sport news Jordan Henderson on dealing with adversity and his battle to always prove ... trends now

Is this the end? That is what some people have been asking. A third of the season has gone and Liverpool are closer to the Premier League relegation zone than they are to the Champions League spots. 

They have won four, drawn four and lost four. They have lost to the bottom two clubs in their last two league games. Their midfield is ageing. They’re ninth, 15 points adrift of Arsenal. So are they in decline? Is it over?

Jordan Henderson, the Liverpool captain, looks up from his spartan plate of food — plain omelette, five slices of avocado, no dressing, no sauce, no garnish, no fuss, nothing fancy, nothing extraneous, nothing superfluous — in the players’ canteen and fixes me for a moment with the kind of withering glare that once turned Diego Costa to dust.

‘So is this the end?’ I ask, mumbling something about playing devil’s advocate.

‘No, of course not,’ says Henderson.

Then there is a pause while he allows the full vacuity of the question to sink in.

‘The end for who?’ he says.

‘For this team,’ I say.

‘When you say “this team”,’ he says, ‘the team always evolves. Is this team the same as three or four years ago? I don’t know. You tell me. It evolves all the time. Players go out and players come in. It evolves constantly. The thing that stays the same is that you have got to keep going, keep working, keep fighting.

‘But for Liverpool, it will never be the end. The players that are here now, the manager, the fans, the club, the whole thing, we will always fight and come back from bad periods. People are quick to jump on what has gone wrong but it was only four or five months ago where we played every game we could, won two trophies, got to the Champions League final and lost the league by a point.

‘You have to put things into perspective a little bit. That does not mean everything’s great, because it’s not. But I know the players in the dressing room and I know they will give absolutely everything every time they play. The most important thing is how you deal with adversity and setbacks. We have done that very well over the past few years. And now we have to do it again.’

Henderson is no stranger to that. He has been dealing with adversity and setbacks for most of his career. The rage to prove people wrong consumes him. He has always felt like he is fighting a battle for respect. In his obsession with modesty and self-deprecation, he even under-estimates himself sometimes.

He wanted to call his autobiography, which was published last week, “With or Without Me”. ‘That’s how I feel about the trophies Liverpool have won over the last few years,’ he writes in it. ‘They’d have won them with or without me. I’m not Luis Suarez or Steven Gerrard or Virgil van Dijk or Mo Salah. The success is not down to me.’

Jurgen Klopp knows better. His team-mates know better. Liverpool fans who watch the team week in, week out know better, too. And even though one of the few highlights of Liverpool’s troubled start to the season was Henderson’s sublime pass with the outside of his right foot to put Salah through for the opening goal against Ajax recently, some are trying to hurry the skipper out of the door at Anfield.

‘It’s been like that my whole career,’ he says. ‘People have probably wanted me to leave from the day I arrived here. Really. So it’s not going to change until I do leave. It’s part and parcel of the game. Everyone’s got different opinions about football. Some opinions you hear seem quite extreme and you think “Bloody hell”.

‘There is no point even getting involved in all of that. Do what you do. Focus on your job. Focus on trying to be the best you can be, focus on trying to help the team as much as possible, to be successful and win games. I have always had doubters. I have got to the point where I prefer to have it than not. There would be something wrong if I didn’t have that.’

Last month, Henderson found himself fighting a battle on another front, too, after the Arsenal defender, Gabriel Magalhaes, made a complaint about a comment he alleged Henderson had made to him during Arsenal’s 3-2 win over Liverpool at the Emirates on October 9. The Football Association conducted an investigation and announced 10 days ago that it would not take any disciplinary action.

Henderson has not spoken about the incident before and does not want to speak about it now. He has long been a proponent of empowering players to come forward if they feel they are victims of abuse and does not want to set that back. It is hard enough for black players to protest in the first place without every complaint being turned back on them in a torrent of discord and hate and vilification and recrimination.

‘I understand why I have to be asked about this,’ says Henderson, ‘but what I tried to do was respect the process. I have spoken before about black players being brave enough to speak out about discrimination so I couldn’t then change my stance. I still feel I need to show respect now, even though it’s been dealt with.

‘I’ve let the FA do what they needed to do and I still feel it wouldn’t be right for me to speak about it. It is just as important to respect the process afterwards as it is during the case. I could speak to you all day about how I was feeling but I have to accept what happened and move on. By the way, that wasn’t easy.

‘There were a million and one things I wanted to say — emotional things — but I think it would have been wrong. It has not changed my mind that people must be empowered to come forward if they feel they have been wronged. It has changed my thoughts a little bit about the person who has been accused but if people feel they have been discriminated against, they must come forward.

‘It would not be right for me to sit here and say how hard it was for me, because there is another person involved as well. It has been dealt with and it was

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