The midfielder said he has inspired by the manager’s motivational words after the bitter disappointment of the 2016 loss to Sevilla.
Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson says a rousing speech by manager Jurgen Klopp following defeat in the Europa League final laid the foundations for their exhilarating Champions League run.
The England midfielder said he has inspired by the manager’s motivational words after the bitter disappointment of Liverpool’s 2016 loss to Sevilla in the showpiece in Basel, where he was an unused substitute because he was not fully fit.
Klopp predicted there would be more finals, outlining his vision of where he wanted the club to go, and Henderson was hooked.
“We were obviously down but when we got back to the hotel the manager had something different to stay,” he said.
“He looked at the bigger picture and the future and he felt as though it could be a big moment in our careers to learn from the experience.
“He had this sort of vision that made me think, in the future, we’d get to another final. He wanted to use the experience of that final to keep us together and use it as a positive. If we got to another final we’d be ready.”
Liverpool have played some sensational football this season and are top scorers in the Champions League with 40 goals.
Their place in the final may have surprised many but Henderson believes it shows the positive mentality bred by Klopp.
“He is our leader and everyone looks up to him,” he said. “I have spoken about the manager having a massive impact since he’s come in, which he has.
“He has created a special dressing room with special players and I’m sure that will continue in the summer with new players coming in and helping this squad out to win trophies.
“I definitely feel we are going in the right direction. [I can] definitely see how hungry the team are to be successful.”
Henderson said winning the Champions League would be a huge shot in the arm for the five-time European champions.
“Getting over that first hurdle as a team, winning the Champions League would be a massive step,” he said.
“The belief you get from that going forward can really put us in a good position over the next couple of years for the Premier League, Champions League, FA Cup – more trophies we want to win.”
“The end of the world war had bought America victory but not security” – this quote from Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book, ‘The Looming Tower’, gives a sense of the growing threat to America from Al Qaeda and the series of events that led to 9/11. Based on extensive interviews, including with Bin Laden’s best friend in college and the former White House counterterrorism chief, ‘The Looming Tower’ provides an intimate perspective of the 9/11 attack.
Lawrence Wright chronicles the formative years of Al Qaeda, giving an insight in to Bin Laden’s war against America. The book covers in detail, the radicalisation of Osama Bin Laden and his association with Ayman Al Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor who preached that only violence could change history. In an interview with Amazon, Wright shared, “I talked to 600-something people, but many of those people I talked to again and again for a period of five years, some of them dozens of times.” Wright’s book was selected by TIME as one of the all-time 100 best nonfiction books for its “thoroughly researched and incisively written” account of the road to 9/11 and is considered an essential read for understanding Islam’s war on the West as it developed in the Middle East.
‘The Looming Tower’ also dwells on the response of key US officials to the rising Al Qaeda threat, particularly exploring the turf wars between the FBI and the CIA. This has now been dramatized in a 10-part mini-series of the same name. Adapted by Dan Futterman (of Foxcatcher fame), the series mainly focuses on the hostilities between the FBI and the CIA. Some major characters are based on real people – such as John O’ Neill (FBI’s foul-mouthed counterterrorism chief played by Jeff Daniels) and Ali Soufan (O’ Neill’s Arabic-speaking mentee who successfully interrogated captured Islamic terrorists after 9/11, played by Tahar Rahim). Some are composite characters, such as Martin Schmidt (O’Neill’s CIA counterpart, played by Peter Sarsgaard).
The series, most crucially, captures just how close US intelligence agencies had come to foiling Al Qaeda’s plans, just to come up short due to internal turf wars. It follows the FBI and the CIA as they independently follow intelligence leads in the crises leading up to 9/11 – the US Embassy bombings in East Africa and the attack on US warship USS Cole in Yemen – but fail to update each other. The most glaring example is of how the CIA withheld critical information – Al Qaeda operatives being hunted by the FBI had entered the United States – under the misguided notion that the CIA was the only government agency authorised to deal with terrorism threats.
The depth of information in the book has translated into a realistic recreation of the pre-9/11 years on screen. The drama is even interspersed with actual footage from the 9/11 conspiracy, attack and the 2004 Commission Hearing, linking together the myriad developments leading up to 9/11 with chilling hindsight. Watch the trailer of this gripping show below.
The Looming Tower is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video, along with a host of Amazon originals and popular movies and TV shows. To enjoy unlimited ad free streaming anytime, anywhere, subscribe to Amazon Prime Video.
This article was produced by the Scroll marketing team on behalf of Amazon Prime Video and not by the Scroll editorial team .
