Raheem Sterling can be reborn at Manchester City

Raheem, mate. I’ve been there. I’ve walked that road. I too have stared into the hippy crack abyss. The side-effects, let me tell you, have been pretty severe. Eight years down the line I’m still constantly tired. I no longer socialise normally, instead spending most of my free evenings staring at Foyle’s War with a packet of Doritos Roulette and a bottle of Taste the Difference Riesling. Quite often I hear voices. Annoying, shrill, demanding voices.
Admittedly there is a fair chance the source of these side-effects is having children rather than the dilute nitrous oxide the NHS offers to women having babies – and by extension to any opportunistic co-parent willing to go the extra yard and really share the birth experience while the nurse is out of the room. And, to be fair, Raheem has probably got this one right in the end. Gas and air, as doctors insist on calling this dangerous drug routinely handed out to women in labour and people having fillings, probably is best consumed on a yacht surrounded by laughing beautiful people in designer swimwear. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is, let’s all just relax. Deep breaths. Push a little harder. Together we can get past the perineum-shredding idiocy of pretending to be upset about the sight of young men having fun, legally, while on holiday. And focus instead on the far more interesting business of a British record transfer that increasingly looks as though it may actually happen.
From the outside there is an air of final divvyings-up about the current negotiations between Liverpool and Manchester City over Sterling’s future, a sense that what is being ironed out is the manner of his departure not the fact. With this in mind it has probably been a little overlooked in the general noises off but this would be a genuinely fascinating, not to mention good and timely move for both parties.
Most obviously it’s good for City, who need a general flushing out, not only of the team and the project but the air inside the dressing room. Yaya Touré has been the defining player of New City 1.0, with his bolt-on champion’s swagger. In Sterling City will get more of a grower, a star presence and 20-year-old first-team regular (which he will be: Jesús Navas played 47 times last season). More immediately he offers a note of textural variation to that well-seasoned attack, a little speed and raw aggression to complement David Silva’s frictionless craft and Sergio Agüero’s cutting edge.
Even the price tag is probably fair enough if we accept the skewing of the market. Sterling is expensive because he’s English. But he’s also expensive because he’s good. Although, it is here, in the extent of Sterling’s ability, the sense of uncertainty over what he may still become, that the real interest lies.
There has been a sourness to some of the how-good-is-he-really stuff in the past few weeks, driven perhaps by the lurking shadow of what we might call the Sterling Paradox. Here is a player with all the trappings: the style, the outline and the moves of a really high-class footballer. But who is still, in terms of impact, and indeed by any sensible measure, still simply circling around the idea of actually being a high-class footballer. In a sense Sterling’s performance in Manaus forEngland against Italy a year ago was a definitive little sketch of where he is right now. For an hour he was brilliant. And yet somehow he didn’t really do anything. Despite looking the boldest, bravest and most technically refined young footballer on the pitch, Sterling still had less of an effect on the actual result than Mario Balotelli.
Increasingly this sense of almost-but-not-quite has been Sterling’s chief quality, a flickering promise of future excellence, a high-class rustling away at the edge of things.
Sterling has so many attributes, from his control and manipulation of the ball, to his physical robustness (defenders can often be seen bouncing off his prodigious rump), to the mental strength to shine at the sharp end of a title race. Not to mention that beautifully waspish way of moving, neck straight, legs pumping, looking always slightly flustered, like a friendly bath‑time rubber duck that has grown legs, learned to run around and integrated itself successfully into human society but still feels terribly worried its cover may be blown at any moment.

It is what Sterling lacks right now that is most interesting, raising as it does the question of exactly what a top-class attacking footballer needs to do these days. For so long English football has obsessed over basic technique and retention of the ball but in more recent times the key quality in elite attacking play seems to be something further, a kind of applied intelligence, the ability to interpret and manage the game around you.
Modern football is essentially a kind of suffocation, a battle for space. What is required is not only precision but an early-warning sense of where the currents will move, where weakness will show itself. It is a quality probably best embodied by someone such as Andrés Iniesta, who simply drifts about in his own portable pocket of space, always two carefully calibrated steps ahead, like a man playing football against a team composed entirely of slow-moving cinematic zombies of the 1970s.
By contrast Sterling often still seems to be all brittle, high-tension endeavour, operating right at the peak of his speed and intensity, never quite ahead of the game. With this in mind a move to City may be just what he needs to open that footballing third eye a little further. Sterling’s best days at Liverpool came alongside Luis Suárez, whose special superpower, it turns out, is to flood the front end of any team with his own relentless creative intelligence. Just as Sterling bloomed next to Suárez, he would surely do so alongside Silva and Agüero, absorbing by osmosis, filling in the gaps in his range, adding the missing gears.

It may be a difficult birth. But what happens next, the reimagining of Raheem, will be fascinating for reasons that have little to do with Uppity Young Men Who Should Know Better, or the perils of medical sedatives, and everything to do with exploring the outer reaches of a very obvious talent.