Sterling can add polish to Roy’s boys for Brazil
ROY HODGSON will be en route to Brazil when Raheem Sterling attempts to again destroy Arsenal this afternoon.
But the England manager will make sure he gets an update on the Liverpool winger’s form when he lands for a FIFA World Cup Team Workshop in Florianopolis.
If the youngster can go close in today’s FA Cup tie to reproducing his two-goal display in last week’s 5-1 Premier League mauling of the Gunners, Hodgson could be taking Sterling back to South America with him in the summer.
Sterling was capped as a 17-year-old 15 months ago, but hasn’t been used since.
Now, though, he is manoeuvering himself into pole position as the man to replace the injured Theo Walcott on England’s right flank.
Says Hodgson: “When we first picked Sterling, he’d just burst into the Liverpool team and was doing fantastically well.
“He lost his place, however, and almost disappeared off the scene for a while. So he wasn’t on the radar to such an extent.
“But I remember being really impressed with him in an Under-21 game when he still hadn’t got back into the Liverpool team.
“Since then, his form seems to be going up and up. Doing well in a top, top team puts a lot of pressure on everybody else.
“If you can do it at the top of the table with Liverpool, you can do it in an England shirt.
“It means we have a lot of competition in the wide areas, with Andros Townsend and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Aaron Lennon and Adam Johnson.
“The Under-21 team is awash with quick, wide players.
“Wilfried Zaha is in the frame again because he’s playing football at Cardiff, and Nathan Redmond is doing very, very well at Norwich
“We’re not short of candidates. It’s going to be a question of how many of that type of player I want to include in the squad, and which ones.
“It might not be nice for me, but the more people I disappoint, the better.
“We really never rule anyone out. A player would have to rule himself out by showing he’s totally unsuitable to the way we want to work.”
When he returns from his Brazilian trip — which will include a bridge-building charm offensive in Manaus, where England play their opening World Cup match against Italy — Hodgson will select 30 players for the Wembley friendly against Denmark on March 5.
“I want to use that game as a forerunner to Brazil,” he says.
“I want to get minds focused and get them thinking about their responsibilities during March, April and early May before we meet up. “I know they’ve got to concentrate on club matches, but I don’t want them to forget that everything that’s going on is also part of our preparations.” With the Champions League re-starting this week, Hodgson is aware that if an English club progresses to the Final on May 24, it will impact on his preparation camp in Portugal that week.
“It’s a fact of life,” he says. “And in many ways I would be happy for the players who got to the Final. “It would mean that they would not be with us for those days, and would join us later. “We would try to find some way of giving them a couple of days off, but they obviously won’t get the full week off that the players who finish on May 11 will get.”