Young players all over the world look more dedicated and focused for their career and it holds true whether you are playing for a Spanish side or in English premier league, and for that reason, most of the sides usually hire players in their teen ages to explore their hidden talents to be used in a long term. We have seen this is something that happened to Neymar and now another player who is getting famous these days for his consistent form is Liverpool’s 19-year-old Englishman Raheem Sterling who proved his worth on both national and club levels. He not only impressed everyone playing for the Reds but also made an emphatic entry in Euro qualifier against Switzerland. Usually, this kind of players have one idol whom they follow the most and in this case manager Brendan Rodgers has taken the role of mentoring the young midfielder and apparently asked him to ‘live, sleep and eat’ football if he wants to enlarge his professional career. This is also a fact that players of this age often get distracted with other lucrative things typically in their personal life and this is exactly what happened to him as well in the last November when Rodgers gave him priceless tips on how to keep motivated towards the game without losing the focus.
Talking about the last one year of his life, Sterling almost shared his daily routine in an interview along with adding the credential notes for his manager, he said, “Going into training each day, coming home and going back to training — that’s been it for me over the last 12 months. I have tried to live, sleep and eat football as the manager has told me to do.
“When the time is right, I have a laugh and a joke with my friends on a day off, but I have had to make sacrifices and in that sense it’s been a huge step forward, completely different to how it was before. I was 18 when the manager spoke to me. I realised I’m not like any other teenager. I can’t be doing stuff any other 18- or 19-year-old was doing. I knew I had to make changes, to ensure being the best I could be.”
“Maybe 12 months ago, I wouldn’t want to get on the ball as much if I’d made a mistake. But now I’m a bit more confident. If I lose the ball, I want to get on it as quickly as possible and make up for it, whereas before I would hide away and maybe only look for the ball 10 minutes later. I don’t want to give the defenders any break,” he further added.