James Milner has revealed what Jurgen Klopp said to the Liverpool squad at a crucial moment in the 2018/19 season.
The Reds were battling with Manchester City for the Premier League title that campaign, and were neck and neck at the top of the table. As the race entered May, Liverpool were also competing in the Champions League and faced Barcelona in the semi-final.
Klopp’s side lost 3-0 in the first leg at the Nou Camp, and were hoping for Man City to drop points in the Premier League the following weekend. However, Vincent Kompany scored his now-famous long-range goal to secure a 1-0 home win over Leicester City, which almost sealed the title for Pep Guardiola’s side.
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Liverpool played Barcelona in the second leg of the Champions League the following night. And Milner has explained what Klopp said to the Reds squad the day after City’s dramatic win over the Foxes.
Milner was speaking in episode four of JÜRGEN, a docu-series by The Anfield Wrap supported by ERDINGER
“You have City the night before, looks like they’re gonna struggle and then Vinny slices one in the top corner,” Milner told The Anfield Wrap. “I’ve seen that shot 50 times go over the fence at City’s training ground into a field, and unfortunately for us it was just one of those.
“You come in the next day and the manager’s like: ‘Right, has anybody got anything to say about last night? No, right, here we go…’
“And he was like: ‘For most teams this would be impossible, the only reason we have a chance is cause it’s you’.”
The game that followed at Anfield went on to be one of the most famous in the club’s history. Liverpool won 4-0 to reach the Champions League final, which was later won in Madrid to earn the club its sixth European crown.
Milner reflected on the opening moments of that May night at Anfield. Liverpool needed to score at least three goals without reply to stand a chance of progressing, and the Reds midfielder has explained how the first moments of the contest paved the way for what followed.
“The game starts and we get a corner, and it’s the loudest roar I’ve ever heard for a corner in my life,” said Milner. “The more you play, you hear good atmospheres and you’re aware of the atmosphere, you sense like, ‘yeah, it’s good’, or you can feed off that, but you don’t generally notice it in the game. But that was a corner and it was like, ‘wow’.
“How I felt after the game was more relief, because you feel that how good we’d been to maybe not have that chance to do that, obviously the disappointment of the year before, and then playing as well as we were in the league and getting as many points as we did thinking, ‘we’re not gonna get over the line there either’, or ‘it’s not in our hands’.”
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