Monday morning at Melwood.
Paul Pogba was halfway through a dramatic reenactment in the middle of the changing room—"So when I dragged the ball past Modrić, I looked up and—" before he caught Klopp staring at him from the doorway with an unreadable look.
Pogba immediately went quiet, dropping his head to scrutinize his bootlaces as if they held the secrets of the universe.
"Chelsea are coming," Klopp said, once everyone had gathered in. "Then it's the Champions League campaign. Then the league."
That was the whole team talk.
Ten goals against the most famous club on the continent, and inside forty-eight hours it was tucked away like a result from the reserves. Robertson, though, taped a printed-out scoreline inside his locker door where nobody else would see it.
Some things get tucked away better than others.
The group stage finished the way it had started.
Away in Bulgaria, a rotated Liverpool side dismantled Ludogorets 3–0 on a freezing night where the substitutes wrapped themselves in heavy coats and thermal blankets.
Then came Basel at Anfield for a dead rubber—top spot in the group long since secured, safe passage to the knockout stages already guaranteed. Klopp made nine changes to the starting eleven.
Julien sat on the bench in his dark grey tracksuit, a heavy fleece blanket draped over his knees, watching the cold rain slick the grass under the floodlights.
Steven Gerrard started in midfield.
Nobody made a grand spectacle of it. The match program barely gave his inclusion more than a brief note. But as Gerrard led the team out of the tunnel, a swell of applause rippled through the Kop—a moment slower than usual, perhaps, but deep and resounding for a match that meant nothing on paper.
For an hour, the game played out like an exhibition. Liverpool drifted into a comfortable 2–0 lead, strolling through the midfield while Basel accepted their fate. The ground took on the loose hum of an end-of-season friendly.
Then, in the sixty-first minute, Liverpool won a free kick twenty-five yards out, slightly left of centre.
Suárez immediately scooped up the ball, intending to place it down. Gerrard walked over and placed a flat hand against his chest.
"Let me have this one."
Suárez looked at him, broke into a wide grin, and stepped back with a sweep of his arm, clearing the stage.
The Kop went hush in reflex the stadium could never unlearn whenever no. 8 stood over a dead ball. Gerrard took four steps backward, looked at the five-man wall, glanced at the top right corner, and settled his gaze on the turf.
He struck it cleanly.
The ball arced smoothly over the dipping wall, bending with lethal precision into the top corner before the Basel goalkeeper could even plant his feet.
"Oh—and it's GERRARD!" The commentator's voice cracked halfway through the name. "Some things you never lose—that is the free kick this crowd has been waiting a year to see again, and on a night he wasn't even meant to be needed!"
Gerrard didn't sprint for the corner flag. He simply stood near the edge of the box, arms extended slightly, head tilted back as the roar swept over him—Steve Gerrard, Gerrard, he'll pass the ball forty yards...—an entire stadium was singing with conviction.
Julien clapped with everyone else on the bench. But watching Gerrard's face, what he saw wasn't really happiness. It more looked like a man desperately trying to cling to a fleeting moment before it slipped away forever.
Liverpool won 4–0, closing out the group stage with six wins from six matches: twenty-five goals scored, three conceded. It was a statistical record Klopp admitted later was far ahead of schedule for a squad still finding its footing.
In the Premier League, Liverpool's rhythm remained unbroken. They won, and won, and won again. Julien found the net in almost every fixture, leading an attack that seemed completely immune to fatigue.
What changed was the world around them.
In Spain, Cristiano Ronaldo had launched into a terrifying streak of form. Six matches for Real Madrid, eight goals, two hat-tricks—each one celebrated with the same ice-cold stare toward the broadcast cameras, like a titan checking off a hit list.
Whatever humiliation had taken place at the Bernabéu, he was burning it as fuel.
In Catalonia, Lionel Messi was responding in kind with a string of masterclass performances, concluding in a stoppage-time winner from an impossible angle that had pundits replaying the footage in disbelief.
As winter set in, the European sports media began reopening a debate that had felt settled a month ago.
"NOT SO FAST?" questioned one major European headline.
"RONALDO'S REVENGE TOUR," splashed another with a full-page photo of the Portuguese forward screaming toward the sky.
On a Sunday morning panel show, three former players spent fifteen minutes debating the Ballon d'Or momentum.
"Julien has been remarkable, no one is denying that," argued a former winger, gesturing energetically. "But football memory is short. Cristiano is finishing the calendar year like a machine. If he keeps this scoring rate up into December, the narrative will surely shift."
The pundit beside him laughed out loud, cutting him off mid-sentence.
"The boy beat Messi in a World Cup final," he snapped. "He scored five against Real Madrid over two legs and put ten past them in aggregate. He's top of the Premier League. What else does he need to do—go out and win next year's trophy as well?"
Online, fans argued endlessly over goal ratios, chance creation stats, and big-match impact.
Julien ignored all of it. He spent his afternoons in the tactical analysis room at Melwood, studying footage of Chelsea, where José Mourinho had spent two full weeks preparing a single defensive directive:
Do not let him turn.
Under the glare of the Stamford Bridge floodlights, Chelsea lined up in a tight, narrow defensive block. Mourinho had assigned two central midfielders a singular task: smother Julien the moment he moved into their zone.
In the sixth minute, a late challenge by Ivanović caught Julien from behind, sweeping his feet out. The referee's whistle blew instantly and showed a yellow card to Ivan without hesitation.
Ever since the recent FA refereeing directives on protecting creative players, officials weren't giving second chances for cynical fouls.
The card didn't ease the impact, though. Julien stayed down on the turf for a few seconds, testing his right ankle before pulling himself up and waving off the medical team.
Sixteen minutes later, it happened again.
Ramires gave a heavy shoulder to Julien's back while his boot trailed across his shin, and where the ref could not see a fistful of jersey will be caught on the turn.
None of them independently warranted a red, but together, they achieved Mourinho's objective: disrupting Liverpool's rhythm and keeping the game scrappy.
At the other end of the pitch, an equally tense drama was unfolding.
Petr Čech was returning to Stamford Bridge for the first time in an opposition shirt.
As he walked out for warm-ups, the entire Shed End stood to applaud him, holding up a massive hand-painted banner that read simply: LEGEND.
Čech raised a gloved hand in acknowledgment, then focused totally on the ball, his face remained incomprehensible.
In the thirty-eighth minute, Chelsea broke quickly down the right wing. A low, whipped cross found Costa at the near post for a first-time flick that looked destined for the bottom corner.
ROAR!
Half the stadium started to rise with noise.
Čech reacted instantly, diving low to his right to tip the ball onto the base of the post before it was cleared. He got back up, brushed the mud from his knees, and did not glance back at the fans who had just been chanting his name.
The half ended 0–0, exactly where Mourinho wanted it.
Inside the away dressing room, the atmosphere was silent. Julien was already seated on the treatment table, his left sock rolled down and an ice pack strapped firmly around his swollen right ankle.
Klopp walked in, closed the door, and stood directly over him.
"How is the foot?"
"It's fine," Julien said.
"Julien."
"It's fine, Boss."
Klopp held his gaze for a long moment, assessing his demeanour.
"If it is not fine, you come off," Klopp said firmly. "I do not care about Zurich in three weeks. I do not care what the newspapers print tomorrow morning."
"I know. I can play."
Klopp stared at him a second longer, then nodded and turned to address the room.
"They are fouling him because they have no other plan," Klopp announced, his voice echoing off the walls. "So, we will have to stop making it easy for them. Paul, N'Golo—drive through the middle. Make their pivot make decisions. Luis, drop five yards deeper and pull their centre-backs out of line. Give Julien space to operate. Philippe, Raheem, stay wide, stretch the width right out."
He looked around at all of them.
"Mourinho thinks shutting down one man wins him this game. Go and show him what the other ten of you can do about that."
The second half began as a war of attrition. Chelsea stayed compact, clogging the passing lanes, frustrating Liverpool's builds for twenty gruelling minutes.
Then came the seventy-first minute.
Pogba intercepted a loose clearance near the halfway line and drove forward with power. As two Chelsea players closed in to choke the angle, Pogba executed a sharp reverse pass to Kanté, who touched it first-time into the central pocket where Julien had stepped away from his marker.
Julien received the ball with his back to goal.
It was the first clean yard of space he had enjoyed all evening.
In a single fluid motion, he dropped his right shoulder, dragged the ball back across his body with his left foot, and left the closing Ramires off-balance. As the Terry lunged in to block, Julien struck it cleanly from twenty-two yards out.
He dropped a shoulder, dragged the ball back across his own body, left the nearest defender Cahill on the floor, and with Terry already committed and lunging, hit it clean from twenty yards with his left foot.
The ball tore through the damp air, staying low and hard, skimming off the slick grass into the bottom left corner before the keeper could fully extend.
"Oh, THAT is a strike!" —the commentator was off his seat before it crossed the line. "Low and fast and there is nothing the goalkeeper can do about that just when you thought Chelsea might actually have found their answer!"
1–0.
Julien didn't head for the corner flag. He sprinted directly to the touchline, where Klopp was already screaming and pounding the roof of the dugout. The two of them embraced on the sideline, roaring over the noise of the crowd.
Mourinho was out of his technical area, gesturing wildly at his defensive line, trying to repair the breach. But the momentum had shifted. Chelsea, so disciplined for seventy minutes, began to fracture under the sudden pressure.
In the ninetieth minute, Julien picked up the ball near the centre circle with Terry and Cahill teaming and stepping out to meet him.
Instead of taking them on, he paused for a fraction of a second, waited for the gap between them to widen, and slipped a perfectly weighted needle-pass through the line. Suárez was already on his bike, collecting the ball in run and calmly lifting it over the advancing keeper.
Chelsea 0–2 Liverpool.
When the final whistle blew, Čech walked toward the Shed End, unstrapping his gloves. Despite the defeat, thousands of home supporters remained in their seats to clap him off the pitch.
Julien walked toward the tunnel with an arm slung over Pogba's shoulder, limping noticeably, his ankle throbbed and his shirt stretched from nineties of physical battling. But the scoreboard read 2–0, and that was the only metric that mattered.
The scoreboard still said Liverpool, though, which was the only line that made it into the headlines.
José Mourinho's post-match press conference was brief and characteristically candid.
"For seventy minutes, we executed our strategy," Mourinho said, leaning into the microphone. "We were organized. We controlled the space."
A reporter asked what broke down in the final twenty minutes.
Mourinho showed a faint, dry smile.
"With most players, you physical them enough and something changes in their mind. They lose their focus. They spend more energy arguing with the referee than playing football." He paused. "With this one, the harder you kick him, the better he plays. I don't know how you train that into a player. I'm not sure you can buy it, either."
He stood up, gathering his coat, and paused near the door before adding over his shoulder,
"If anybody works out how to stop him, ring me. I'll pay whatever they ask." A moment later, he continued. "For once, I mean it."
The Monday morning headlines reflected a decisive shift.
Sky Sports: JULIEN PLAYS ON THROUGH THE PAIN AS LIVERPOOL SURVIVE THEIR HARDEST NIGHT.
The Times: THEY TRIED TO STOP HIM. THEY ONLY MADE HIM BETTER.
The small corner of the internet that had spent a fortnight talking up the comeback went quiet, and stayed that way for a while.
That same afternoon, FIFA officially narrowed the Ballon d'Or shortlist from twenty-three names down to the final three finalists, as voted on by national team captains, managers, and international journalists.
Julien De Rocca.
Cristiano Ronaldo.
Lionel Messi.
The three names nobody had seriously doubted since September. What surprised people was the order—because even after Ronaldo's run and Messi's December, for the first time in almost a decade, the man standing ahead of the two iconic rivals who'd spent that decade swapping the trophy between them was neither of them.
Ronaldo said nothing publicly. Messi put out two careful sentences through Barcelona's press office—an honour to be named alongside two players he respected, best wishes to everyone involved.
When the news broke, Julien was sitting in the Melwood canteen eating lunch. Pogba burst through the double doors at full speed, holding his phone in the air like a trophy, shouting a string of incoherent sentences.
At the far end of the table, Kanté looked up from his plate, gave a calm nod, and went back to his food.
"Good," he said.
"Good?" Pogba stared at him. "That's genuinely all you've got?"
"It was always going to be him." Kanté replied simply.
"You are impossible to talk to, N'Golo."
"I am just realistic."
Julien finished his lunch with a smile and didn't say much either way, which was usually how he handled things like this.
________________________________________________________
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