Brendan Rodgers will go into tomorrow’s game still hurting over a defeat three years ago in the biggest club game in European football<\/p>\n
Rodgers was part of the Chelsea coaching staff that watched on in agony as John Terry missed the vital penalty to hand the Champions League final to Manchester United – tomorrow’s visitors at the Liberty Stadium.<\/p>\n
Rodgers said\u00a0\u201cTo be involved in the Champions League final was an incredible experience and something I had always wanted<\/p>\n
\u201cChelsea had earned the right to be there because they had fallen just short in the previous few years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe stayed at the Ritz Hotel in Moscow.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember the kick-off was so late it was unbelievable, it felt like the longest day in the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnited had been the better side in the first half and could have scored a couple of goals but Chelsea were fantastic in the second and it went to penalties.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at the images of the penalty shootout there is a picture of Sir Alex Ferguson and you could see in his face that he thought it had gone.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt all came down to John Terry and you would have put your house on him to score.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the time we were all in a huddle on the touchline and I was so sure he was going to score I had my mobile phone\u00a0in my suit jacket and I moved it to my trousers and zipped it up so I didn\u2019t lose it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to make sure my mobile didn\u2019t get lost when we celebrated!<\/p>\n
\u201cAll my family were in the ground and I wanted to make sure I would be able to get in touch with them afterwards.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven when John took a run up we were sure he was going to score, he hit it and we started to run forward. But he missed and the rest is history.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a horrible night, by the time the game\u00a0finished it was the early hours of the morning.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went back to a party at the hotel afterwards and as you can imagine it was a real damp squib.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be involved so closely is something I may never do in a lifetime again. And for Manchester United it typified the resilience they have.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brendan Rodgers will go into tomorrow’s game still hurting over a defeat three years ago in the biggest club game in European football Rodgers was part of the Chelsea coaching staff that watched on in agony as John Terry missed the vital penalty to hand the Champions League final to Manchester United – tomorrow’s visitors […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":453,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/453"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}