In the dressing room on the other side of the corridor, Roberto Martínez was doing the same work from a very different emotional position.
Losing a derby at half-time, in your own ground, to a Liverpool side with a nineteen-year-old who has just scored twice and stood in front of your supporters with his arms wide open—that is also a specific kind of pressure.
Martínez had the look of a man who was refusing, through sheer professional discipline, to let that pressure become visible in how he moved or spoke.
No one wants to lose a derby.
He was forty years old that July, having celebrated his birthday in the weeks before the new season began. He had come to Goodison Park as the club's first new manager in eleven years, following the long and deeply embedded tenure of David Moyes, and the challenge of that succession was something that had been underestimated by almost everyone who discussed it in the summer.
Inheriting a squad shaped across eleven years by a single managerial philosophy is not a renovation project—it is closer to an architectural reconstruction. The bones of the building carry the previous owner's decisions in every beam.
Martínez had built his name at Swansea and Wigan, and his greatest single moment had come the previous season: he had taken Wigan Athletic, a club that had never won a major domestic honor in its eighty-one-year existence, to an FA Cup final against Manchester City—and won it 1–0 creating one of the most famous upsets in the competition's history.
The trophy sat in Wigan's cabinet. His name was on it.
His philosophy had always been about the ball—technical, possession-based, what the old Everton legend Pat Nevin had publicly described as "mini-Barça football."
It was a significant departure from the Moyes era of disciplined defensive structure and direct intensity, and the departure was visible in the results so far: some matches in which Everton played genuinely attractive football, others in which the transition from the old system to the new had left the team looking between philosophies, uncertain which language to speak.
Under Moyes in his final season, Everton had been remarkably consistent—finishing sixth in thirty-eight league matches, their seventh consecutive top-eight finish, and crucially, the second consecutive season they had placed above Liverpool.
That had not happened since 1962. But Moyes was gone, and what followed transitions always follows them: a period of becoming.
The squad's most obvious structural weakness remained clear.
Jelavić, their nominal first-choice striker, had managed seven goals the previous season, a figure that explained, in its bluntness, why so many of Everton's possession sequences had dissolved without consequence.
Fifteen draws the last season—fifteen—had cost them a European spot and represented the frustration of team which although controlled matches but couldn't convert the control into results.
Martínez had moved resolutely in the summer: signing Arouna Koné from his former club, loaning Barcelona's teenage winger Gerard Deulofeu, and adding veteran Paraguayan center-back Antolín Alcaraz on a free transfer.
Of all the new arrivals, Deulofeu had generated the most attention and justified it.
Nineteen years old, he had won the UEFA U19 European Championship with Spain that summer and taken the tournament's Most Valuable Player award.
The press had latched onto the nickname "the Little Messi" with enthusiasm that the press always latches onto such things.
That a player of his profile had chosen Everton surprised several clubs who had also been interested. But he was here, and he was available for the second half, and Martínez fully intended to use him as part of the solution to the problem the scoreboard was presenting.
He stood in front of his players; his voice was flat and certain for a final instruction before they left the dressing room.
"Neutralize Julien," he said, "and we are seventy percent of the way there. Everything else follows from that. Every decision we make in the second half starts with that problem."
He looked around the room. The fire was still there in his players' eyes — bruised, yes, wounded, yes, but present.
Derby players do not give up at half-time. Not at Goodison Park, not with forty-five minutes remaining and a crowd that was still making noise above their heads.
"Yes!" The response came back with enough heat in it to mean something.
He nodded. "Good. Then let's fix it."
In the Boot Room pub, Liverpool fans were making the most of every minute of the interval. Pints were raised and re-raised. Groups of three and four had formed around every table, the conversations were overlapping and feeding off one another in the way that only works when everyone in the room is in the same emotional state.
"What a first half! Two-nil up, pressing them into the dirt in their own ground—this is the derby we needed. And Julien—" He stopped and shook his head slowly, searching for the words. "Those two goals. Especially the second one. Standing there, ignoring the whole crowd, arms wide—" He made the gesture, briefly, and dropped it. "There is ice in his veins."
Someone nearby jumped in without waiting. "He's nineteen! Nineteen years old! When I was nineteen, my head was completely full of ru—"
Laughter broke across the group before he could finish the sentence.
When it settled, a different voice cut through. "That said—Mirallas's tackle on Suárez was filthy. Studs up, full force, drew blood, and all he gets is a yellow? Oliver must be seeing a different match to the rest of us."
"Don't even start," someone else said shooting back. "McCarthy's been grabbing Julien's shirt every five seconds since the second half of the first half. Blatant. Every time Julien gets the ball in tight spaces—arms come around him, shirt gets grabbed, no call. If he keeps that up, Julien's going to be carried off the pitch before the hour."
An older man at the back took a long pull of his beer and set the glass down.
"Derby football." He said it simply, as if those two words were the complete explanation. "Everton can't beat us straight up—you could see that inside the first twenty minutes. So, they go dirty. Same as ever. But listen—"
He pointed toward the screen, "—we're two nil up at Goodison, with a nineteen-year-old who's already scored twice. I've watched Merseyside derbies for thirty years. Enjoy it."
On the television above the bar, the broadcast had cut to first-half highlights. When it reached Julien's celebration, the pub erupted all over again, as if the goal had been scored in the room, glasses were clinking across every table in a spontaneous, overlapping toast.
"Cheers!"
Every face in the room was lit. The thought was simple and shared, passing between people without needing to be spoken: hold what we have, take one more, and make this night at Goodison Park something to carry home.
As the players returned to the pitch, Goodison Park rose with them.
The Everton fans were not finished. Forty-five minutes remained. They still believed or were working very hard at it.
Julien took up his position in the center circle and scanned the faces across from him. The eyes looking back were different from the ones he had faced at kick-off, they were colder. Whatever the first half had been, this would not be a continuation of it.
He knew it wouldn't be easy. He had known since the team talk, since Klopp's hand on his shoulder and the honest assessment of what was coming.
Peep.
Oliver blew his whistle and Goodison roared back to life.
Liverpool moved first, feeling their way into the second half, trying to establish the composure and structure that Klopp had outlined. The ball found Julien was dropping into space at the edge of the area which usually generates at least a touch and a turn.
McCarthy was already there.
He had tracked the run from the moment Julien's hips turned, anticipating the drop, positioning himself in the space rather than in the channel. And when Julien received the ball, McCarthy did not attempt to win it.
Without a word, he placed both hands flat on Julien's back and shoved hard.
Julien's balance gave way beneath him. He stumbled two steps forward and hit the turf, and the ball rolled away into Everton possession.
The Liverpool end detonated. "Yellow card! Yellow card!"
One voice cut above the rest: "Dirty Bast*rd!" aimed at McCarthy, carrying the raw fury of a fan.
In the Boot Room, palms slammed down on tables hard enough to rattle the glasses. "And he doesn't book him? McCarthy nearly flattened him—that's intentional!"
Oliver jogged over, waved play back, gave Liverpool the free kick and said nothing more to McCarthy. No card, not even a stern word.
On commentary, Martin Tyler's voice climbed with an urgency.
"Goodness me. McCarthy from behind—deliberate obstruction, you cannot call it anything else. But Oliver has been consistent in his approach throughout this match, for both sides. Henderson's challenge, Mirallas's horror tackle—all yellow cards.
Derby football operates on a different set of rules, and what we are seeing today is a referee who has decided to let the contest breathe and manage the temperature through positioning rather than cards. Whether you agree with that philosophy or not, he has at least been even-handed in applying it."
The Everton stands cheered McCarthy's intervention warmly and without apology. Some were even calling Julien soft for going down so easily.
Julien pulled himself up from the turf and decided not to donate any energy to the process of being knocked down. He brushed the grass from his kit. He looked back at McCarthy for one quiet moment and then he turned away.
His teammates gathered around him. Gerrard arrived at his shoulder and spoke low, direct and close. "Don't retaliate where anyone can see it. That's a red card."
The implication beneath those words was clear, and both men understood it completely. What Gerrard was not saying was that Julien should ignore what was happening to him. He was saying: if the time comes, be intelligent about it.
Julien held his eye for a moment and nodded once. He understood.
They exchanged a few quiet words about the positioning of the free kick, where the wall would be, where Howard would shade, what was actually possible from the angle.
When the wall was set and Oliver was satisfied with the distance, Julien was the only Liverpool player standing over the ball.
Just Julien, alone at the spot, twenty-two and a half meters from goal, positioned to the right of center where the angle tightened and the margin for error narrowed considerably, with an Everton wall already organized into a compact line.
Martin Tyler's voice sharpened into something approaching disbelief.
"Wait—there is only Julien over the ball? Liverpool are going to let him take this directly? The position is difficult—outside the box, the angle is tight, the wall is set and well-organized but is he really going to have a go from there?!"
Julien crouched and adjusted the ball with both hands. He stepped back to his run-up position and set his feet wide apart. He fixed his gaze on the goal, not the wall, not Howard, but the goal itself.
The ground held its breath.
Every pair of eyes in Goodison Park converged on this single figure. A nineteen-year-old, standing alone in the silence before the storm, with the ball at his feet and the weight of the whole occasion balanced on the next few seconds.
Was this really Liverpool's plan? To trust it all to him?
Nobody in the ground, and nobody watching on television, and nobody in the Boot Room pub with their pint half-raised and their eyes on the screen—nobody could quite decide whether what they were about to witness was an act of genius or an act of extraordinary hubris.
The only person who didn't seem uncertain was Julien himself.
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