iwasthere2012 wrote:PrezIke wrote:Annnd...
Sterling tells Rodgers he does not want to play for him anymore due to not taking seriously his desire to leave Liverpool to further his career.
Apparently Rodgers didn't inform him of the initial inquiries from us and United.
If Twitter is to be believed, the latest is that Sterling believes Rodgers leaked his mobile number for the third time. Glad I never started on Twitter. How do you know what's real and what's not.
There's a war out there going on for talent and really it's just "all in the game."
Sure, some of these stories are thrown out to slag off a player we are targeting, but this is Liverpool and an English player with a lot of potential that traditionalists always want to see "stay" with their club. It's funny because in American sport someone like Sterling would "test free agency" or "push for a trade" and there would not be the same kind of venom thrown at him. Sometimes it happens, but if you win the critics go silent.
Yes, there have been some players' decisions to leave their club that have been seen as the result of agent engineering but the reality is that an individual player's life span is short, and opportunities may not be frequent to move up. If Liverpool won the league the year before maybe they would have been able to keep him, but they lost Suarez, fair or not, and they lost stature, internationally, and are not signing nor have players that put them as likely title contenders.
This is just how it is, and for him to receive the level of criticism he does is funny. Could he and his agent have handled this all better? Maybe, but I recall the interview late in the season being completely spun outside of what I head him say. He said he's not a "money grabbing 20 year old." Somehow it was then turned into all he wants is money. I really had a laugh at this one. He wants to be on a top team to prove himself at this level, as he showed himself when they were in the race with us, and the quality we saw last season until the rumours of his desire to go were beginning to surface.
Liverpool is not entitled to keep him due to their "history" if they aren't doing that now. Sterling can be a real star, and this is not the old-era despite the whinging out there. Sorry. This may upset traditionalist fans but that's really how it is. Yes, we have more cash and can offer that as an additional incentive, but we also have seen the alleged downsides of complacency, or if a player drops in form, but we are simply a better team and run club over the past 5 years or so.
Sport is competitive. That's its nature. So the best players will emulate this as well with a desire to become "the best." Sometimes that means you have to move on to make that happen, as many in other professions do regularly. To act like young players with potential must remain at their clubs seems strange when moves of the kind happen consistently in other cases. But, of course, if they are English, and don't just sit quietly and stay even if the team they play for seems less likely to be so great, apparently who cares? They must remain with their club, particularly if it is one with so-called "tradition." What if Isco came to us? He left Malaga. Why not stay there? They were in the Champions League and did well under Pellegrini. Did he receive the same criticism? We bought Balotelli from Inter as well. Was it just money? Liverpool know they are widely loved by older English journalists so they milk it for all they can, trying to make Sterling look bad.
In the end if they keep this up Liverpool will lose, but it's an interesting play. Carrigher's latest rant about how Sterling is ruining his reputation is also laughable, but predictable. In case he doesn't realise there are far more football fans outside of England of the game, and they won't follow or believe him like other die hards who watch Sky every day. They will look at Sterling's performances on the pitch. That's it. If he does so well he will be fine.
He seems willing to take that risk, so he is quite confident, and ambitious. If he shows himself to be worth/close to the value he is assessed, which he is probably bothered by being so high now -- a tactic to slag him off, clearly -- then the silence will be deafening.