JORDAN HENDERSON is set to join in the celebrations should his Liverpool team-mates secure a Champions League place today.
But the Anfield skipper will still have a worry at the back of his mind.
For he has told close pals he is deeply concerned that his return to training after groin surgery in February may have come too late for him to make England’s bid for the Euros this summer.
Three Lions coach Gareth Southgate is due to announce his squad for the finals on Tuesday.
But Henderson, though seen happy and smiling as he worked out on Friday, fears he might get a call tomorrow that would turn the joy of his club’s top-four comeback to sorrow.
Reds boss Jurgen Klopp declared recently that England’s vice-captain still had a chance of being selected by Southgate.
Yet Friday was his first proper football session since getting crocked and the 30-year-old fears the worst.
That with only two warm-up games scheduled, against Austria and Romania before the big kick-off with Croatia on June 13, Southgate will not take a chance on him.
Henderson’s injury, along with the season-ending knee damage to Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez, means Klopp’s fallen champs find themselves in the last-chance saloon today.
The Anfield chief, whose team host Crystal Palace, stressed: “A season is a season and you cannot cut off the positive parts from the negative parts and then say, ‘Oh, look at that, nearly there’.
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“We don’t see it like this. I said when we lost our centre-halves, all of them pretty much, we broke our leg but we could still win games.
“Not always with the most convincing football but we could still win games, we were still scoring and all these kind of things.
“Then, we had to – and we had to at that time – take midfielders and transform them into centre-halves and that broke our spine.
“The young boys were not ready to play centre-half, the midfielders had to play centre-half at that time and we lost rhythm, we lost pretty much everything, all of the stuff.
“A football team is like an orchestra or whatever, or something else where plenty of people work together, and if you lose one piece you might, or you can, still do it.
“But if you lose another piece then it gets really difficult, especially in this league where everybody performs at such an incredibly high intensity level.
“This year with the injuries we had, it was not a year in which you can become champions. No chance for nobody.
“Take out, as good as they are, the three centre-halves of City. No.
“Three centre-halves of United. No. For the whole season, pretty much. That’s how it is, it was really strange.
“But fight back. Accept the difficulties, fight back and make the best of it.
“If we qualify for the Champions League, then we made the best of it.”
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Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
