The group crashed their pint glasses together with enthusiasm, beer sloshing over the rims onto the wooden table, foam mixing with old ring stains.
"YNWA!" The cry went up from multiple throats.
Even Liz smiled despite herself and raised her glass, shaking her head at the testosterone-fueled optimism. "Alright, you optimistic lunatics."
George returned to the bar, wiping down the wood with slow, thoughtful strokes. The rag moved in familiar circles, polishing the same spots he'd polished ten thousand times before.
His eyes seemed to look through the haze of conversations and the flicker of television light, back through decades of triumph and tragedy that had played out in this very room.
A complex smile appeared on his face—pride mixed with pain, joy shadowed by loss, the expression of a man who'd witnessed glory and devastation in equal measure and understood that football gave you both without asking permission.
He'd watched Shankly's red army conquer England. He'd watched the empire crumble from its European peak, the dynasty dismantled by forces beyond anyone's control. Those seven years—the ban imposed after Heysel, Margaret Thatcher forbidding English clubs from European competition remained a wound that never quite healed, scar tissue that ached when the weather changed.
George remembered it too clearly. The year before Heysel, English clubs had swept all three European trophies, announcing their absolute dominance to the world with arrogance. From 1977 to 1984, English clubs claimed seven of eight European Cups.
England wasn't just competing in European football—England was European football.
Then came Heysel.
Then came the deaths, the tragedy, the allegations.
Then came the aftermath.
Prime Minister Thatcher, in her "magnanimous wisdom," pressured the FA to voluntarily withdraw all English professional clubs from European competition as penance for the disaster.
For five years, no English clubs appeared in any European tournament. Liverpool received a seven-year ban. Their golden generation withered under external forces beyond their control, watching their peak years disappear while others took their place on the European stage.
The same fate befell their Merseyside rivals Everton, and English football as a whole.
The antagonism between Thatcher and Liverpool—hell, between Thatcher and English football itself could fill volumes. Even Sir Alex Ferguson was among the managers who publicly opposed her, and he rarely agreed with Liverpool on anything then.
All that history had combined two months ago into a uniquely Liverpudlian, suffocating farewell.
April 13th, 2013. Reading's Madejski Stadium. Liverpool's traveling support didn't seem particularly bothered by their team's draw against bottom-placed Reading.
Instead, they waved flags and sang songs in near-carnival celebration of one woman's death, chants that made the television commentators fall silent and the newspapers clutch their pearls in manufactured outrage.
Five days before that match, Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female Prime Minister and Liverpool's most hated politician had died of a stroke at age 87.
The Premier League's response was telling. They declined to organize league-wide moments of silence for this polarizing figure in British history. Instead, they offered a carefully neutral statement: "This is a matter for individual clubs. We won't intervene."
George's hand paused on the glass he was polishing, his reflection ghostly in the clean surface. His clouded eyes seemed to hear those distant, complicated songs echoing through his pub, through his memory—celebrations that weren't really celebrations, grief that wasn't really grief, just the sound of old wounds finally allowed to breathe.
Thatcher was gone. But Liverpool's lost golden years would never return. That generation—Rush, Hansen, Lawrenson, Whelan had been denied their place in history by political decisions made in Westminster offices, by people who'd never loved football the way Merseyside loved football.
And now? Liverpool had new owners with deep pockets. New money from Saudi investment. A record-breaking €80 million bet on an eighteen-year-old kid named Julien De Rocca.
What kind of era was beginning?
Dawn of a renaissance, or another bubble of delusion destined to burst?
No one could say.
History didn't repeat, but it rhymed.
George hoped desperately for Liverpool's success, but he understood that some things couldn't be forced, couldn't be bought no matter how much money you threw at them.
Through all the storms—Shankly's iron dynasty, Paisley's quiet brilliance, Heysel's darkness, the wilderness years under Hodgson—he'd learned to keep silent amid noise, to stay sober during mass hysteria.
He only hoped this time wouldn't end in disaster.
The city couldn't take another false dawn.
The bar gleamed under George's cloth, its surface was reflecting his calm, wrinkled eyes—eyes that had seen Anfield's sunrises and sunsets for fifty years, that held decades of hard-won wisdom about what mattered and what was just noise.
Suddenly—
The pub door crashed open with enough force to make the brass bell above it ring aggressively, the sound cut through the conversations like a referee's whistle.
Cold evening air rushed in, carrying the smell of rain-slicked streets.
A tall man in a vintage Liverpool jacket, the kind they stopped making twenty years ago strode in. His face was flushed with excitement and the evening cold, cheeks red from rushing.
"Oi! George! Your most loyal customer needs your strongest drink!"
Jamie Callaghan, head of the Merseyside "Shankly Spirit" supporters' association, had a voice loud enough to cut through a match-day crowd.
It certainly silenced the pub.
George didn't look up from his polishing, but his mouth curved into a knowing smile. He reached for a fresh glass and began to pour. "Jamie, you sound like you've found Gerrard's lost boot. What's got you running through Liverpool like a madman?"
Jamie grabbed the glass before George could even slide it across the bar and drained half of it in one long pull, foam coating his stubble. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and slammed his palm on the bar hard enough to make the empties dance and ring.
"A thousand times better than that, George! Just came from the club. I've got massive news!"
The entire pub went silent. Even the television highlights seemed to lower in volume. Every eye locked on Jamie, waiting.
Sean frowned, leaning forward. "Don't play games, Jamie. Is Suárez staying?"
Mick's eyes lit up with hope. "Are the owners buying someone else? Another forward?"
Jamie savored the moment like a fine wine, taking another long drink, scanning the crowd slowly, knowingly, then lowered his voice to make every word clear:
"Listen up, lads. Next Saturday. One week from today. Anfield."
He let the suspense build, the silence stretch on.
"The club is throwing a massive, dedicated welcome ceremony for the new kid. Julien De Rocca. Not some pre-match formality where he waves from the center circle—a proper 'Welcome to Anfield' event. Just for him. An entire afternoon dedicated to unveiling him to the Kop."
The pub exploded.
"A dedicated ceremony?!" Liz adjusted her glasses in genuine shock. "The club hasn't done something like that for a new signing in years!"
"Brilliant!" Mick leaped up, punching the air. "That's the proper reception! Show that kid he's not just another signing—he's the chosen one! The one we've been waiting for!"
Sean grunted, though his eyes gleamed with suppressed excitement. "Better not be all show and no substance. Hope he doesn't freeze like Carroll did, unable to control a ball in front of the Kop, fifty thousand people watching him fumble."
Mick was already on his phone, fingers flying across the screen, searching frantically. "Is it official yet? Will there be performances? What's the Kop planning? We need new banners! Someone call the lads who do the tifos!"
Jamie grinned triumphantly, riding the wave of excitement, voice rising again to fill the room.
"Official announcement tomorrow morning! But I heard from someone in the supporter liaison office—they're planning a solo unveiling in front of the Kop. Full stadium ovation. They'll show his Bastia highlights on the big screens. They might even invite Shankly's family—symbolizing the passing of the torch. This isn't just theater, lads. This is a signal. The new dynasty begins here!"
He looked directly at George, his expression suddenly serious beneath the excitement. "You have to be there, George. Bring your finest whisky. We need every blessing we can get. Every bit of luck from the old times."
George finally set down his polishing cloth, the bar gleaming beneath it. In the amber light coming through beer bottles and old windows, those eyes that had witnessed so much turmoil, so many false hopes and genuine glories—flickered with something like hope rekindled.
He nodded slowly.
"Alright." George's voice was steady and strong. "For Liverpool. For that boy. And for Shankly."
The pub erupted in cheers and clinking glasses.
Julien's name and Anfield's future fused together in that moment, bound by sudden, desperate hope—the kind of hope that had sustained this city through darker times than these, the hope that maybe, just maybe, glory was coming home.
The news spread like wildfire through Merseyside.
By midnight, every Liverpool supporters' group, every pub, every message board knew that Anfield would officially unveil their new number 10 in seven days. Everyone discussed the same name: Julien De Rocca—and that record-breaking €80 million price tag.
A strange mixture of euphoria and anxiety hung in the Merseyside air, heavy as fog rolling in from the river.
Most fans adopted a pragmatic view: the money was spent, so they might as well hope for the best.
After all—
"What if he really is the chosen one? What if he's the next Dalglish, leading us into a new era?"
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