Raheem Sterling has room for improvement: Roy Hodgson
England manager Roy Hodgson has predicted that Raheem Sterling will become an even more dangerous player, as the teenage Liverpool forward`s importance to his national side continues to grow.
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London: England manager Roy Hodgson has predicted that Raheem Sterling will become an even more dangerous player, as the teenage Liverpool forward`s importance to his national side continues to grow.
Hodgson deployed him at the tip of a midfield diamond in Monday`s opening Euro 2016 qualifier away to Switzerland and the 19-year-old shone again, laying on the first goal for Danny Welbeck in an encouraging 2-0 win.
But while Sterling`s electric pace and incisive passing continue to dazzle opposition defences, Hodgson believes the former Queens Park Rangers youngster still has a sizeable margin for improvement.
"What he will get is more nuanced in his decision-making," Hodgson told journalists after Monday`s victory against Switzerland in Basel.
"Hopefully he won`t lose anything of that incredible talent, pace, athleticism, and even aggression, because he doesn`t get knocked off the ball very easily.
"But the bottom line for him is his understanding of when it`s really important to do it and when maybe he should be a bit more careful and when maybe he should drift away and take someone out of position.
"These are the things you work on on the training field and I`m certain (Liverpool manager) Brendan (Rodgers) is working on that all the time on the training field, just like we are when he comes to us.
"But it`s also games, and the big games. Now Liverpool are back in the Champions League they`ll have some big games coming up. That`s where you learn most and I`m excited for him."
England`s victory over the Swiss was their first competitive win of 2014, following their meek group-stage exit at the World Cup in Brazil.Their energetic performance, bristling with attacking enterprise, was also a vast improvement on last week`s drab 1-0 friendly win over Norway, but Hodgson urged his young players not to get ahead of themselves.
"I think they`ve got to go away feeling happy that they let nobody down, that they did the right things, but if they`re wise, they won`t start jumping for joy too much," he said.
"They will be keeping their feet on the ground and saying `Yes, we were good enough, we did some good things, but if we`re going to do anything in France 2016, we`ve got to be a lot better.`"
After further qualifying games at home to San Marino, away to Estonia, and at home to Slovenia, England will bring the curtain down on their year with a friendly against old rivals Scotland in Glasgow on November 18.
By that time, Scotland could have broken away from the United Kingdom, depending on the result of next week`s referendum on Scottish independence.
However, Hodgson played down concerns about off-pitch tension and said it would be an occasion to savour.
"Taking the independence side out of it completely, I know one thing. I took a (Neuchatel Xamax) team to Celtic Park a long time ago and we`d won the first leg 5-1 and it should have been a dead rubber," he said.
"It wasn`t a dead rubber for those Celtic fans because 60,000 of them turned up and made our life a misery for that 90 minutes, just to make certain we didn`t give away the advantage we`d got in the home game.
"So that`s going to be a very, very spiky game. It`s going to be a game that`s feisty. We`re going to be in an atmosphere which many of these players won`t have been in before.
"So I`m looking forward to that game because it will be another massive test for us. It`ll be so different from playing Estonia away or Slovenia at home."