Raheem Sterling’s kind of courage was to speak up

Last week, Raheem Sterling talked himself out of the England starting XI by telling Roy Hodgson that he was tired. The reaction of one former England captain displayed a stunning lack of empathy.

"He is 19, and it's October," Alan Shearer told the Sun. "I genuinely have never heard something like that in my career . . . The working man who is up at 6am and home at 8pm does not want to hear how tired a 19-year-old professional footballer is . . . Perhaps all the attention over the last 18 months has simply gone to his head and he feels able to pick and choose his games, depending on how good a night's sleep he has had."

Shearer didn't seem to have thought much about the reality of Sterling's situation. In the four weeks leading up to the Estonia game, he had been playing a match every three or four days. It was the first such spell of top-level matches in his career, since Liverpool played very few midweek matches last season. It should be obvious that a still-growing 19-year-old might initially struggle to cope with that schedule.

Neither had Shearer considered the peculiar psychological pressures on Sterling. In two years, he has gone from being a kid who was happy just to be involved with the first-team squad to being the most important attacking player for his club, and England’s great young hope. Last season, Luis Suárez took the pressure of being Liverpool’s on-field leader and inspiration. Now the burden is all on Sterling.

It’s no surprise he was tired. The surprising thing is that he told Hodgson about it. One reason why Shearer struggled to empathise with Sterling is that British and Irish players of his own generation would have been unlikely to admit any such thing to their manager.

Roy on Ruud’s sore knee

Roy Keane

touches on the theme in his recent book, writing that Ruud van Nistelrooy missed the 2004 FA Cup semi-final against Arsenal because he had a sore knee.

“It’s the Cup semi-final, for f*ck’s sake,” Keane said.

“Well, I’ve only got one body. I need to look after it,” Van Nistelrooy replied.

Keane played against Arsenal with a sore hamstring that he now thinks was actually a torn hamstring. He notes that this injury forced him to retire aged 34, while “Ruud ended up playing in Spain till he was 39, and still looks 21”.

“I was thinking he was the fool, but I think now that I probably was,” Keane writes. “I was conditioned to think that not playing if you weren’t 100 per cent fit was a sign of weakness, and that you should be strong and play when you were injured. But the clever lads won’t be limping around when they’re 45 . . . My tradition was different: ‘Don’t show you’re hurt, just get on with it’. . . What we see as heroic, I think now is probably weakness.”

Keane is taking the analysis too far. He’s right that it takes moral courage to stand up to a manager or dressing room and declare that you cannot play. But that doesn’t mean that the physical courage it takes to play through pain is a kind of weakness.

Young players at the top level now seem to have more of the first kind of courage than the second. Partly this is because injuries are better understood. The Borussia Dortmund coach, Jürgen Klopp, says: "The boys now have injuries we never even heard of 10 years ago. When I was a player we used to say we had a sore leg; now it's a 'bone bruise' and they need four weeks out."

Yet it also seems there is an increasing unwillingness to accept that suffering is part of the game. As Arsène Wenger said recently: “Modern society wants less pain, wants to suffer less and wants to be treated better in every aspect . . . Pain has to disappear, whether you go to the dentist or go to work.”

Old-fashioned ethic

The outstanding examples of the old-fashioned ethic in the

Premier League

era are probably

John Terry

and

Frank Lampard

. Terry, in particular, seems to take a masochistic pleasure in defying injury; you get the impression he doesn’t consider himself 100 per cent fit without the sensation of pain somewhere in his body. He once played an entire season with a broken toe that never had time to heal between matches. He just ignored it, with the help of painkilling injections.

"Even if we're injured or tired, the instinct is always to get on the pitch if it's at all possible and even when it's probably not," Lampard says in his autobiography, Totally Frank. "It's a standing joke at Chelsea with John. He'll limp in after training on a Thursday, clearly struggling for the weekend match. 'F*ck it, my ankle's in bits.' And he means it. Yet in spite of the pain he goes out and gives it everything for 90 minutes two days later. That's JT for you."

It’s easy to roll your eyes at their macho backslapping, but it would also be wrong not to acknowledge the courage. Willingness to suffer is part of what made Lampard and Terry huge figures in the game. Lampard ignored a host of injuries to set a record for outfield players of 164 consecutive Premier League appearances. Given the way suffering is out of fashion, it will probably be the last of his records to fall.