Countless eyes were locked on the pitch. Every conversation in every stand had stopped. The advertising hoardings, the grey sky, the cold air—all of it had receded to the edges. There was only the ball, and the boy standing over it, and the silence that had settled over Goodison Park.
Julien stood motionless as a mountain.
Tweet!!
The instant Oliver's whistle cut through the silence; Julien exploded into motion.
Two quick steps—his body dropping with each one as his center of gravity fell dangerously low, the angle between his planted shin and the turf was thin. Then his right foot connected.
Thud
A dull, heavy impact and the ball rocketed off his boot with ferocious spin, not launched into the air but skimming low across the surface before bending through a huge arc, curving clean around the right edge of the Everton wall at breathtaking speed.
Howard had shifted his weight toward the far post, trusting the wall to cover the near side. It was the logical decision. It was what the situation demanded.
But Julien's ball had bypassed the wall entirely—had never gone near it and was already screaming toward the near post before Howard's body had processed the information and begun to respond.
Howard flung himself right in a desperate, full-stretch dive, and the crowd breathed in sharply—but it was already too late by the time his boots left the ground.
The ball kissed the inside of the post with a sharp, ringing crack and buried itself in the net.
Goal.
3–0.
Goodison Park plunged into silence.
The blue terraces, wild just seconds ago, froze solid as though someone had reached into the room and cut the power. Scarves hung motionless in the air, held high up by hands that had forgotten to move.
Disbelief was across every face in the same language not yet ready to process.
The jeering, the battle cries, the continuous wall of blue noise that had defined the afternoon—all of it was cut off in a single instant, leaving nothing but the fading echo of ball striking net and the distant, growing sound of the Liverpool away end beginning to understand what it had just seen.
Against the grey, brooding sky, Liverpool's red kits burned like fire.
Then the away end detonated.
Julien shook off the first teammates to reach him. He sprinted toward the corner flag like a loosed arrow, covering the distance in long, explosive strides, and reached it and skidded to a halt in a single fluid movement that sent a small spray of turf into the cold air.
He turned to face the sea of blue.
For a moment he simply stood there—arms wide open in the gesture that had become, over the course of this afternoon, the defining image of what he was.
The same gesture he had made after his second goal, but now carrying an extra dimension.
Then, slowly, he raised his right hand and lifted three fingers high above his head.
Three goals. Two assists.
Four goal involvements in a 3–0 away derby victory. Every one of them born from a moment of individual quality that the occasion had demanded and that he had supplied without hesitation or error.
The Liverpool fans in the away end leapt and screamed, red scarves cutting white lines through the cold air above their heads. The chant that broke from them was not organized or coordinated—it simply arrived, fully formed, from hundreds of throats simultaneously:
"Julien! Julien!"
It crashed through the stadium's silence and kept building, filling the space that forty thousand Everton voices had just vacated.
Inside the Boot Room pub, it was absolute bedlam. Fans clambered onto tables, roaring at the tops of their lungs, pint glasses hurled toward the ceiling, beer raining down across the floor in golden curtains. Nobody moved to avoid it. Nobody reached for a cloth.
The floor could wait. This was happening now, and nothing else existed.
"Julien, you absolute legend! Two goals and an assist—away at Goodison! Who is this kid?!"
The noise was deafening and self-sustaining, feeding on itself, the accumulated weight of the entire afternoon—the goals, the arms-wide celebration at the hoardings, and now this—all arriving at once in a single release.
His teammates came tearing toward him like madmen. Everyone piled in, all of them surrounding him, lost in the celebration of a historic moment.
Across the blue terraces, the silence held. Everton fans stood with their heads bowed, shaking slowly. Some hurled their scarves to the ground in disgust. Despair had settled over Goodison like fog.
In the commentary booth, Martin Tyler's voice cracked with disbelief.
"Oh my! It's in! It's in, it's in, it's in—JULIEN!" He stopped, and the pause was not for dramatic effect but because he genuinely needed a moment. "He stepped up alone and put it away himself. What an extraordinary free-kick."
He took a breath and let the stadium noise fill the gap, then continued with a deliberate, building cadence.
"I am absolutely stunned. And I want to be precise about why I'm stunned—because this is important."
His voice found its footing, becoming more slow even as the feeling behind it remained visible. "We already knew about his dribbles. We already knew about his explosive finishing. We already knew about his ability to drive at defenders and manufacture chances from nothing. But this? This level of dead-ball craft, produced under these conditions, at this moment—nobody saw this coming. Nobody."
He paused again, and resumed saying instructively. "Who could have predicted this from a nineteen-year-old? This wasn't some fluke from a young player having a go—this was pure, distilled technique.
A low, bending free-kick around a wall demands both power and precision equally, and it demands them simultaneously, which is what makes it so technically difficult. A fraction too much power and the bend isn't there—it flies wide or straight into the wall. A fraction too much spin and it loses pace and drops short.
But Julien threaded it perfectly. Flawlessly. He put it exactly where Howard couldn't reach it even with a full dive. In a derby. In a hostile away stadium. With the crowd howling and every Everton player in the ground zeroed in on him."
There was a brief, genuine silence. "The word 'genius' doesn't begin to cover it."
He lifted his tone again as his voice took on a broader, more retrospective tone.
"Goodison Park is in complete silence right now. I imagine every Everton supporter—every Everton player—feels the same way I do: utterly stunned, and not quite sure what to do with that feeling."
He let that land. "This goal belongs in Liverpool's derby folklore. And that name—Julien De Rocca—belongs in the conversation alongside the very best. Not just the leading scorer in the Premier League. A complete, technically supreme footballer. Look at that celebration. Three fingers raised to the sky."
His voice softened slightly. "That is his answer to every boo, every whistle, every taunt from this ground today—and it is the loudest answer imaginable."
Play had resumed, and Everton had responded with the desperate energy of a side that had nothing left to manage and everything left to lose.
Martínez had made his most significant adjustment—Deulofeu, the nineteen-year-old on loan from Barcelona whom Everton fans had already nicknamed "the little Spanish Messi," had jogged on to replace the hobbling Baines and immediately declared his presence with a hunger to attack that was visible in every stride.
Everton had reorganized into a back three, pushing their defensive line higher, committing to an all-or-nothing gamble that transformed the game's texture into something breathless and end-to-end: waves from one side, counters from the other, the tackling grew fierce, the tempo became relentless.
Deulofeu threatened down the flank several times with quick feet and the directness that belongs to players who have not yet learned caution. Liverpool responded with sharp counters that exposed the gaps Everton's commitment forward had created.
The balance of goals tilted only one way.
In the seventieth minute, Gerrard won the ball in midfield waiting for exactly this moment that left him in full control.
He looked up immediately, and the picture he saw was clear: Julien dropping into central space, Everton's defensive line not yet recovered from the latest attacking phase, two defenders converging but neither yet in position. He fed it in to Julien's feet without hesitation.
Julien received it and did not rush.
His body dipped left, a clean shift of weight that sold the move convincingly enough to drag the first defender's center of gravity onto the wrong foot, committing him to a direction that Julien had already decided not to take.
Then, in the same moment that the defender committed, he dragged the ball back right with his sole, pivoted on the planted foot, and was past him.
The second man came in hard from the side, hand already reaching for the shirt knowing he has lost the footrace and looking for any means of slowing Julien down.
However, Julien felt it coming before the contact arrived. He nudged the ball onto his left foot, pushed it into the space ahead, and accelerated through the attempted grip before it could close around the shirt. The hand found the shirt for less than a second and then lost it.
The combination left a wide lane through the center of Everton's shape.
Suárez was already bombing in there. He had read the play from the moment Gerrard won the ball in midfield—had begun his diagonal run from the right while Julien was still receiving, timing the movement.
His run laced through the remaining threads of Everton's defensive structure that left the defenders scrambling to assign responsibility on tracking Julien or tracking Suárez.
They chose Julien.
As Suárez reached the edge of the box, Julien's peripheral vision found him in an instant. His left wrist snapped: a low, flat through ball that became the needle between two converging defenders and rolled into Suárez's path, placed so precisely that he needed to adjust nothing.
When Suárez collected it, there was no one within five yards. There was nothing between him and the goal except Howard.
He took it first time, sliding his finish low into the right corner.
Howard dived. Never got close.
4–0.
Goodison went completely, utterly silent. Only the Liverpool away end made any noise and the noise they made was large enough, in that silence, to feel like it filled the entire ground.
Suárez sprinted to Julien and they crashed into each other in a fierce embrace, each hammering the other's back with both hands, faces lit with raw open joy, laughing at each other and at the situation and at the scoreboard and at the afternoon in general.
Suárez pulled back just far enough to look at Julien directly. He was breathing hard, grinning wide.
"Two and two," he said. "You and me—two each, two goals each. Perfect." He gripped Julien's shoulder once, hard, and then the rest of the teammates arrived and the private moment dissolved into the collective one.
Suárez had scored twice. Julien had assisted twice. Add Julien's two goals and you arrived at a number that told the story of the whole match more completely than any description could: four goal involvements from a single player, in a derby, away from home, at eighteen years and however many months.
He had not merely contributed to this victory. He had authored it.
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