James Milner: ‘One regret? You don’t enjoy it as much as you should’

James Milner celebrated Liverpool’s FA Cup victory by treating himself to a Coke on the coach from Wembley to the airport. “Full fat, because Diet Coke is worse for you,” he claimed. By 10.30 the next morning he was sitting through a video analysis meeting of Southampton. Chasing a quadruple is not all glamour.

After the joy and the exertion of Wembley, where Liverpool and Chelsea players almost ran themselves to a stand-still in the second half of extra time, Jürgen Klopp’s players must go again at St Mary’s Stadium on Tuesday and win again to take the title race with Manchester City to the wire. Lifting trophies helps alleviate tiredness, although Milner wishes there was more time to savour each one.

“It was probably harder if you go back six weeks but we’ve got three games left now,” says the 36-year-old, whose contribution to the cause remains invaluable. “All the stuff we’ve been through, training, games, recovering, travelling, with three games left if you’re on one leg it’s worth going through.

“We’ve just won the FA Cup. Would you like to celebrate more? Yes, we would, but we can’t afford to do that. That’s the tough thing about being at this level, you maybe can’t afford to enjoy your successes as much as you’d like to. You win a trophy and it’s like: ‘When’s the next game?’ You win the Premier League and you can enjoy it for three weeks on your holiday, then it’s pre-season and you have to go again. That’s probably the one thing you regret in your career: that you don’t enjoy it as much as you should. But that’s part of being successful; you have to be focused and move on to the next one.”

The title contenders will be without Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk against Southampton, who will be playing their first