Heighway didn’t let on about any of this right away, though.
Instead, he just said, “Right, you two keep training.
Don’t talk a bigger game than you can back up.
Let’s see it.”
The two of them nodded and carried on.
With Heighway himself saying so, was there really any option but to keep going?
Onward.
With that groundwork already laid, once they picked back up, Conor and Dean’s play together flowed smoothly.
The back-and-forth passing came clean and sharp.
Dean’s performance, in fact, bore out every bit of Conor’s praise—there wasn’t the faintest trace of a zero-background newcomer on his first day of proper football training.
Heighway couldn’t help but marvel to himself: this was exactly what talent looked like.
Dean’s starting point was already the finish line for most people.
Even with how stunned he was inside, none of it showed on his face.
“Speed it up.”
He suddenly spoke, pushing the two of them to lift the pace of the drill further.
“Keep the ball moving faster, no hesitation.”
At the instruction, Conor picked up the tempo of the passing at once.
This kind of high-intensity, fast-paced combination play put stamina, focus, and reaction speed all to a severe test.
Conor had assumed Dean wouldn’t be able to keep up.
But Dean kept pace!
After a short time, if anything, it was Conor who started struggling—a small error crept into one of his passes, forcing Dean to cover a few extra steps to reach it.
Heighway’s brow furrowed, just slightly.
Conor noticed this, and it rattled him a little.
Years at Kirkby, and now he was going to get shown up by some brand-new kid?
And so, the next time Conor played the ball, he slipped a little extra spin onto it, with a bit of silent mischief.
The moment Dean received it, the ball skidded away from him.
He knocked it back under control at once, thought about it for a second, then carried on with the drill as if nothing had happened.
But he’d already started watching Conor’s technique closely.
After a few more rounds of passing back and forth—
Thwack!
Dean sent one back with a bit of spin of his own, and Conor, clearly not expecting Dean to return the favour, fumbled his first touch—the ball skidded five meters away from him.
Conor stuck a hand out toward Dean.
“Mine, mine, my bad.”
Then hurried off to fetch the ball.
That moment left Heighway deeply stunned all over again.
He’d seen plenty of gifted players in his time.
He’d never seen one quite like Dean.
Dalglish’s recommendation had gotten Dean through the door at Kirkby—but this one short morning of training performance alone was already enough to secure his place there for good.
He was becoming the single most worthwhile prospect at the whole academy to invest everything in.
Time slipped steadily by.
Half an hour of high-intensity work came to an end in what felt like no time at all.
The instant training was called to a stop, Conor doubled straight over, hands braced on his knees, gasping for air.
He’d wanted to run Dean’s stamina into the ground—and had ended up running his own into the ground instead.
Conor had actually been carrying a small grievance about Dean, if he was honest with himself—no one had ever seen a brand-new signing get placed straight into the U16s; he himself had climbed there one level at a time, the hard way.
But now, that feeling had completely vanished.
If anything, he felt like the one who’d just taken the hit.
Years of training, and it still couldn’t match what this kid had shown in one single day.
Dean’s breathing had stayed more or less steady the whole time—tired, but nowhere near as wrecked.
After catching his breath a bit, Conor spoke up.
“God, you’re an absolute freak.
Are you really only thirteen?”
Dean, in that moment, was still turning over the feel of that last exchange of passes in his mind.
A satisfaction he’d never felt before was quietly taking root in him.
Unlike school—fighting, studying, the same unchanging routine day after day, football training gave him something purely, straightforwardly positive.
He could actually see himself getting better.
He suddenly realized he might genuinely be starting to love this sport.
Hearing Conor’s question, Dean gave a simple explanation.
“I’ve been running for as long as I can remember.”
Conor heard that and couldn’t help giving him a thumbs up.
He was completely won over.
Heighway glanced at the time—closing in on eleven and spoke up to wrap things.
“That’s it for today’s training.”
He turned to Conor and gave him instructions.
“Take Dean to meet the rest of the U16 lads.
Go find him a spare locker in the changing room.”
“For now, he’ll keep training on his own—no rush getting him fully into the squad yet—but he’ll be training with the team eventually, so let’s get everyone acquainted with each other first.”
Conor nodded at once.
“Right you are, boss!”
Heighway turned and walked off to keep handling the academy’s business.
The two of them packed up their training gear on the sideline together and walked side by side toward the U16 squad’s training pitch.
But seeing that the U16 session had already wrapped up, they headed straight for the changing room instead.
On the way, Conor still couldn’t contain his excitement, grinning as he talked.
“The lads are going to be completely shocked once they see what you can do.
You’re seriously something else.”
Dean gave a light shrug.
“Maybe.”
As they chatted, Conor suddenly remembered something and asked, curious, “Oh, by the way—your school, Bishop John Catholic, has an official youth partnership with Liverpool.
There’s a summer camp and a winter camp selection every year, and a lot of the lads got into Kirkby through those school programs.
With how good you are, how come you never came to trial earlier?”
Dean’s steps faltered slightly, and he gave a simple explanation.
“My grandmother wouldn’t let me play before.
She doesn’t have any objection to it now, so that’s why I’ve come.”
Then, Dean turned the question back around.
“What about you?
Did you start training early on?”
Bringing up his own history, Conor talked easily and at length.
“I started young, training at Rainford Rangers back in St Helens.
A Liverpool scout spotted me at a youth match later on, and I’ve been training here ever since.”
The two of them kept chatting as they walked, and it didn’t take long for them to grow easy with each other.
A teenager’s openness, with nothing held back.
Conor even laid out his own embarrassing stories, completely unfiltered.
“…Ha, when I was ten, I actually snuck a kiss off the neighbour’s daughter—she was twelve.
No idea where she’s ended up now, though, hope she remembers it.
I mean, that was my first kiss—if she doesn’t even remember me, that’d be pretty rough.”
Dean laughed.
“Sounds like you’ve had an eventful life.
That stopped Conor cold for a second, his face was full of disbelief.
“God, you really are completely different from the rest of us.”
Conor looked Dean over with curiosity all over his face.
“So, how’d you get so good at fighting, then?
Boxing?
Karate?
Something like that?”
He threw a couple of clumsy air-punches to demonstrate.
Dean shook his head.
“Nothing like that.
I just got into a lot of fights.”
Conor blinked.
“You’re telling me you learned just by fighting people?”
“Pretty much.”
Conor laughed.
“Remind me never to annoy you.”
The two of them looked at each other and burst out laughing together.
After a short time, they’d crossed the corridor through the training area, and Conor pushed open the door to the U16 changing room, Dean was following behind.
Dean’s brow furrowed at once.
That smell…
A tangled mix of odors hit him all at once, and Dean nearly gagged.
The changing room itself was a mess.
Football boots of every color lay scattered across the floor, shin pads of mismatched sizes had been carelessly tossed under the benches, and bags and training socks sat scattered haphazardly across the seats.
Someone was scrubbing at wet hair with a dry towel; a couple of small clusters of boys stood around, muttering complaints about a teammate who’d fumbled a ball during the earlier internal match…
When the door opened, nobody paid it much attention at first.
But then someone spotted Dean and laughed.
“Heh heh heh, this the new kid Heighway was on about?”
Heighway had mentioned to them earlier, during their own training, that a new player would be joining the squad.
But nobody had known any of the specifics.
A wave of curious looks turned toward Dean, more than a few of them were openly appraising.
Dean had seen looks like this plenty of times before.
New faces always attracted attention in any place.
Conor caught the shift in mood and stepped in immediately, introducing Dean to everyone with confidence.
“Right, lads, let me introduce you.
This is Dean Scott.”
The words landed, and Conor paused deliberately for two seconds, an exaggerated look was spreading across his face.
“I need to tell you all something, and I need you to really listen.
Before he stepped into Kirkby today to train under Coach Heighway, Dean had never had a single day of proper football training.
Not one.
Absolute zero background.”
The instant those words landed.
Every U16 player sizing Dean up had disbelief all over his face.
Impossible!
Never played football before, never had any academy training at all?
Then how on earth could he just drop straight into Liverpool’s U16 squad, out of nowhere?
After all, every single one of them had come up grinding through various academy clubs since they were small, surviving round after round of selection, endless rounds of competition and cuts, just to scrape their way into Kirkby and hold on to a place in the U16s.
And now some zero-background newcomer had just dropped straight into their squad, out of the blue.
The whole thing sat completely outside anything they understood.
One doubtful gaze after another turned back toward Dean.