From star man to forgotten man, Sterling’s England exile is no longer a surprise
IT’S a funny and sad business, the cycles we have in sport. New becomes old and the old becomes the forgotten ever so quickly, doesn’t it? I was thinking a little about that the other day, because at the precise moment when Gareth Southgate left Raheem Sterling out of another England squad, something else was playing out 4,000 miles away in Florida.
The Players Championship has been going on over here, but on Thursday the eyes of many in the gallery switched quite suddenly from the golfers to the well-built chap on my left.
For the life of me I had no idea who he might be, but I soon learned his name is Caleb Williams and it turns out this is a good time to be Caleb Williams — he is a quarterback who is likely to be the No1 pick in the NFL draft next month. That must be one of the best parts of the sports cycle, you’d imagine. Everything is rosy. Everything is possible. Everyone wants you. Everyone wants to call your name.
So I tagged along with him for a few holes and he said a comment to my colleague, Daniel Matthews, that really made me chuckle. He was asked how he handles all that commotion and replied: ‘I smile and wave — like the penguins in Madagascar.’
And smile and wave he did, all while on a mission to watch Jordan Spieth. Now that’s an interesting guy for the cycle conversation — Spieth was once the next Tiger Woods and he hasn’t won a major since his third seven years ago. He missed the cut a day later. The other golfer Williams took an interest in, Rory McIlroy, has tried and failed to win a fifth for 10 years and Williams thought his name was Roy.
Again, cycles. You might never know you’ve hit the downward curve until your fans alter their glare to a bloke who thinks your name is Roy.
But that’s McIlroy’s struggle and it will always feel momentary. Like he could snap out of it in a blink. With Sterling it all seems so very different. By now Sterling’s omissions from Southgate’s gatherings are not a surprise. We can count six of them in succession since the World Cup but they barely count for news any more. Kalvin Phillips being dropped? That registered more prominently and the fella has hardly played for two years. Ben White rejecting the call-up? That was a big deal.
But Sterling? That was a murmur. A point to bury far beneath other developments and good for a few questions to Southgate and Mauricio Pochettino. But old news is no news.
And Sterling is old news to Southgate. It is old news that he is old news.
If we buy that Oscar Wilde line, the one where the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, then that’s the stage of the cycle where we find Sterling.
But we won’t find him at the European Championship this summer, barring a change in fortunes that seems wildly out of kilter with his trajectory. No. This is the cycle of Phil Foden. Of Bukayo Saka. Of Cole Palmer. You have to go through Jarrod Bowen and Anthony Gordon to get to a man who, three years ago, was England’s best player when they reached the final of the same tournament.
Has a cycle moved so quickly in the wrong direction for any primeage England footballer in recent history? Have any of them morphed from rainmaker to cloud so pointedly without serious injuries? I can’t think of one.
And that is sad. It’s a nuanced sympathy, but it is sad.
He was the future once, we know that, but what does his sporting future look like now? He is 29 and his season has actually been quite good — he has six goals and six assists for that roadkill of a Chelsea team in the Premier League. And maybe he’ll add to that in the FA Cup against Leicester today. Perhaps he’ll have one of those afternoon flourishes that show us, and Southgate, what the fuss is about.
Except there isn’t much fuss and the flourishes are rare — he had a strong November, a flat December, excellent against Middlesbrough in January, dire against Wolves in February. Decisive against Manchester City, hopeless against Liverpool, a botched one on one against Newcastle.
His line goes up, his line goes down and the discussion about his place in the ecosystem gets ever quieter. Not life-off-the-rails quiet, but long-standing inertia quiet. The quiet you get when a talent that was once so screamingly brilliant is now not so worth shouting about. Damned by those whose form is vastly better than quite good; damned by a creeping sound of silence.
Hopefully he can turn it around and that’s a fading hope rooted in the memories of how destructive he was until relatively recently. Maybe he was never quite as close to greatness as we mostly believed, but you don’t start 30-plus league games in six straight league seasons in a Pep Guardiola attack unless he thinks you’re pretty great. You don’t score 131 goals for Manchester City and the winners for England in three of six matches on the way to a final unless you are indeed pretty great.
It is plausible that much of him went on ice in the Stamford Bridge morgue when he joined in 2022. I also see merit in the view of those far closer to the England camp that Southgate’s trust in Sterling, beyond his playing contributions, was compromised during the World Cup of the same year, his last stint on such a stage.
Some particulars of that trip remain a bit hazy two years on — was he willing to accept being a squad player? Could he have returned quicker to Qatar from a burglary at home, the details around which drew differing accounts from his spokesperson and the police.
If there’s a lesson, perhaps it is that the great and good should smile and wave when they have the chance because you never truly know when a quarter-back might ask: whatever happened to Roy Sterling?