The following morning, Melwood was still and damp, the training ground was holding a silence that has not yet been claimed by the day.
Dew sat on the grass in a fine, even coat, catching the pale early light and giving the pitch a quality that would last perhaps another hour before the first set of boots came through it.
The goalposts stood at both end in the cold air, and the cones and markers from yesterday's session had already been laid out by the ground-staff in neat configurations.
Klopp stood in the center of the main pitch with his hands cupped around his mouth, his breath was visible in short clouds. "All right, gentlemen, warm up first. Then thirty minutes of high-intensity shuttle runs. Speed! I want to see your legs actually move today!"
The players groaned not with any real resistance, but with hope, against all evidence, that yesterday's draw at the Emirates might have earned them something gentler this morning.
It had not.
During the warm-up, Gerrard moved alongside the group with his hands loose at his sides and muttered, just noticeably, "Easy part first, lads."
Everyone in hearing distance knew what was coming. But still for the sake of what they were building, for the sake of the dream, they would run themselves through it.
When the warm-up ended, the squad broke into groups and the real work began.
Players sprinted between cones in staggered intervals, the shouts of coaches and the heavy regular breathing of men pushing themselves was filling the quiet training ground.
In the rest intervals between sets, the conversation found its own natural subject.
"Hey, Raheem!" Sturridge called across the group, barely troubling himself to suppress the smirk. "I saw that Sun photo from last week. She's lovely, when are you introducing her to the rest of us?"
Sterling's face went from its normal color to red in a single second. "What photo? Those people just make things up. I haven't been anywhere; I haven't done anything—"
Gerrard didn't look up from retying his boot. "Haven't been anywhere. So who's that in the picture, your twin?"
The group dissolved. Several players were bent double. Someone had to put a hand on a cone to keep himself upright.
Sterling threw his hands up. "You lot will never let this go, I'm done with that paper, I swear!"
Liverpool's relationship with The Sun was a matter of record and grievance going back decades, and no one on the squad needed it explained to them.
Liverpool's relationship with The Sun was a matter of record and grievance going back decades, and no one on the squad needed it explained to them.
The paper was not welcome at Anfield, was not welcome in the city, had not been welcome since Hillsborough. And yet, when it came to the specific subset of journalism that concerned itself with the private lives of young footballers, the paper had a frustrating tendency toward accuracy that made it difficult to completely dismiss, however much everyone would have preferred to.
Sterling had been spotted by a Sun photographer a few weeks earlier.
Klopp's whistle cut through the noise. "Small-sided passing and movement! Four groups, reorganize!"
The players moved quickly, the laughter cut off cleanly. In the compact zones, they began working through attacking patterns.
Suárez dropped his shoulder in a feint, drawing his marker half a step in the wrong direction, and slipped the ball back with the outside of his foot to Julien arriving late from the angle. Julien's first-time finish went cleanly through the simulated goal.
"Beautiful!" Klopp applauded from the sideline. "Julien, half a second quicker on that run and the defender has no information. He cannot get close, because the ball is already past him before he has decided which way to go. Half a second! That is the difference between a chance and a certain goal. Every time!"
Julien jogged back to his starting position.
By the time the final whistle blew and the players drifted toward the changing rooms, the Sterling saga had completed its natural arc back to the surface.
Suárez draped an arm over Julien's shoulder as they walked. "You know what I've noticed?" he said, in the tone of a man who has been saving this observation for the right moment. "Outside of training, you're basically a ghost. No sightings, no photographs, nothing. If I didn't know you used to be quite the ladies' man back in France, I'd be asking serious questions about you, my friend."
He let out a booming laugh that carried across the car park.
Julien took a long drink from his water bottle and fired back without changing his expression. "I call it strategic focus. What's more important right now, winning or romance? And besides," he added, raising an eyebrow, "when we lift the trophy, I won't exactly be struggling for introductions, will I?"
Sturridge sidled over; eyes wide with mock-sincerity. "Mate, do you have any idea how famous you are right now? Post one message on Instagram saying you're looking to meet someone, and your inbox will need its own postcode."
Julien laughed. "It already does. But good things come to those who wait. Unlike some people, who get photographed and then insist nothing happened."
The conversation swung back to Sterling like a boomerang. Sterling threw his hands up in despair. "You lot will never let this go. I'm completely done with all of you."
The laughter only got louder.
Klopp watched from the edge of the group with his hands in his tracksuit pockets.
His football required trust, required players who would run for each other without a second thought, who would play the risky pass rather than the safe one because they had learned, in moments exactly like this one, that the person making the run would be there.
The easiest way to build that kind of trust was not through meetings or speeches. It was through shared laughter, shared embarrassment, shared humanity.
Through perhaps knowing that the man beside you had been mercilessly teased about a tabloid photograph and handled it with good grace, which meant he could probably handle the harder things too.
There would be more mornings like this one. Many more.
That evening, the players settled in to watch the highlights from Matchday 4 of the Champions League group stage, and the full picture that emerged over the course of the night was one of a competition beginning to define its shape and separate its contenders from its pretenders.
Four clubs had already secured their places in the round of sixteen, Bayern and Atlético were moving through as if they had never been genuinely threatened in their groups, City and Barça, the latter having destroyed Milan 3–1 at the Nou Camp to qualify ahead of schedule with matches to spare.
Italian football had shown its limitations again, though Juventus, AC Milan, and Napoli all still controlled their own fates, just barely, with diminishing margins for error and the knowledge that what remained in their groups was challenging.
The English clubs had performed well.
Arsenal had ground out a 1–0 in Dortmund, Ramsey with the only goal, a result that said more about defensive organization and collective discipline than attacking ambition, but one that delivered the points and moved them closer to the knockout rounds.
Chelsea had been more vigorous, dismantling Schalke 3–0 at Stamford Bridge, the result was built on a structure of pressing and intensity that had Mourinho's fingerprints all over it.
City had swept aside CSKA Moscow 5–2 in a result that was entirely expected by the scoreline and carried, beneath it, an historical weight that deserved to be acknowledged: this was the first time in the club's history that they had reached the knockout rounds of the Champions League, years after their 1968 European Cup appearance, the long circle was finally and properly closed.
Only United had disappointed, rotating heavily ahead of the weekend's fixture with Arsenal and finishing goalless against Real Sociedad, it was a result that, given the circumstances, was less damaging than it looked.
From Spain: Barcelona was through. Real Madrid had extracted a precious point from the Juventus stadium. Atlético continued to run roughshod over the competition becoming the only side alongside Bayern with a perfect four-from-four record, a fact that was beginning to stop surprising people and start demanding to be taken seriously.
Real Sociedad, who had lost their first three, had finally managed something on the board.
Julien watched all of it and eventually came to Bastia's section of the table.
Four played. Four lost.
He gave a quiet, regretful shake of his head and sat with that for a moment. They were a club focused entirely on staying in the competition, European football was a distinction they had earned and could barely afford to sustain at the same time, the way a club of that size could barely afford to sustain most things that came with genuine success.
He found himself wondering, briefly and without quite intending to, what it would have been like if he had never left, whether he would have made any difference to those four results, whether there was a version of this group stage that ended differently with him in it.
He put the thought aside, gently, the way you put aside a question that has no useful answer.
There was no version of the story where he stayed. Even if he had wanted to, Bastia would never have been able to hold him beyond a certain point, and he had known that long before the offers came.
That was the melancholy mathematics of small clubs, they could not keep the players who outgrew them, and the players who outgrew them could not, in the end, afford to stay.
Both sides understood this. Both sides felt the loss anyway, and for different reasons, and neither reason was wrong.
He turned his attention to the other scores.
Agüero and Negredo had both scored in City's rout of CSKA. Diego Costa had contributed a goal and an assist as Atlético cruised through their fixture with the aggression that was becoming his calling card.
And Eto'o, back at Stamford Bridge, of all the places his career had taken him, standing again in the ground where he had once been the opponent had repaid Mourinho's faith with two goals, the first of them a product of pure, terrier-like pressing in the opposition half, the kind that stripped the ball from a defender who had a half-second longer than he needed and then suddenly didn't.
Bale, still carrying the weight of his world-record fee and the conversation that surrounded it everywhere he went, had finally silenced some of the criticism with a quality finish against Juventus.
The Ronaldo-Messi subplot ran quietly beneath all of it, as it always did, the way a river runs beneath everything in a landscape without being the landscape itself.
Sepp Blatter's recent public comments in support of Messi for the Ballon d'Or had clearly lit something specific in Ronaldo, who had been treating every Champions League appearance since as a personal statement addressed to a particular audience.
Against Juventus he had scored again. His tally for the calendar year now stood at fourteen Champions League goals surpassing Messi's thirteen from 2012 as the record for a single calendar year, putting him equal with Shevchenko on the all-time list at fifty-nine, behind only Raúl on seventy-one, Messi on sixty-five, and Van Nistelrooy on sixty.
That same evening he had become the twenty-sixth player in the competition's history to make one hundred appearances, the count broken down as forty-four with Real, fifty-five with United, one for Sporting and became the second Portuguese player to reach the landmark after Figo.
Messi, meanwhile, had marked his 500th competitive appearance with two goals, ending a drought of 368 minutes without scoring in the process. Across 394 games for Barcelona: 327 goals, 119 assists.
Julien absorbed all of it and set his phone aside.
It buzzed almost immediately.
It was René.
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