Raheem Sterling - Done - See main forum

[Ric]

Raheem Sterling criticism has to stop, football is ruthless too

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...ball-ruthless-want-loyalty-labrador-wing.html

Who'd have thought it, Ollie Holt a rare voice of reason in the Sterling maelstrom. Fair play. David Maddock should take note.

 

[NorCalBlue]

Hopefully something was sorted with them before the Delph outcome became public knowledge mate.

Maybe the Delph deal helped with Sterling - perhaps it seemed credible that we'd walk away if we at least got in one English player.

 

[1.618034]

Raheem Sterling criticism has to stop, football is ruthless too

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...ball-ruthless-want-loyalty-labrador-wing.html

Raheem Sterling criticism has to stop, football is ruthless too... if you want loyalty, put a Labrador on the wing

• Raheem Sterling has pushed for a move away from Liverpool this summer
• The young England star has been the subject of two bids from Man City
• Sterling told Brendan Rodgers that he did not want to go on the club's tour
• Winger has been criticised for his behaviour in his attempts to seal switch
• Forward called in sick and missed training on Tuesday and Wednesday
• Sterling has to prioritise his career over everything else in order to make it
• Players shouldn't be blamed if the chance to move is offered to them

So these are the things that have been levelled at Raheem Sterling: he’s selfish, he’s disloyal, he’s callow, he’s arrogant, he’s ambitious, he’s immature.

Well, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. Newsflash: he’s a professional footballer. You know what they say about loyalty: if Liverpool want that these days, they better get a golden Labrador to play on the right wing.

Idealise your heroes if you want to but romanticise them at your peril. The reality is that most players who make it to the Premier League are hard men, emotionally as well as physically.

People like Sterling are survivors. They’re the ones who made the cut. They’re the ones who saw their fellow apprentices in tears when the youth-team boss told them they had no future in the game.

They’re the ones who sat outside in the corridor and saw the shattered hopes trudging past them down the corridor heading for a life in Palookaville. They’re the ones who smelled the fear but escaped the cull.

They learned all about loyalty back then. They saw how a club will dash a dream as quickly as a snap of the fingers. It’s not personal. It’s business. That’s the way the clubs treat it. They have to. Why should the players be any different?

Nobody’s playing a violin for them but, in their world, it’s sink or swim. Trying to make it as a professional footballer is a hard, hard school. There is no sentiment involved. It’s about proving your worth.

People like Sterling, they’re the ones who left home in their teens, uprooted and sent to digs to live with families they don’t know, away from their mums and dads, knowing the odds are they’re going to be chucked on football’s rubbish heap.

Sterling lived that life. He lodged with the people he called his ‘house parents’, Peter and Sandra, when he moved to Liverpool from his home on a north London estate aged 15.

A lot of the kids who make it in football are hungrier than the others for a reason. Sterling had a difficult childhood. After he and his mum left Jamaica for England when he was five, his father, who he never knew, was murdered in Kingston. For kids like him, football is often an escape.

Sterling’s story is not untypical. Before he knows it, someone like Craig Bellamy finds himself in Norwich, about as far east of his home in Cardiff as you can get in this country, crying outside a chip shop because he has just got off the phone from his parents and the homesickness is killing him.

Or you’re another player I know, an apprentice when he made a senior pro look silly in training and found himself cleaning up a pile of steaming faeces from the dressing-room floor as punishment.

Or you’re the lad I know who was cut from Manchester City’s youth set-up at 15 and joined a lower division club on YTS forms. He moved away from home for the first time and found the demands of training hard. He had real talent but got a niggling injury. He was sent for treatment. The medics couldn’t find anything. He was told he had to play injured. He wasn’t used to that. He tried but his form never really recovered. At the end of his two years, they let him go.

The point is, it’s not easy getting where Sterling has. Top-flight football does not breed balanced individuals. It breeds single-minded, intensely driven young men who prioritise their careers over everything else because, if they want to make it, they have to.

So they shut everything else out, including friendships and relationships. A player has to be intensely selfish just to have a chance. They’re not particularly normal. Most of the time, the normal ones don’t make it. If you want rounded, grounded individuals, talk to a teacher or a nurse. Definitely not a footballer. Definitely not somebody who has cut himself off from most of society.

Sure, Sterling could have been more tactful in his dealings with Liverpool. Maybe he could have disguised the fact that he wanted to leave. Maybe he could have been more cute. But maybe he figures, why bother? It has to be that way if you’re going to make it like he has. If you’re going to play for one of the top clubs in the Premier League and the England team, then you’re going to have to sacrifice most of your youth for it.

Again, you won’t find anybody offering any sympathy for that. Nor should they. Just don’t expect these young men to play nice when they make decisions about their future. Sterling has no roots in Liverpool. He has no real emotional attachment to the club or the city. The media and the fans demand that attachment but the hard truth is that it’s an unrealistic expectation.

Sure, feel sympathy for the fans who take a player to their hearts, who idolise him and dream of him being the inspiration for a renaissance at their club. But don’t blame the player if he’s ruthless when someone offers him the chance to move on. It’s the way the system made him.

 

[GeorgeHeslop'sTackle.]

I

Maybe the Delph deal helped with Sterling - perhaps it seemed credible that we'd walk away if we at least got in one English player.

If that's the case, then Tixxi's played an absolute blinder.

Bloody risky strategy though.

I suspect we've just stumped up the extra 10 million (Particularly now the Delph thing has gone tits up).

I don't think we'll ever know the real truth. Both clubs will put their own interpretation on it, as both will, no doubt, want to save face.

 

[NorCalBlue]

I


If that's the case, then Tixxi's played an absolute blinder.

Bloody risky strategy though.

The tricky part was getting the timing right with agent Richards...

 

[Ric]

I


If that's the case, then Tixxi's played an absolute blinder.

Bloody risky strategy though.

That didn't happen, unfortunately. We had no idea that Delph was going to walk away. It was his decision, not ours. We wanted him to sign regardless of Sterling, and it's a setback in our plans. Not a major one in the scheme of things, as he wasn't a priority, but a setback nonetheless.

 

[Sergi0 Na5r1]

A labrador on the wing a chihuahua in goal and Ricky Lambertino in the front and they will walk the league.

 

[oakiecokie]

A labrador on the wing, a chihuahua in goal and Ricky Lambertino in the front and they will walk the league.

Don`t forget about all the bitches who slagged him off.

 

[SuperBlu]

Lopes or Kelechi could play on the wing and develop to be as good as Sterling.

 

[Sheikhspeare]

We'll have two European Golden Boys in the side when this wraps up, and maybe 3 if we land Pogba... And to think, people are flapping over Fabian fucking Delph