Why Sterling lost rag and snapped at Gomez
It was a huge game for Manchester City at Anfield on Monday (NZ time), a chance to halve Liverpool’s six-point lead over the visitors and put down a marker while slowing their rivals’ formidable march.
It was no less so for Raheem Sterling and, as the fallout from his bust-up with Joe Gomez is hungrily dissected, that loss of control for which the City forward has subsequently apologised appears to have its roots in a lot more than just frustration at a particularly damaging defeat.
Liverpool is not just any game for Sterling. His departure from Anfield in 2015 was one of the most acrimonious of the Premier League era and he has been feverishly targeted with boos and chants of ‘‘there’s only one greedy b ..... d’’ whenever he returns to the club he once called home.
Sterling quickly became typecast as a bad-boy mercenary who had moved primarily for a £180,000 (NZ$365,000)-a-week salary that was double what was on offer at Anfield – even if his now bulging trophy cabinet dictates otherwise – and, whether a seed was sown or not, a wave of vacuous ‘‘stories’’ with an uncomfortable undertone would follow in certain outlets.
Remember the one about him buying a sausage roll from Greggs and having the temerity to eat it in a ‘‘£500,000 limited edition Bentley’’? Or that one about him shopping in Poundworld, as if that was some sort of mortal sin for such a wealthy individual? And so the list goes on.
He would later joke that he had one of those faces ‘‘people don’t like’’ but the watershed moment came after he was abused during City’s 2-0 defeat at Chelsea in December last year and responded in an Instagram post by accusing some sections of the media of helping to ‘‘fuel racism’’ through their portrayal of young black footballers.
Sterling had actually been quite calm in the dressing room after the game on Monday and had appeared to patch things up with Gomez but something snapped in him on Tuesday.
The surprise, perhaps, is that he had not snapped before now. – The Telegraph, London