I didn’t get into the reasons why, but yes there are different levels of motivation. If Matip was born and raised in Cameroon, perhaps it would’ve meant more to him. Like it does for Keita or Salah.
Shit (wrong treatment, overused/misused or bad luck) can happen both at club (and yes even at the highest level) and country. Clubs also have players for the vast majority of time, year after year and do pre-seasons with them.
Roy breaking Sturridge is a theory I’ve heard for the first time. Should we count the amount of times he got injured at Liverpool? And would that make us the only culpables or that we didn’t see it coming when we selected and signed him? No.
At the end of the day, all you want is a respectful line of communication between club and country level. The rest cannot be avoided.
He turned up for an international break with a training plan to protect his fragile fitness. Roy decided he needed to ‘test the players wesolve’, threw the plan out and put Sturridge in a high intensity training match. Sturridge broke down and returned to Liverpool injured, and was never the same player again.
Who to believe? Brendan, someone on the internet or the player himself?
Sturridge, 25, injured his thigh while training with England in September, just two days after playing in the 1-0 win over Norway.
That led Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers to claim his England counterpart Roy Hodgson had been over-training the striker although Sturridge himself insisted he had no problem with what happened.
“I would never blame him for this. Never. Or any of the staff – it was just an unfortunate incident”.
The player needs to be protected from himself quite a lot of times. Woy ignored the guidelines from LFC which led to Sturridge getting an injury and his career massively derailing post that.
How do you even know that? And it’s Roy by the way. My father in law had a similar speech impediment and in his younger days he suffered no end of “amusing” comments about it.
Interestingly, that suggestion is what made Matip say fuck it. He got dropped after they suffered a run of bad results and had the manager suggest it was because he didn’t care the way “real Cameroonian” would have. The FA didnt back him in his complaint so he decided he wasn’t going to through the ball of ache of it all just to be disrespected like that.
It was a really shit situation all while it is something that raises its head in international football from time to time, does not really relate to any conversation about Mo’s place in international football.
Nice to have him back after AFCON and then the extended injury. He showed sharpness in the Europa game (UEFA seems to be hiding whatever VAR offside image they used), and then against $hitty, had that sublime pass to put Diaz one on one.
Can build up minutes in the second leg and the FA Cup, and then with not being selected fro Egypt’s friendlies, can be back to his sharpest after the international break.
Just want to add well played Egypt. They obviously would love their top man to play, as I’m sure it lifts the team, and by extension, the country. But common sense seems to have prevailed. It’s a small mercy, and is obviously the right thing to do, but in a global game with vested interests pulling this way and that, the correct outcome here was uncertain.
