Julien stood at the mouth of the tunnel with his fingertips moving unconsciously along the hem of his shirt, tracing the stitching in small repeated strokes while his mind was somewhere else.
The noise was already enormous, arriving in waves, each one pressing against the last before it had fully receded.
This was the Emirates Stadium.
And somewhere inside the red and white wall of sound that lived in these stands, there was a history he had been aware of long before tonight.
The 1971 Double.
The back five that George Graham built into something close to a defensive religion with Adams, Bould, Dixon, Winterburn, Keown and the unbeaten season that back five helped make possible.
The 2003-04 Invincibles, forty-nine league matches without a defeat, a record that still stood alone at the summit of the English game and would probably stand there for the rest of his career.
Bergkamp's turn against Newcastle, one touch, a change of direction so sudden it seemed to exist outside the normal rules of what a human body could do, and then the finish.
Henry's runs, those long accelerating diagonals that defenders positioned correctly for and still couldn't stop.
Vieira commanding the center of the pitch with the kind of authority that made the space around him feel like his personal territory.
These were some of the reference points in Julien's football education, the moments he had replayed on a screen in his room as a teenager trying to understand what this game could be at its highest.
And the man responsible for most of it was standing somewhere on the other side of this tunnel, in a long dark coat, hands clasped behind his back.
Arsène Wenger.
Julien had never had a simple way of thinking about him. He was something more than just a successful manager.
He was and Julien recognized how this sounded, but found it accurate anyway, proof of what football could be when someone brilliant enough and stubborn enough decided to treat it as an art form rather than a competition.
The way his teams played, the specific quality of the movement he had taught a generation of players to produce, the aesthetic conviction that ran underneath his entire philosophy, it made you fall in love with a club without quite understanding why, made you watch Arsenal and feel something that went beyond wanting them to win or lose.
People said it constantly: I support Arsenal because of Wenger.
Julien had heard that from fans of a dozen different nationalities, people who had no geographic or tribal connection to north London, who had discovered football through the specific beauty of what this man had built and simply never left.
There was a romantic pull to it that most managers in the game had never come close to generating.
He was also absolutely the engine behind half the football internet's finest comedy.
And then because Julien had spent enough time on the football internet to know both sides of this, there was the other Arsenal. The Arsenal of the jokes.
Fourth place is a trophy. The perennial optimism of pre-seasons that encountered reality by October. The summer transfer window in which Arsenal were always the kings of activity and always somehow ended up with less than they needed.
The captain's armband as transfer request. The 'We played Barcelona, we played Bayern, we've collapsed again'. The inexplicable losses that arrived precisely when they were least affordable. The famous phrase, delivered with the straightest face: 'We Arsenal are invincible.'
An entire ecosystem of comedy had grown up in the gap between what Wenger's Arsenal could be and what they sometimes became, and it existed precisely because people cared so much, because the club had been given a standard by this man and could never quite forget it.
Julien found the jokes genuinely funny. And the fact that they were only funny because of the depth of the feeling beneath them made them, in a strange way, another kind of tribute to the same man.
He hadn't ended up at this club. A different path had taken him to Bastia, then to Liverpool, and now here he was on the opposite side of the tunnel from the manager.
None of that reduced the respect. Standing here as an opponent, about to spend ninety minutes trying to take something from what Wenger had spent two decades building, required that you understood exactly what you were facing. Not just a team. It was a philosophy. A way of seeing the game that had earned its place in football history permanently, regardless of what any single match produced.
Julien exhaled slowly, drawing in a lungful of cold air and grass and the electricity of a full stadium in anticipation. His hand closed into a fist at his side, then released.
The legends could stay where they were.
The history could stay on the walls.
What was in front of him right now was a pitch, and a ball, and a manager on the other touchline who had studied him more carefully than almost anyone Julien had ever played against.
The best answer to all of it, the respect, the reverence, the weight of everything this place carried was to play.
He fixed his eyes on the rectangle of light at the end of the tunnel.
The referee's arm came up, then swept forward. "Go!"
The moment they crossed the threshold into the open air, it hit them.
Not sound exactly, something more than just sound, something that bypassed the ears and went straight to the chest.
Sixty thousand people who had been building toward this for hours released it all at once, and the effect was physical in a pressure wave that moved through the players as they walked out of the tunnel and into the arena.
The stands were a solid mass of red and white.
Tier after tier rising from the touchline to the high corners of the stadium, every seat filled, scarves catching the light and whipping high in the pre-match ceremony that transforms a crowd into a single organism with a single purpose.
The lower sections near the tunnel exit had people pressed against the advertising hoardings, arms extended, hands open, not touching the players but present as a corridor of human intensity.
As Julien came through, two Arsenal fans in vintage shirts gripped the railing and leaned forward. "De Rocca! Not going to be so easy tonight!"
The tone was that particular combination of challenge and acknowledgment that home fans reserve for the opponent's best player, it wasn't hostile, exactly, more like a declaration that they knew who he was and were making clear that knowing mattered.
Started out the season - Nothing stopped us
Everything was going right right right!
Walking in a Bergkamp Wonderland,
When Parlour was our Ray of light
Gonna see the Arsenal playing some Hot Stuff
Let's see the Arsenal showing them how!
Come on you Arsenal - yeah you"re the Hot Stuff,
Keep telling us we"re boring - we"ll just keep on scoring now!
The Arsenal
Come on the Arsenal
The Arsenal
....
Hot Stuff was already running through the stands, the melody was swelling as the teams reached the center circle, and the Arsenal fans gave it everything.
When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don't be afraid of the dark
At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark
Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Tho' your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone
You'll never walk alone
...….
In the away section, a far smaller cluster of Liverpool fans pushed back with You'll Never Walk Alone, thinner in volume but carrying that quality Julien had noticed outside.
Julien looked across the pitch toward the Arsenal dugout.
Wenger was standing at the edge of the technical area. Hands behind his back. Eyes on the pitch, moving carefully from zone to zone in the pre-match cataloguing what he already knows while watching for anything he might have missed.
The noise in the stadium was extraordinary, and he appeared not to hear any of it or rather, to have moved through a version of it so many times that it existed beneath the threshold of his conscious attention, leaving him free to simply watch.
Julien held that image for a fraction of a second and then looked away.
As the pre-match rituals progressed, the broadcast cameras found the center circle where the referee's team was completing the coin toss with both captains. The roar from the stands had not paused since the teams walked out.
At the BBC commentary desk, and across Sky Sports and every other broadcast carrying the match, the presenters were already in full voice. Among them, Alan Parry had begun his preview.
"The head-to-head record between these two clubs in the league: one hundred and seventy-eight meetings in total, Arsenal with sixty-two wins, forty-seven draws, sixty-nine defeats, so Liverpool have a slight historical edge.
But in recent form, over the last two seasons' four encounters, Arsenal have taken two wins, a draw, and one defeat, which gives the home side a degree of psychological advantage walking into tonight.
"That said, tonight's context changes things significantly. Liverpool have a new manager making his Premier League debut, and both clubs are pushing at the top end of the table. The result tonight could directly shape the title picture for the rest of this season."
The cameras cut to the lineup visuals on screen.
"Let's look at both starting elevens and the injury situations. Arsenal: Wenger stays with his familiar 4-2-3-1. The key forced change is Wilshere out with an ankle problem and Rosický comes in alongside Özil and Cazorla in the attacking midfield.
Giroud leads the line. Ramsey and Arteta sit as the double pivot. The back four is Sagna, Mertesacker, Koscielny, Gibbs, with Szczęsny in goal. This is the Arsenal we know, their passing game through Özil and the physical reference point of Giroud up front remain their attacking spine.
Liverpool: Klopp has also gone 4-2-3-1, but he too has a significant forced change. Glen Johnson is ruled out through illness, which means young Jon Flanagan comes in at right back. The starting lineup: Suárez leading the attack, with Sturridge, Henderson, and Julien De Rocca behind him. Gerrard and Kanté form the double pivot. The back four is Cissokho, Sakho, Kolo Touré, Flanagan, with Mignolet in goal.
Now, the big question for Liverpool is Klopp's tactical approach. Everyone who knows his Dortmund work knows the principles: high press from the very first minute, aggressive ball recovery, transitions that happen before the opposition can set themselves.
In terms of specific targets, Arteta is the obvious pressure point given Liverpool's energy in midfield. And the tactical question we've all been discussing: De Rocca is listed here on the right side of midfield.
But watching how Klopp has spoken about him this week, we should not assume that's where he stays. The battle for the tempo of this match will tell us most of what we need to know."
This match was not only being watched in England.
Across France, Spain, and dozens of other countries, screens had been switched on for this specific fixture. In the Sunset café Bar in Bastia where Julien had first become widely known, Bertrand had wheeled the television to the center of the room and people had come in off the street when they saw the screen through the window and recognized the person on it.
Every table was full. There was no standing room.
In the small town where Julien had grown up, someone had rigged a projector against a bedsheet strung between two posts in the open square beside the new pitch, the pitch that had been built because of him, because of what he had become.
Two hundred people stood in the October cold and watched the green of the Emirates on a screen that moved slightly in the evening wind.
In Madrid, Zinedine Zidane sat at home and watched.
At the Monaco youth academy, a teenager named Kylian Mbappé watched through headphones, phone propped against his pillow, careful not to disturb the curfew.
In Japan, China, India and other Asian countries, it was past midnight. A significant number of people were awake regardless. Arsenal had always had strong roots in Asia, the attractive football, the philosophy, the aesthetic clarity of Wenger's best teams had built a following over decades.
But over these past two seasons, something had been shifting.
Julien's style of play also had a quality that traveled across languages and time zones without losing anything.
Fans who had never previously had a reason to care about Liverpool found themselves following his games, and tonight they were awake at midnight to watch him play at the Emirates against the club many of them had grown up supporting.
Football produces players like that occasionally. The ones who make tribalism temporarily irrelevant.
In all of these places, at this same moment, Howard Webb raised the whistle to his lips.
Webb was at the peak of his career in 2013. The 2010 World Cup final, the Champions League final, those were the benchmarks.
His record-setting fourteen yellow cards and one red in that World Cup final had drawn its share of criticism, particularly his handling of De Jong's notorious foul, but within English football he remained among the most trusted referees in the game, known specifically for his ability to manage high-intensity, high-emotion matches without losing the thread of control.
This was exactly that kind of match.
He looked at his watch. The time arrived.
The whistle went sharp, clean, and long and the roar from the home sections hit a higher register as if the sound itself had been waiting for that signal.
________________________________________________________
Check out my patreon where you can read more chapters:
patreon.com/LorianFiction
Thanks for your support!