FINAL AGONY STILL HAUNTS KLOPP

Seville defeat was devastating

JURGEN KLOPP still feels the pain of Liverpool’s Europa League heartache.

But the Kop boss wants his side to use that disappointment as their inspiration this season.

Liverpool looked to be heading for European glory in May when Daniel Sturridge put them ahead in the first half of the final against Seville.

But within a minute of the restart the holders were level thanks to a Kevin Gameiro strike before a Coke double gave the La Liga side victory.

Klopp says the scars have not healed during the summer and he is still haunted by his team’s second-half collapse. He said: ® “Of course, I’ve had a lot of thoughts about this.

“It was long ago but it still feels bad. After the game I was not in the mood to think too much about the first half.

“Later I did and it was obvious that we’d played a good game in the first half and we could have been in a more clear lead.

“We could have had a penalty for handball, all this stuff that you see afterwards.

“It’s not interesting because it’s over but as a human being it’s quite difficult to accept all this stuff. You have the moments when you still suffer a little bit. The second half, 18 seconds in was too soon.

“We knew it was only half-time and there was still a lot of work to be done but what happened, happened.

Weapons

“When you watch it again you see that something broke at that moment. Different players had no weapons any more, they had no power and no confidence. You saw that.

“All of it was not too good but it was, of course, about the intensity that we had had on the way to the final. We’d had to over-perform one or two times, we had to play special games and we’d had a lot of games.”

Klopp has had most of his squad together for a couple of weeks. They fly to America later this week for a training camp and friendlies against Chelsea, AC Milan and Roma before a Wembley warm-up against Barcelona on August 6.

While the Kop boss won’t make his players watch the Seville horror show again, he hopes the pain of defeat stays with them.

“We’d tried everything to have fresh legs for the final, but none of this is an excuse because this was not a final that we should have lost,” he said.

“But it is in the past and like all games in the past, if you can use them you should do.

“You have to take the right thoughts from it and that’s what we’ll try to do.

“But that’s not easy because you can’t bring all of this up in the first meeting and say, ‘Look, I hope you had a wonderful holiday, but I want to tell you the second half in Basel was not so good’. That wouldn’t make sense.”

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