The match kicked off in earnest, and Anfield’s fever bloomed open completely holding nothing back.
The roaring wave of sound across the whole ground never once let up.
The chanting of tens of thousands of red-clad supporters swept over everything, deep and thunderous.
The waving flags, the shirts, all were merging together into one vast red sea, rolling and churning, endlessly, across the stands.
This sea was loud beyond belief, while mixed in with the chanting and roaring was a rawness, a restlessness unique to English terraces, along with more than a few supporters hurling out bursts of foul language at the Tottenham players.
Every kind of sound imaginable, all at once.
Beside him, Ethan had already thrown himself completely into the fever, standing the entire time, shouting hoarsely, his emotions were swinging wildly with every shift in attack and defence.
This was love, in its purest form.
Dean sat in the middle of the crowd, though he wasn’t settling into it nearly as naturally as Ethan was.
He felt a little stiff, and held back.
A certain distance from the whole spectacle.
This was the first time in his life he’d ever watched a football match in person.
Before this, his life had basically only ever consisted of school—he’d never once been close to a match, to the roaring fever of supporters.
Yet fate had a strange sense of humour.
He hadn’t even properly grasped football’s full appeal yet, and he’d already stepped through the door into professional academy football, onto the very path so many people spent their whole lives dreaming of.
He didn’t push back against the noise.
He just sat quietly, taking it in, letting himself adjust.
The ringing in his ears gradually became something he was used to, and the surging crowd around him, the swelling emotion, the sheer intensity of the fever, seeped into him a little at a time.
Bit by bit, it eased the unfamiliarity, and he found himself trying to actually understand what made this game so uniquely captivating.
The first half was tightly fought, deadlocked—Liverpool held no clear advantage, both sides were locked in a tense pull of attack and defence, with only a handful of genuinely sharp attacking moments.
Then, in the thirty-fifth minute, the match delivered its first real, glorious chance to score.
Liverpool won a corner.
A Tottenham player, clearing the ball in a panic inside the box, very nearly put it into his own net—the ball cannoned hard off the goalpost and bounced clear off the byline.
Clang!
The sound of the post shuddering seemed to carry across the entire ground.
The very next instant, the whole stand let out one long, unified groan of disappointment, countless fans were clutching their heads, hands over their faces, regret was across every one of their faces.
Ethan, worked up beyond words, stamped his foot and roared at the top of his lungs.
“God!
How did that not go in?!
So close!”
Dean looked out at the pitch, and felt a small pang of regret settle in him too.
For the first time, he understood that one goal, one moment won or lost in an attack, could hold the heartbeat of tens of thousands of people in its grip—that this small, ordinary ball could carry this much weight over people’s emotions. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
Barely a minute later, the match threw up another twist.
Gerrard struck decisively inside the box, and the ball caught the outstretched arm of a Tottenham player—Ledley King, also Gerrard’s teammate on the national side.
The whole crowd shot to their feet at once, every arm was thrown up, screaming for the foul, waiting on the referee to point to the spot.
But the referee on duty didn’t react at all.
He waved play on at once, decisively, refusing to award the penalty.
In that instant, Anfield completely erupted.
Liverpool’s players swarmed the referee immediately, gesturing, arguing their case with everything they had.
Up in the stands, tens of thousands of supporters exploded with fury all at once—a storm of curses, jeers, and furious howls swallowed the whole ground whole.
“Penalty!
That’s a stone-cold penalty!
Are you blind?!”
“Bloody referee!
How do you not give that, a handball that obvious!”
“You’re wrecking the match, you absolute wanker!
You don’t understand the first thing about football!”
Raw curses, indignant howls, and jeers were rolling on and on, one after another.
Every single supporter’s face had gone red, veins were standing out on their necks.
Furious, every one of them was at the injustice done to their team.
Ethan lost all restraint too, cursing right along with the whole crowd, filled with the same indignation.
Dean sat in the middle of the restless crowd, not joining in the cursing.
Grandma’s teaching from childhood was carved into him: treat people with civility, never let foul, careless language out of your mouth.
But Grandma had never taught him what to do when he faced loathing, or was insulted.
So, over the years, growing up, Dean had worked out his own rule for surviving: don’t go looking for trouble, don’t swear—but if someone deliberately humiliates you, treats you unjustly, hit back directly, and never back down.
A personality that looked, on the surface, oddly split in two had settled onto Dean, this way.
On one side, an everyday gentleness.
And on the other, an absolute capacity for violence.
Dean looked around him now, at every single supporter—faces flushed, arguing their case, emotions completely unchecked.
He understood their anger.
But no matter how the whole crowd protested, no matter how much they raged, the referee’s decision wasn’t going to change.
A scoreline like that clearly wasn’t going to satisfy Anfield’s supporters.
Through the fifteen minutes of halftime, the stands stayed just as lively, clusters of supporters were standing around in twos and threes, endlessly going back over the first half.
“If Kuyt’s movement had been a bit sharper, that chance a minute ago was absolutely on!”
“Gerrard’s long-range effort just needed a touch more power behind it, a bit more precision and that’s in!”
“Bloody hell, that referee, that was a stone-cold penalty!”
“Useless referee, he must’ve been paid off!”
“Alonso played one pass that was inch-perfect, shame his teammate wasn’t quite on the same page, didn’t get onto it in time—that would’ve been a real threat too…”
Fragments of conversation drifted around him.
Dean listened quietly to all of it, his eyes were fixed on the pitch, quietly putting himself into the picture.
Running back through the first half in his head.
Thinking to himself: if he were the one standing out on that pitch, in that same position, how would he have moved, how would he have linked play, how would he have seized the chance?
Beside him, Ethan was still buzzing, not the slightest bit deflated by the goalless scoreline at the break.
Making the most of the interval, he kept right on filling Dean in.
He got onto the subject of Liverpool’s man in charge right now—Benítez.
“You know what, that bald Spaniard—he’s the one Coach Heighway likes least, but the man’s an absolute top-tier manager, no argument.”
Ethan rattled it off like he knew it by heart.
“He managed Valencia before this—won two La Liga titles there, one UEFA Cup.
And in his very first year at Liverpool, he went and won the Champions League with them.
Nothing else comes close to that.
But he’s fiercely ambitious, wants total control over everything—always wanted the kind of absolute authority Ferguson has.
Transfers, the academy system, facilities, every single part of the club, he wants to run it all himself.
He genuinely believes total, centralized control is the only thing that’s actually good for the club long-term.
And that’s exactly why his relationship with Kirkby is so bad.
There’ve been rumours in the papers for a while now that Benítez wants to overhaul the whole academy system completely—it’s just been held off by the people above him, for now.”
Hearing this, Dean’s brow furrowed slightly.
If this Spanish manager really did take a hatchet to the academy system, would his own hard-won scholar contract just get cancelled, straight out?
That was a hundred and ten pounds a week on the line!
Still, he told himself this kind of high-level power struggle probably had nothing to do with a transparent, low-level academy kid like himself.
Besides, this was a contract Dalglish had personally fought to get him.
Even a brand-new management regime would surely think twice before openly disrespecting Dalglish, wouldn’t they?
In the middle of Ethan’s non-stop chatter, the second half began.