Suárez, seated beside him, reached across to tap his arm once.
Pascoe moved on. "Steven—another ten to fifteen minutes, then I'm bringing you off around the hour mark. Henderson and Kanté are more than capable of managing the tempo from there. You're important to us, and Sunday is more important than these remaining minutes."
Gerrard gave a single nod with no argunt, and no expression of reluctance. "No problem."
"Third substitution, I'll read the ga as we go. If Norwich give us nothing, we rotate the remaining starters early. If they find so urgency sohow, we reassess."
He turned to the tactics board and wrote one word: CONTROL.
"Second-half instruction is simple. Slow it down. Keep the ball. There's no reason to press at the sa intensity when we're three up—that only risks injury and wastes energy we'll need on Sunday. Norwich are ntally done. They won't co at us with anything dangerous. Let them chase shadows if they want, but don't give them anything to chase."
He stepped back from the board and looked around the room one final ti. The word still on the board behind him, stark and clear.
"I know so of you want to keep attacking and run up the score—I understand the feeling, and normally I'd encourage it. But today is about being smart. Show the intelligence to protect what matters. Win this match, advance to the quarter-finals, and then go to the Emirates on Sunday and take three points from Arsenal. Do that, and there'll be plenty of ti to celebrate." He smiled. "Deal?"
"Deal!" The response ca back as unified and instantly, resonating off the tiled walls with conviction.
Victory does sothing to a dressing room that nothing else can replicate.
After weeks of tactical uncertainty, managerial disruption, and the particular anxiety of a club in transition, a dominant three-goal lead at half-ti had restored confidence and reminded everyone in that room what they were capable of when the system was working and the talent was trusted.
One victory can boost a squad's belief the way months of positive training sessions sotis cannot.
For Julien, sitting quietly with a towel draped across his shoulders while his teammates traded jokes and analysis around him, the thought turning in his mind was not about Norwich at all. It was about Sunday.
Arsenal. The Emirates. Arsène Wenger.
He gave a small smile at the irony.
There had been a version of events where he might have ended up working under Wenger, where Julien and the great French manager would have been on the sa side of the technical area.
Arsenal's financial constraints had made it impossible, and in hindsight that constraint had resolved itself perfectly. But now he was about to face Wenger as an opponent, and that carried its own kind of appeal.
Wenger was managing through his own difficulties, Julien had gathered from recent news cycles.
The injury reports surrounding Arsenal had been almost funnily continuous, hardly a week passed without another first-team player joining the treatnt room.
Most recently, The Daily Mail had reported Wenger's intention to sign West Ham's Moroccan defender Winston Reid during the January window, driven by the very real possibility that captain Thomas Vermaelen would seek a January move to guarantee his place in Belgium's World Cup squad.
With Koscielny and rtesacker occupying the primary center-back roles, Vermaelen faced a choice between regular football elsewhere and a bench seat at Arsenal, however prestigious that bench might be.
anwhile on the opposite flank of Wenger's squad concerns, Theo Walcott had attracted the attention of Monaco's ambitious recruitnt machine.
According to reports, Monaco who'd arrived back in French football's top tier that sumr ard with extraordinary financial resources and imdiately spent €166 million on Falcao, Jas Rodríguez, Moutinho, and Kondogbia had identified Walcott as a priority January target at approximately £34 million, the kind of figure that Arsenal's financial structure made genuinely difficult to refuse.
Walcott was currently injured, sidelined since the Champions League victory over Marseille, but expected to return within a fortnight. In a squad already missing Podolski and Oxlade-Chamberlain to injury, his pace and directness represented an attacking breadth that Wenger could not afford to surrender.
Julien shook his head slightly with sothing between sympathy and regretful recognition.
Wenger's predicant was genuinely difficult to watch, even from a rival's perspective.
Here was one of football's great managers, a builder of teams and careers spanning decades, trapped in a cycle of selling talent to fund infrastructure obligations, directing a never-ending injury crisis with inadequate squad depth, and doing it all while maintaining the dignified refusal to complain publicly that had defined his tenure.
Eight years without a trophy, and the pressures only compounding.
And yet though he recognized Wenger's predicant with genuine empathy, he had absolutely no intention of letting it influence how Liverpool approached Sunday's match. Arsenal's difficulties were Wenger's to solve. Liverpool's obligation was simply to win.
Arsenal had endured eight years without silverware. Liverpool had waited more than twenty years for a Premier League title. There was no competitive rcy available to anyone in this business, and none had been asked for.
The buzzer sounded.
It was ti to go back out.
The tactical adjustnt was visible from the opening minutes of the second half, it was a noticeable gear-change in Liverpool's tempo, the pressing intensity dialed down, the ball was circulating more patiently through deeper positions.
When Norwich's substitutions filtered down to the players still on the pitch, and when Julien failed to erge from the tunnel alongside his teammates, the visitors' body language shifted.
Several Norwich players exchanged glances. Shoulders dropped a fraction. The specific tension of defending against soone who has beaten you three tis in forty-five minutes had been removed from their afternoon.
Raheem Sterling entered instead, he was quick, technically skillful, not the sa kind of threat but a constant irritant who kept defenders honest and the ball moving.
Liverpool kept possession leisurely.
Kanté and Henderson patrolled the center of the pitch, recycling the ball carefully and pressing quickly when Norwich won possession in their own half.
The crowd, liberated from any actual concern about the result, turned the second half into sothing closer to a party with noise not of anxiety but of genuine, uncompromised enjoynt.
As Colin had predicted, Norwich raised no aningful challenge. Hughton had clearly reassessed his priorities during the interval. His team defended with nurical discipline rather than pushing bodies into attacking positions that left them vulnerable to further humiliation.
The logic was sound: protect the players' confidence and physical reserves for the league battle ahead, don't compound the scoreline by chasing a ga that was already lost.
It was pragmatic, unheroic managent, but managent nonetheless.
Pascoe substituted Gerrard at fifty-eight minutes who received a reception that acknowledged not just his contribution today but everything accumulated across a remarkable career at this club.
Suárez ca off shortly afterward, drawing thunderous appreciation that continued well after he'd disappeared down the tunnel. In their places ca players grateful for the opportunity, grateful for minutes in a ga that had already been decided.
The caras, as they often do when the competitive tension has dissipated, began roaming the stands for human monts. Late in the second half, a broadcast director noticed sothing in the Kop's middle section and held on it.
A young boy perhaps nine or ten years old, wearing a Liverpool shirt three sizes too large with the sleeves folded back to his wrists was holding up a piece of card torn from what appeared to be a program.
The writing on it was large and slightly uneven, the letters pressed hard with what was clearly a marker pen, the final word decorated with underlines to give it emphasis, and at the very end, a hand-drawn red heart.
The sign read:
"Three things we love: Anfield, winning, and JULIEN" ❤
The cara held on it for a long mont. Long enough for the image to reach the stadium's enormous screens, where it appeared alongside the live match feed. Long enough for fans in surrounding rows to notice and point it out to each other, creating a spreading ripple of affection through that section of the Kop.
And long enough for it to reach Julien in the technical area with a training vest over his Liverpool shirt, watching the match restlessly like soone who'd rather be on the pitch.
He turned toward the screen and read the sign twice.
Then he raised his hand toward that section of the stand in a simple wave directed at the boy with the sign.
The caras caught that too.
The boy's both hands were flying to cover his mouth, his eyes were enormous, bouncing imdiately in his seat as he turned to whoever was beside him completely unable to process the fact that Julien had seen the sign, had looked directly at it, and had waved.
Tweet.
The referee's final whistle landed gently over a ground still full of noise and warmth.
Three-nil.
Liverpool through to the EFL Cup quarter-finals. Three more victories, and the club that hadn't claid a dostic cup since 2012, that hadn't lifted a league title since 1990, would have earned sothing tangible to show for all the recent investnt and upheaval.
Three more matches.
A quarter-final, a semi-final, a final.
An entirely achievable sequence of events, each one requiring only that a football team plays better than its opponent on a given day.
The players celebrated with joy. Handshakes, embraces, laughter were shared between substitutes who'd contributed and starters who'd done the heavy work.
Colin Pascoe moved among them with genuine delight watching his team win who happens to be standing in the technical area.
When the final whistle blew, while teammates clustered in small groups to share the mont, Julien walked directly toward the stand where the young boy with the handmade sign was still visible.
________________________________________________________
Check out my patreon where you can read more chapters:
patreon/LorianFiction
Thanks for your support!
User Comments
0 comments from readers