Liverpool striker Daniel Sturridge explains how meeting helped Champions League winners avoid 'heartache'

Out-of-contract striker remained coy on his plans for next season

Daniel Sturridge has revealed how Liverpool's players came together to harness the disappointment of previous near misses and win the club’s sixth European Cup in Madrid on Saturday night.

Sturridge, who is expected to leave Anfield this summer when his current contract expires, also believes that the floodgates could now open, ushering in an era of trophy-laden success on Merseyside.

The 29-year-old was part of a team meeting last Wednesday, made up only of players and not coaching staff, where squad members discussed how they would respond to different scenarios against Tottenham Hotspur at the Wanda Metropolitano.

“We had a long talk as a group of players [on Wednesday] and I think that’s important too: to speak as a group of lads, without any staff involved, just the players hashing it out,” said Sturridge, who was an unused substitute in the final.

“We were all in there and if anyone wants to say anything, anyone can say what they want to say. It was just like: ‘Look, it’s our time, we’ve prepared ourselves as best we can.’

"It was just about if we go behind how do we deal with it, if we go ahead how do you deal with it? And we haven’t had those conversations before.

“And I feel like maybe before the Europa League final we didn’t prepare as well. Last season, we said: ‘We didn’t prepare well the season before and we have learnt’.

"This year we have had two finals now, so you have learnt so much more. I think that’s what makes teams so successful. They have experienced it.”

The Champions League trophy is manager Jurgen Klopp’s first while in charge of the club and Liverpool’s first since a League Cup triumph in 2012, predating Sturridge’s arrival by a year.

Sturridge admitted that there were times when he wondered whether he would ever win silverware at Anfield, but he believes that Madrid could well prove to be a watershed moment in Klopp’s tenure and the club’s history.

“Once you win one, you hope the floodgates open and you continue winning. It’s that culture of getting over the finishing line,” he said.

“I’m just thinking the most difficult thing is winning a trophy with a manager that you have not won a trophy with before. It’s difficult, it’s not easy. So to be able to won the first trophy and understand ‘we can do it’. This group of players.

“There have been so many groups of players who have tried so hard to win something at Liverpool since the last time they lifted a big trophy – it’s been over ten years – so to be to do it... Come on man, we have to say that all the preparation we have done behind the scenes has paid off.”

Sturridge scored yet was on the losing side in Liverpool’s first European final under Klopp – the 2015 Europa League defeat to Sevilla, at St Jakob’s Park in Basel – but he believes that failure has only fuelled him and his team-mates in the years since.

“The difference is that the heartache never goes away,” he said, harking back to a night when Liverpool went ahead only to lose 3-1. “You always think about it. People were saying: ‘If we win we won’t think about it’ but you do.

“You always think: ‘What if? What could we have done differently, how can we prepare differently?’. There are so many different questions that you ask yourself.

“All the things when you lost, you take them into a game because you’ve learnt from them: all the pain, all the heartache you had prior to that. And when you come into a game like this, you go: ‘OK, cool’. You come in at half time and you talk different.”

Sturridge would not be drawn on the subject of his future, though with wages of around £150,000-a-week and just eight starts this season, his six-year stay at Anfield is all but certainly drawing to a close.

“I don’t even want to talk about all that stuff,” he said. “I feel like it has been an incredible time and I am not going to talk about next season or anything.

“What’s important now is celebrating something so momentous, something we were striving for, working for for a long time. To finally win something is amazing.”