The midfielder has been in plenty of dark places over the past 12 months. Injury prevented him from making an instant impression under Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, for example, and the frustration of repeated setbacks thereafter effectively dashed his hopes of salvaging his season.
Yet for all the time spent on the treatment table, the numbing shock he encountered in the dressing room at the Allianz Riviera in Nice in the aftermath of England’s defeat to Iceland still resonates. There was a damning silence, and then the sight of Roy Hodgson broken and in bits.
“It will stay with me,” said the midfielder. “Being in that dressing room after that game was one of the worst places I have been in my career.
“It was a horrible place to be. We let everyone down as we know. We let the fans and the country down, but most of all we let the manager and the staff down.
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“People were emotional. The manager was emotional with the talk that he gave afterwards. It wasn’t nice to see.
“Everyone is human. Sometimes people think we are machines and they can just chuck everything at whoever the manager is and criticise. But I can tell you we do care.
“I know it is easy to say you have to learn from those experiences, take them forward and use that to motivate you so that it doesn’t happen again, but it will always stay with the players that were there.”
The anguish is evident in Henderson’s thoughtful, measured responses and reveals much about his outlook. After all, he could easily have detached himself from the whole debacle and washed his hands of another tawdry episode for English __football given he did not feature.
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His only appearance at Euro 2016 had come in the previous game against Slovakia when he was arguably the best player.
Yet abdicating responsibility does not sit with the Liverpool captain. Even when he finally escaped on holiday with his family, Henderson’s mind replayed the tumult.
His own conclusion is interesting: England were not undone by a lack of belief but a lack of patience, and their efforts to regain a foothold became rushed as a result.
“If you are talking specifically about the Iceland game, we could have stayed positive and been patient even though we were down in the game,” he said. “We forced it quite a lot and it looked to me from the bench that we were a bit shocked to be down in the game.
“I don’t think it was a lack of belief. We believed we could win the game. We believed we could do well in the tournament. We have got a very good team and very good players.
“But in that particular game we believed that much, sometimes we forced it instead of being patient and taking our time to build, knowing and expecting a goal would come at some point.
“Mentality is big in football. I wouldn’t say there was a mental block in the team. I feel very much that the team is together, a very close group, and we do a lot of things outside of training, all together, which helps that.
“In training and in games we all believe we can do something special, but it’s no good me sitting here and telling you that. It’s up to us to go out there on the pitch and prove to people that we are good enough to play for England and hopefully make people proud of us.”
Henderson’s observations remain pertinent, especially with the next step on the road to recovery coming against Malta, ranked 176 in the world, at Wembley for interim coach Gareth Southgate’s first game in charge.
The 26-year-old will look to continue the impressive form which is underpinning Liverpool’s own eye-catching start to the campaign as a central figure in the England dressing room. He is sure the future can be bright, even if the memories of Nice remain seared on his psyche.
“The only way is up now,” he said. “There is only us who can turn that around. We have got to use that in the future as a positive to turn it around. Hopefully we can look back at that one day after a lot of better things have happened.
“We have started well winning in Slovakia with a good performance and good result and we have something to build on now.”