Julien. Two goals. And the Emirates Stadium, for one long, extraordinary second, went completely silent.
Then the away end exploded.
It wasn't a cheer that built, it was an instant detonation. Liverpool supporters were in the air. Strangers were holding each other. The noise was so dense and so sudden.
"Julien! Julien!"
In the away section, an older supporter was weeping, both arms around the person beside him, not trying to hide it.
A young fan in a Julien shirt was screaming the name until his voice broke and then kept screaming. The chant found its shape and spread and filled the whole upper tier of the away end and kept going.
Julien, when he saw the ball drop over the line, did not process the moment gradually. He turned and ran full speed, immediately, heading toward the corner of the pitch nearest the away end without deliberating about it.
He reached the advertising boards and stopped. He opened his arms wide. His head went back and his eyes closed.
The jeers from the home end and the roaring from the away end poured over him simultaneously and he let both of them wash over him without distinguishing between them.
He was not thinking about the first-half criticism, or the pundits, or the position he'd been asked to play, or the doubts that had followed him from the tunnel to this moment.
There was only the specific, irreplaceable feeling of a goal scored in the instant before the noise comes back and he stayed inside it for as long as it lasted.
The stadium lights fell across him and held him still, and for a moment the scene became something close to a frame extracted from the motion of the game.
"Julien! unreal!" Sturridge hit him from behind with both arms, his voice was cracking through the noise. "That ball is absolutely ridiculous, what a hit!"
Gerrard arrived right behind him, pulling them both together: "That curl, I don't know how that curls like that."
Lucas came in. Sterling came in. The rest of them piled on, wrapping themselves around Julien in a mass of white shirts and noise, every voice was tumbling over every other, none of them were distinguishable.
Someone in the middle of the pile was saying that bend was impossible. Someone else kept saying we're level, we're level not quite believing it yet, needing to repeat it until it became real.
A few of the older hands had eyes that were shining, and they weren't hiding it.
On the touchline, Klopp surrendered completely to the moment.
He was jumping, actually jumping, both feet leaving the ground, his fist driving up with the full force of his arm and shoulder, again and again, his face was flushed deep red, his assistant was crashing into him in a bear hug that nearly took them both off their feet.
All the weight of the first half from the 0–2 that had looked so final, the pressing system that had collapsed had been lifted in an instant, and what replaced it was this: the pure joy of a manager watching a player he believed in answer every question with a goal.
He kept shouting toward the pitch, his voice was raw from the evening: "Julien! Julien!"
His face, in that moment, held something that was not quite celebration and not quite pride but occupied the space between them, it was the feeling a manager has when he has staked something on a player and the player has honored the stake in front of a crowd that doubted both of them.
In the home end, the Arsenal fans sat down. The noise that had been filling the ground retreated.
What replaced it was the particular silence of people who have been comfortable and are no longer comfortable.
Two-all. Sixteen minutes.
A player on the other side who had just done something extraordinary twice in the same game.
Wenger stood before the Arsenal bench with his arms back across his chest, eyebrows drawn together, watching the Liverpool players celebrating on his pitch and running the evening's events through his mind.
He had planned a defense. The plan had been executed correctly.
The adjustments had been correctly timed. Koscielny had held his position on the roulette as well as any center-back in the league could have been expected to hold it. The wall had been correctly set. Szczęsny had gone the right way.
And Julien had found the way around all of it anyway.
Twice.
In the same match.
That was not a tactical failure. That was something that tactics could not fully contain. And Wenger, who had spent thirty years in football understanding the difference between problems you could solve and forces you had to simply account for, recognized which one he was dealing with.
He straightened his shoulders, looked at the clock, and began calculating what the last minutes required.
Across the city, the image of the ball kissing the inside of the post was already on repeat on every screen carrying the match.
In The Boot Room, it set off something that had been coiling and tightening for the previous twenty minutes and now it released all at once.
"In! The curl! Julien, that free-kick is from the gods themselves!"
George had abandoned the polishing cloth somewhere around the fifty-third minute and hadn't noticed. Both palms were flat on the bar, his whole upper body was leaning toward the screen, the grey at his temples were trembling.
"Who is calling him incapable in the central position now? That ball is in the back of the net. That is our man."
Every voice in the room said something at the same moment, which meant nothing was individually intelligible and everything was collectively unmistakable.
"Julien, that is absolute, unrepeatable class!"
"I was ready to write it off at 0–2. Look at the scoreboard. LOOK AT THE SCOREBOARD."
The pub had gone entirely over the edge.
Someone was standing on a chair swinging a scarf in a full circle over his head and nobody was telling him to get down.
The chant of Julien! Julien! was loud enough to rattle the picture frames on the walls.
A man had his phone held up filming the entire room and was simultaneously shaking his head and saying that turn is criminal, I'm still not over the turn in a continuous low murmur of pure delight. A table of older men were gripping each other by the shoulder and drinking in steady gulps, their eyes were wet, too full of it to form sentences.
Ted was thumping the table with the flat of his hand hard enough to knock the glasses: "Did you SEE that?! That is what Liverpool produces! That is what JULIEN produces! Forget the 0–2, forget every word of doubt, never mind any of it, we've got time left and we've got him and WE. ARE. LEVEL!"
Before he had finished the last word, the pub had taken it from him and made it into a chant:
"Level! Level! Level!"
Every doubt from the first half was under rubble.
Because football is, in the end, very simple.
You Score. You Win.
The match resumed. Wenger's arms were folded across his chest again, and the composure that had defined his touchline presence all evening was not quite there anymore.
He watched the players find their positions and replayed both goals in his mind.
Kanté's interception, Gerrard's long ball, the first-time lay-off, the run, the combination with Sturridge and then Suárez, the roulette through Koscielny, the finish to the bottom corner.
And then: Ramsey's challenge, Lucas's pass, Julien's first touch, the body feint, Gerrard's dummy walk-over, the contact on the lower half of the ball, the curl to the top corner.
Two goals. Twenty-two minutes apart.
Both of them completely correct in their execution.
Tactically, we did nothing wrong.
He had told himself this after the first goal, and it was still true. That was almost the most unsettling part of it not that Arsenal had made errors, but that Julien had simply refused to be contained by correct defending.
The role Klopp had given him in the second half, stripped of the creative burden, liberated from organization, pointed at goal and told to arrive had produced a player who found answers to problems that shouldn't have had answers.
That was not a tactical problem. That was something else.
Either he found a way to put Julien in a box and keep him there or he found a way to get Arsenal a third goal before Liverpool found a second.
One of those two things needed to happen.
Wenger looked at the clock and began to calculate.
In the offices of Liverpool's director of football, David Dein had watched the whole evening unfold on the screen in his study, mostly alone.
When Julien's free-kick bent around the wall and kissed the inside of the post, Dein was on his feet before he'd decided to stand. Both fists went up without his permission.
"That is some strike."
He stood there for a moment, aware of the involuntariness of the reaction, and then the camera cut to Wenger standing still on the touchline, brow drawn, arms folded, watching his team have just conceded the equalizer to a player who had once been in Dein's own scouting reports, a player Dein had looked at, had thought about, had imagined in an Arsenal shirt.
Dein sat down slowly. His fingers found the arm of the sofa and moved against the cloth in a small, private movement.
There had been a time when that face meant everything, when Wenger's satisfaction was a thing Dein worked toward every day, when Wenger's frustration arrived on Dein's desk as a problem requiring a solution.
He had given years to Arsenal. Real years, with real investment in them, and something of himself that didn't fully come back when the employment ended. The affection for a place didn't always obey the logic of which side you were now on.
Seeing Arsenal on the wrong end of something tonight particularly something achieved by a player Dein himself had once watched in a lower division and wanted to bring north produced a sensation he couldn't entirely categorize. It was not guilt and not satisfaction. Something quieter and more specific: the ache of genuine fondness for a place, persisting after the address had changed.
He pressed it down, reminded himself of his role and his responsibilities, and what he was here to build.
His phone buzzed on the desk. The screen showed Abdullah.
He answered it already smiling, and before he could speak, the voice from the other end was halfway through a sentence, warm with unmistakable laughter:
"David, don't tell me you didn't almost knock something over when that went in. What a goal. Though please tell Jürgen not to make a habit of giving me 0–2 deficits to sit through, would you? The result is wonderful. The cardiac system is less wonderful."
Dein laughed out loud. "Fair point. I'll speak to the medical staff about having something ready on standby."
Abdullah laughed again, and Dein felt the tension in his chest ease a fraction. The mood was good, and the mood of the man who owned the club mattered enormously in moments like this.
Because whatever else the evening had produced, whatever the final whistle would eventually say, it was becoming clear that this debut had been, by any honest measure, something better than expected. A draw at the Emirates against the table-topping side. With a squad that had known their manager for three days. Coming from two goals down. With a teenager scoring twice.
In the circumstances, in any circumstances, that was a result. And the momentum was entirely Liverpool's.
The screen still showed the replay. The curve of the ball. The post. The net. Julien's arms opening wide in front of the away end.
Julien, Dein thought, watching it again.
Not bad at all.
In the broadcast booth, once the initial noise had found its ceiling and begun to settle, Parry found his thread,
"This goal is about more than the scoreline. For Liverpool to do what they've done tonight, to come to the Emirates, to fall two goals behind in the first half, and to find their way back level through two moments of genuine, irreducible quality, that is a statement about the spine of this team.
That is the proof of what Klopp's half-time adjustment contained, and the proof of what the player he trusted to carry it out is capable of.
Julien turns nineteen in a matter of weeks. Think carefully about what that means. Most players at that age are still competing for a starting place in their first senior club, still learning the rhythms of professional football, still finding out who they are at this level.
Julien has come to the Emirates tonight, the home of the league leaders, a ground that has been hostile to him from the first whistle, fallen two goals behind, and put his club level with two pieces of quality that most seasoned internationals would be proud to claim.
He has carried Liverpool back from the edge of a heavy defeat in a stadium that spent the best part of ninety minutes telling him he had no business being here.
That is not what ordinary talent looks like. That is not what promising talent looks like. That is what a superstar looks like before the world has quite got used to calling him one before the vocabulary has caught up with the reality.
And you know what else it looks like? It looks like Liverpool. The Liverpool that people in this city and this football club carry in them as an article of faith: the one that never stops, never bows its head, never concedes defeat until the final whistle has made it compulsory.
They're back."
________________________________________________________
Check out my patreon where you can read more chapters:
patreon.com/LorianFiction
Thanks for your support!