15th Oct 2014
Poor Raheem Sterling: still only a teenager with the world at his incredibly talented feet and at 19 already one of the best players for club and country. Now, as well as the heavy burden of expectation, he has a large percentage of the population on his back due the ill advised comments of a man vastly his senior; a man who should have known much better.
When Liverpool and England’s precocious 19-year-old went to Roy Hodgson and told him that he was feeling tired prior to the team departing for Estonia he must have done so thinking it would remain in complete confidence.
England secure a 1-0 win and yet for reasons known only to the England manager Sterling is thrown under a bus.
Victory had already been achieved, so why set up arguably your best player to be lambasted by swathes of the press and public? It was a move that was of no obvious benefit to either party.
Sterling now has the likes of Alan Shearer, a man who retired from international football at the age of just 29 remember, dragging him over the coals and comparing him to the average man in the street and their daily struggles.
It’s a pointless comparison because Sterling isn’t the average man in the street; he is a footballer and a special one at that. He’s clearly an intelligent one too as he is able to recognize when his as not fully developed body needs a rest. Wise and mature beyond his years; if only more footballers were as aware as he…
We can all agree that footballers are overpaid and that the average man in the street would give his right arm to do what he and his colleagues do but that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to suffer from fatigue from time to time. He is, as he said in his defence on twitter, only human.
“Fans” are also decrying Sterling’s act, saying mindless things such as “we don’t want players picking and choosing when they play for England”. He did nothing of the sort. He went to his manager, as he is entitled to do, and told him he wasn’t feeling 100%; at no stage did he say he wasn’t going to play.
If Hodgson had turned round and said, “I’m sorry, Raheem, but I really need you in this game,” then there is little doubt he’d have started.
From a managerial stand point, Hodgson is also suffering because his methods are being brought into question once again and it is impossible to think that his players won’t regard speaking candidly to him with more than a modicum of trepidation now.
Having betrayed Sterling’s confidence, players will be less likely to confide in him again and that could see a rift form; a “him and us” situation could easily develop which will serve to undermine his authority.
What’s more he’s provided his critics with further ammunition with which to lob at him, something it would appear the likes of Rio Ferdinand, no stranger to being on the receiving end of curious decisions by Hodgson, has appeared keen to do.
The stupid thing is how easily this all could have been avoided. England won the game in Estonia to make it three wins from three in group E. Hodgson didn’t even need to bring up Sterling except perhaps to praise him for the impact he made coming off the bench.
If he’d been subsequently questioned why he wasn’t in from the start, he could have answered in any number of ways that would have been deemed adequate:
“I wanted to play Adam Lallana.”
“I felt we had to counter their threat by setting up our team a little differently.”
“I wanted to adopt a different formation and felt that the starting XI would be able to implement my strategy better.”
Would any fan or pundit not been assuaged by those answers? Unlikely. Besides, he’s the England manager and is paid a ludicrous sum of money to make the big calls; not playing Sterling from the start is his prerogative.
Following criticism he invited on himself, Hodgson has found himself backed into a corner and has decided to come out swinging and has rounded on Brendan Rodgers.
The Liverpool manager was understandably angry that his number one striker was injured on international duty and voiced his displeasure at the training methods used by England.
Arguably, he was wrong to do so publicly and could have had those conversations with Hodgson behind closed doors. Now it is Hodgson criticising his methods and those adopted by Liverpool – a high profile version of “my dad’s bigger than your dad” if you will.
Rodgers has a day-to-day duty of care when it comes to looking after his charges and despite a slight over-reliance on Sterling this season – out of necessity rather than design – has done a good job overall.
He is also a modern, forward-thinking, progressive coach who is aware that sport science can and must be used in today’s game; in short everything, in my humble opinion, Hodgson is not.
During his time at Liverpool, players complained about his training sessions due to their intensity and monotony, a charge that has not been levied upon Rodgers to date with many of his players coming out and stating how much they enjoy training under him.
His latest attack on Liverpool’s training methods shows how archaic Hodgson truly is. His inability to grasp that footballers, like all elite athletes, require individual programmes highlights woeful deficiencies in his knowledge of sport science and also brings into question the England medical team too.
“I don’t think there is a lot of medical evidence to support the two-day recovery,” he said before going on to suggest that Germany don’t adopt such practices, something I find highly unlikely given that Joachim Loew was the protege of Jurgen Klinsmann, a coach who has fully embraced sports science.
His beliefs have been given short shrift by a number of experts in the field, namely Raymond Verheijen, a Dutch fitness specialist who has worked with Barcelona and Wales.
“Sterling is not only a young but an explosive player. They have many fast twitch muscle fibres compared to less explosive players,” he said.
"Fast muscle fibres recover slower compared to slow muscle fibres because less blood & oxygen is running through these fast muscle fibres.
"This is why explosive players like Sterling need longer recovery time after a game to get rid of fatigue compared to less explosive player.
"If explosive players do not get extra recovery time & are treated in the same way as other players, they accumulate fatigue in their body.
"Thirdly accumulation of fatigue due to insufficient recovery makes the nervous system slower. The signal from brain to muscles travel slower
"If the signal from the brain arrives later in the muscles this means the brain has less control over body during explosive football actions.
"So there's much evidence that insufficient recovery, accumulation of fatigue & slower nervous system are dramatically increasing injury risk.”
Verheijen’s words are also backed up by Liverpool’s own head of performance Glen Driscoll:
“Controlling the extrinsic causes of injuries means controlling the training on the football pitch and understanding that it is all down to space, numbers of players and duration,” Driscoll has said. “In football drills these decisions allow you to either protect or condition footballers. When to place these sessions in context to your next or previous match is the key.
“Many sport scientists don’t understand this, let alone managers. Some do but don’t have the influence to affect the management and their training. The beauty here is we have a manager [Brendan Rodgers] who not only gets it but manipulates it as part of his own methods to achieve success and protect players from injury. The manager is aware that each player has a threshold level and if he goes above that threshold then the probability of injury in the next match rises.”
Yes, the England boss has to deal with time constraints not imposed on club managers but being flexible and having the ability to deal with these issues is surely the remit of any manager, especially one so well paid.
It seems Hodgson has started a spat he is ill-equipped to win and has only succeeded in widening the chasm in the club-versus-country row.
Since Hodgson has been manager of England I have found myself more and more in the club camp which is sad because I desperately want the Three Lions to do well and miss the days where an England international would create a buzz and genuine excitement.
A balance between club and country is possible as has been proven in rugby union where the country’s elite clubs are working with the RFU to make what has the hallmarks of a very strong England team.
Sadly, as long as Hodgson is the current incumbent and continues with his blame-anyone-but-me culture, the same is not going to happen in football any time soon because clubs will feel a reluctance to accommodate him.
Of course it is not all his fault, Premier League clubs are animals that will prove hard to tame in the manner that exists in rugby union but the approach of Gareth Southgate with the under-21s gives hope that one day it could be achieved.
For now, Hodgson is the coach that England are lumbered with and I fear little will change during his tenure if he continues with his current attitude. If anything, it will get worse if he continues to alienate players and clubs with his comments.
You see, Roy? Silence is often golden.