged to their feet as one: arms thrust over their heads, some climbing onto chairs, others slapping tables with both palms in a rapid, joyful rhythm that made the glasses and pint pots jump and rattle.
A group of young fans near the bar locked arms and bounced in a tight circle, chanting Julien's name.
"Get in! Absolute scenes!" A middle-aged man in a faded away shirt was slapping his thigh repeatedly, his face was split wide open with joy. "We're bullying Everton! Away! At Goodison! Do you have any idea what this feels like?!"
Someone nearby was already nodding before he finished.
"Tell me about it—I've watched derbies in here for years. Years. And there's always that knot. From about Wednesday onwards, that horrible knot you can't shift. Tonight?" He shook his head with genuine wonder. "Nothing. Not a trace of it. Because Julien has been running them ragged from the first minute—their entire backline is chasing shadows and they've been doing it for half an hour already."
"Everton fans love to boo, don't they?!" A voice from somewhere near the back sounding cheerful and merciless.
"They love to make someone a target, get everyone on the same man. Well—look at them now! Two nil down, and the man they've been booing all day is the one who's done this to them. What do you say to that?"
Nobody had an answer to that. The room laughed instead.
"Keep going! Get another one! Bury them! Make it three!"
But they were still away from home. And away from home, even at 2–0, is never the same as safe. Liverpool knew this.
The celebrations on the pitch were fierce and brief. The players shook themselves back into professional focus with discipline, and jogged back toward the center circle.
The whistle blew. Play resumed.
Everton came forward immediately, throwing themselves at Liverpool's half before the defensive shape had fully reset. Barkley spotted the opening, six or seven yards outside the box and suddenly unleashed a shot, clearly trying to replicate what Julien had done moments earlier with a thundering long-range strike.
He swung through it with real power, and the ball screamed toward goal. The Everton faithful rose as one, hands already in the air—
But the ball caught the very top of the crossbar and flew into the stands.
The roar became a groan. Barkley stood clutching his fist, stamped the turf once, hard, jaw tight with frustration.
Liverpool played it out from the back. They moved it toward Gerrard and Everton swarmed him immediately, two men were pressing at once with desperation. This time the press worked.
The ball was stripped before Gerrard could release it. Everton moved it quickly, urgently, and swept back toward Liverpool's box.
The pressure built through careful phases. Leighton Baines swung in a low, skimming cross from the left. Barkley was running from deep on a diagonal, arriving through the area with good timing, cutting inside as the ball reached him. Glen Johnson rushed across to intercept, measured his distance, and shaped to go in with the tackle —
Then pulled up sharply at the last moment.
But Barkley was already falling.
His legs buckled beneath him and he went down face-first in the penalty area, both hands shooting forward instinctively to break the fall.
The blue end erupted instantly: "Penalty! Penalty!"
Forty thousand voices, or what felt like it, all were arriving at the same word simultaneously.
Oliver jogged across. He observed the scene—Barkley on the ground, Johnson standing over him, the gap between where the supposed contact had occurred and where Barkley had ended up. He shook his head.
Then he reached into his pocket.
The yellow card emerged. Aimed at Barkley.
Diving.
The Liverpool away section cheered.
Barkley scrambled to his feet with urgency. His hands went out to his sides, palms up, his expression was a live argument.
"I didn't dive! He caught me—he touched me! I felt it!"
Oliver was already pointing: play on. He had seen what he had seen, and his mind was made up, and Barkley's outrage was not going to revise it.
Barkley muttered all the way back to his position in indignation
Glen Johnson walked past him, moving back to his position, his voice was pitched just low enough to reach Barkley's ears and no further.
"Your acting could use some work, bro."
Barkley stopped and shot him a look.
In the away section, Liverpool fans thrusted thumbs down at the pitch, their voices were raised and shouting: "Cheat!"
In the Boot Room, the reaction was a collective burst of laughter.
"You've got to be kidding me—that's how you try to win a penalty? Oliver's not blind, mate!"
"Only Everton fans could watch that and think it was a foul. The rest of us could see it coming from a mile away."
The laughter hadn't fully faded before something uglier broke out on the pitch.
In the 36th minute, a Liverpool pass was played out from the back. Suárez moved to collect it, his body already angled for the next touch, his attention was completely on the ball arriving at his feet.
He did not see Mirallas coming.
Mirallas came steaming in from Suárez's blindside, not tracking the ball, not positioning himself to contest it through any means, but arriving with intent that expressed itself in a very specific way: his right leg was already swinging high, studs pointing forward and up, aimed directly at the exposed thigh.
He raked down hard.
"Ahhh!"
Suárez hit the ground. Both hands went immediately to his thigh, gripping it hard. His face was twisted with expression of real pain.
The camera pushed in close.
The leg of his shorts had been torn open in a irregular line across the thigh where the studs had caught the cloth and the skin beneath it. Blood was already darkening the portion.
Liverpool players arrived around Mirallas from every direction at once.
Gerrard was at the front, in Mirallas' face, roaring furiously at his. Julien arrived at a sprint, pointing directly at Mirallas with one extended finger, his eyes were burning with cold anger.
On the touchline, Klopp had become furious.
He threw himself toward the fourth official with both arms spinning in wide, furious arcs, his whole body showed a single expression of outrage, his voice was reverberating clean across the technical area and beyond:
"Red card! That is a red card! How is that anything other than a red card?!"
His face had gone a deep, furious red, and the fury was not performance. He said it again, pointing directly at the pitch: "Red card!"
Oliver jogged across. He knelt briefly beside Suárez, took in the torn cloth, the blood, the evidence of the injury on the player's body then reached for his pocket and produced the yellow.
What followed in the Liverpool away section was a collective sound of disbelief.
Fans leapt to their feet. Some pointed at Mirallas, screaming a single word: "Dirty Bast*rd!"
Others turned on Oliver directly, producing language that the broadcast cameras had the good sense to frame away from.
A red scarf sailed down from the stands and landed on the pitch. Two clenched fists were thrust toward the officials' bench in the gesture that needs no translation in any language.
In the Boot Room, fists hit tables. Glasses were set down with a force that sloshed beer over the rims and across the surface and onto the floor.
"That's assault! He has to go! There is no version of that challenge where you show a yellow card!"
"Did Oliver get paid for this one? How do you watch that—how do you stand ten meters away and watch that—and give a f*king yellow?!"
The same fan who had praised Oliver's decisiveness over Barkley's dive barely ninety seconds ago was now standing with his face drained of color, apparently having entirely forgotten the compliment he'd paid the man.
"Absolute disgrace! He is ruining this match!"
"Suárez is bleeding! The man is bleeding on the pitch! And a yellow is the answer?"
On the pitch, Mirallas kept his head down and walked slowly back to his position, avoiding the eyes of every Liverpool player he passed.
The team doctor guided Suárez carefully to the touchline. A bandage was wrapped tightly around his thigh. Suárez walked slowly testing the thigh with each step, feeling to what it reports back.
As he turned back toward the pitch, his eyes found Mirallas.
He did not look away. His eyes were burning with cold fury.
What he wanted to do with that fury—well, under different circumstances, the thought was not hard to guess. But he held it in. He thought about the team's form, about the goal he'd already put away. He thought about how much he'd rather win.
He stared at Mirallas one last time.
Then he swallowed it down.
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