Dean kept up a steady pace the whole way, running through the old streets of West Derby, past the residential edges of the city.
He followed the main road all the way out to the Kirkby training ground.
A full hour of long-distance running, covering the whole width of the city, didn’t weigh on him much at all.
His stamina had never been like anyone else’s.
By the time he reached the gates of the Kirkby academy, he was only slightly out of breath, about right for a warm-up before training.
By then, the sky had fully brightened.
Once Dean had a word with the man on gate duty, he walked into the office building and went straight to find Steve Heighway’s office.
Heighway, seeing Dean arrive right on time, gave a flicker of approval.
He’d only just gotten there himself, a little while before.
There were still droplets of rain clinging to him.
Dean, meanwhile, had hair soaked clean through.
Heighway pointed to a training bag on the sofa.
“That’s your kit from now on.
Look after it.”
Dean nodded and picked it up, checking it over briefly: roughly two sets of training kit, along with proper football socks and thickened shin pads, it was the usual equipment.
Dean wasn’t a complete blank slate on football anymore, either—he’d spent the evening before going through the basics properly with Ethan.
He had at least a rough grasp of it now.
Heighway looked at Dean.
“I’ll be training you one-on-one today.
I’m not putting you into any squad for the time being.”
Hearing that this was down to business, Dean focused in a little more.
Heighway explained his thinking.
“Your situation right now is unusual.
Your age sits awkwardly in between groups, and you’ve got a completely blank slate when it comes to football basics.
Put you in with the younger age group, and the pace of training is too slow—it’d waste your talent completely.
Put you in with the older group, and your total lack of grounding becomes a fatal weakness—you’d never keep up with that intensity.
So, for now, you’ll train one-on-one with me on the fundamentals.
Once your footwork and your basic feel for the game take shape, I’ll match you with whichever squad suits you best based on how you’re coming along.”
The plan was thorough and well thought out.
Dean took it all in clearly, and nodded again and again.
He’d already decided he’d follow whatever plan he was given.
Whatever Heighway said, that’s what he’d do.
He was treating this as a job.
A hundred and ten pounds a week!
The two of them walked out of the office building together and headed toward the most out-of-the-way training pitch on the site.
It was still early.
The whole academy grounds sat cold and empty, with no players training anywhere yet.
The place usually didn’t become active until closer to mid-morning, when the various squads would trickle in, one after another, to start their day’s training.
“Warm up first.” Heighway gestured toward the pitch.
Dean spoke up at once.
“Boss, I ran here from West Derby.
I’m already fully warmed up.”
Heighway paused, caught off guard.
“You live in West Derby?
And you ran the whole way here?”
Dean nodded, serious.
Heighway couldn’t help letting out an exclamation of disbelief.
“Incredible, kid.
Sounds like Kenny wasn’t exaggerating one bit—you were born with a set of lungs made of iron.
That’s a gift straight from God.
Out on a football pitch, there’s no substitute for it, none at all.
When every other player on the pitch has run themselves dry by the seventieth minute, cramping up, form falling apart—you’ll still be running strong.
Then, he pulled his amazement back in, his expression was turning serious.
“Listen, Dean.”
Dean found himself straightening his back without meaning to.
“I understand your situation.
Thirteen years old, never seriously touched a football before.
To most people, starting from zero at this age is far too late—there’s basically no realistic path forward.
But to me, you’re a completely clean sheet of paper.
No bad habits, no fixed, wrong movements baked in.
That puts you in a far stronger position than most so-called prodigies out there, who are covered in bad habits so deep they’re nearly impossible to correct.
I’m not going to turn you into some player who just runs mindless shuttle runs, who only does the dirty, thankless work on the pitch.
What I want to build is a footballing brain—someone who can stay calm and keep thinking clearly under the highest pressure, someone who controls the rhythm of the whole game.
Your stamina is a top-tier gift you were simply born with.
That means, across a full ninety minutes, your energy will never run dry.
When everyone else is falling apart late in the game, that’s exactly when you’ll be the one controlling it.
Down the line, I want to shape you into this team’s metronome—either as a deep-lying playmaker, controlling the whole match through your passing, dictating the tempo of attack and defence, the way Xabi Alonso does.
Or as a complete, box-to-box midfielder, covering every blade of grass, both attack and defence in one, the way Gerrard does.
We’re not going to waste time on flashy tricks that look good and mean nothing.
We’re going to train the most useful fundamentals there are.
I want your first touch to feel as natural as breathing.
I want every single pass you play to have the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.
Ready?”
Dean’s eyes hardened at once, and he gave a firm, forceful nod.
“I’m ready.”
“Good.”
Heighway pointed toward a flat, high wall at the side of the pitch.
“Today, we’re starting the first piece of training—the foundation underneath every technical skill there is.
Passing.
This whole week, we’re not doing any running, any physical duels, any tactics.
We’re just building your feel for the ball.
See that wall?
Pass the ball against it.
A hundred reps with your left foot, a hundred with your right, per set.
I want to hear a clean, sharp ‘thwack, thwack, thwack.’ Every single pass has to be steady.
Accurate.
Remember the key principles: your standing foot planted firmly on the ground, your toes always pointed straight at your target, fixed in place, not moving.
The inside of your striking foot locked in place at the angle you’re generating power from—steady as stone, no wobble, no drift.”
As he spoke, Heighway stepped up himself to demonstrate—planting his standing foot firmly, pushing the ball with the inside of his foot, the ball was striking the wall and rebounding back.
“See that clearly?”
Dean watched his every movement intently, committing each detail to memory, and nodded firmly.
“Got it.”
“Then get started.”
With that instruction, Dean stepped forward at once, took the ball, and set himself up in front of the wall to begin.
For the first several dozen touches, his rawness showed clearly.
His standing foot drifted out of position now and then, the angle of force from the inside of his foot wasn’t steady, and the ball would either skew off and hit the sides of the wall or come back at some erratic, unpredictable rhythm, never settling cleanly back at his feet.
But Dean stayed completely focused, running through every mistake quickly after each touch.
Fine-tuning his stance, the force he put into it, exactly where the ball met his foot.
Over and over.
And through this repeated, touch-by-touch process,
The blue bead on the left was climbing at a rate he could see happening in real time, growing far faster than the faint increases he’d seen before.
Whenever he took a break between sets, Dean found himself thinking it through.
His own blank slate, his complete lack of any background, was precisely his biggest advantage.
It meant there was so much more room to grow.
The dull, repetitive foundational training became, in his eyes, the fastest possible shortcut to improving himself.
At first, Heighway had kept stepping in now and then from the sideline to correct small details.
“Standing foot locked, don’t let it wobble!”
“Softer with the force, control how hard you’re passing!”
“Lock the inside of your foot, don’t let the power leak out!”
But little by little, his corrections came less and less often.
He gradually stopped moving altogether, standing rooted in place, a look of disbelief was creeping into his eyes.
He’d coached academy football for decades, worked with countless gifted boys, and never once seen a player with zero background adapt at a speed this frightening.
Dean’s ability to learn, his raw, natural feel for the ball, was completely beyond anything reasonable.
An ordinary kid learning to pass from scratch needed days, sometimes weeks, to work out the stiffness in their movements and find the right rhythm of force.
But Dean only needed to see it demonstrated once, hear a few words of guidance, and he grasped the core principle at once.
Any mistake got corrected immediately, the very next touch.
His movements went from raw and stiff at the start to properly standardized at breathtaking speed, and the sound of the ball hitting the wall and rebounding grew crisper and crisper.
“Thwack, thwack, thwack…”
The rhythm began to settle into something steady.
What was most staggering of all was his physical condition.
Two hundred touches per set, five sets, a thousand touches of continuous passing training in total—repeating the exact same, mind-numbingly dull motion the whole time, a massive drain on both focus and stamina.
Even Kirkby’s strongest players in the older age group would come out of a thousand touches of passing drills breathing hard, their legs gone heavy.
But Dean held steady the entire way through, only slightly out of breath.
Thwack!
The final touch!
A thousand touches of foundational passing training, completed in full.
Heighway held down the shock rising in him.
He’d been watching Dean closely, not just for his adaptability, and not just for his stamina.
He’d noticed something else too, something even more staggering.
He walked over to stand in front of Dean and asked, “Kid, after training this long, which foot feels more comfortable to you—more natural—for striking the ball?
Left, or right?”
This was the single most important question in scouting a young player.
The overwhelming majority of players have one clearly dominant foot.
Being weak on the “wrong” foot is a near-universal issue in football; the rare, genuinely two-footed player is an exceptionally scarce kind of talent.
And what he’d just watched suggested there might be no real difference between Dean’s left foot and his right at all.
Dean lowered his head and thought for a moment, carefully recalling how it had felt switching between feet during the drills, the sensation of generating power with each.
Then he looked up and answered.
“About the same.
No real difference.
Striking the ball with either foot feels almost exactly as comfortable.”
He had, of course, no idea what “having a weak foot” even meant in football terms.
But, this simple answer, landing in Heighway’s ears, set off something enormous inside him.
Almost certainly no weak foot at all!
A thirteen-year-old boy, coming to football from absolute zero, in his very first structured training session, showing off what looked like near-perfect two-footed balance!
Extraordinary stamina.
A world-class feel for space on the pitch.
And now this—the ability to learn and self-correct, a natural feel for the ball…
and on top of all of that, now this rare, almost unheard-of lack of a weak foot!
Heighway broke into a smile.
He understood it now, completely.
Dean wasn’t a blank sheet of paper at all.
This was a once-in-a-generation talent, delivered by God’s own hand, straight to Kirkby—straight to Liverpool.