HENDERSON: SEVILLA DEFEAT THE CATALYST

IT WAS after midnight in Basel’s Novotel when Jurgen Klopp decided it was time for a speech and a song.

His disheartened players were drinking away the memory of their 2016 Europa League final defeat to Sevilla a few hours earlier. Klopp wanted to change the mood.

“We are Liverpool,” he chanted, urging his players to join him. In a rousing sermon he assured those who would continue his Anfield journey, still in its infancy, that they would experience more finals and eventual victories. “This is just the start for us,” he said.

Captain Jordan Henderson was in the audience. “After the game we were obviously down but when we got back to the hotel, the manager had something different about him,” recalls Henderson. “He felt it was the start of something, something he could take forward.

“He had this vision that, in the future, we’d get to another final. He was confident and wanted to use that experience of that final to keep us together and use it as a positive.”

As captain, Henderson had spent the game against Sevilla on the bench, having not fully recovered from a knee injury sustained against Dortmund in the quarter-final. “I thought I was ready but, looking back, I definitely wasn’t,” he says. “I convinced myself I was. I got in the squad and obviously didn’t feature so that was difficult because of the injury but also because we didn’t win.”

Klopp has kept his promise to lead the squad to another final, albeit only three who started against Sevilla – Roberto Firmino, Dejan Lovren and James Milner – are likely to do so against Real Madrid.

“The biggest thing for us is to go that one step further and win,” Henderson says. “That is what people will say in 20 or 30 years, not that you qualified for a semi or a final.” (© Daily Telegraph, London)