He wasn’t a natural finisher, but he was a very good goalscorer.”Sterling could do things that McLaughlin wasn’t encountering against wingers of a similar age and his tireless work-rate meant he was thorn in the side as much defensively as he was going forward.But the defender took consolation from the fact that the 17-year-old was already proving a menace for seasoned professionals.“We played Everton U23s at Goodison Park.
“All top players have that, being a sore loser. He would be the same with every single person, but when he went on the pitch, he would be the star.” It was the star shaved into the side of the head which first caught Ryan McLaughlin’s eye.He was the right-back for Northern Ireland U16s wondering who the diminutive substitute with the striking haircut was in the Victory Shield match Steve Gallen believes did so much to enhance Sterling’s self-belief.“I thought this guy looks like a kid, but he got the ball and he absolutely blitzed every one of us,” says McLaughlin. At 15, Liverpool beat back competition from Arsenal and Manchester United to sign Sterling from Queens Park Rangers. “In my opinion, over the next five years, you are going to see an even better Raheem Sterling.”You sense Morgan could speak at length about what makes his former team-mate special.After all, Sterling’s is a tale of rampant excellence and the non-league player has witnessed part of the journey at close quarters.But what is most striking about his recollections of the period in which Sterling was establishing himself as a star of the future, is that the effusive praise for his footballing ability goes hand in hand with the compliments about his character.The two are still in touch, with Morgan giving his former colleague the courtesy of letting him know he would be doing this interview and he received a warm response.“I knew he wouldn’t mind, but it was just out of respect for him. “We were playing 4-3-3 and he was playing on the left of the front three, coming in on his right foot. He was good that day, but we made a lot of individual mistakes and he was absolutely fuming because, at the end of the day, he was the best player in the tournament and he didn’t want to be in a team that got beat by that amount. They have lived on this side of the world. “As an athlete you never want to settle.
“What is the need for it?” he said. Even in training, he would be absolutely livid,” McLaughlin recalls with a laugh.“We got beat by Ajax in the semi-final of the youth Champions League.
He just needed to work on parts of his game. “I know he made his debut at 17, but I thought he could have gone up even earlier. City rewarded him with a new contract a few months ago, at least partly to ward off interest from Real Madrid.
“He developed him brilliantly. If I was showing 10 cars on my driveway, if I was on Instagram biting my gold chain, or with two Rolexes on, you can call me flashy.
I think he made his debut at the end of that season under Kenny Dalglish. The last time he went back, he said in an interview last week, he looked at those streets not far from where he had grown up, those high-rises, and saw “a prison, with no way out.”His meteoric rise to being one of the finest English players of his generation should, then, be a cause for celebration for England. The way we trained was relentless.“He was very good with Raheem. “If you think back to Wayne Rooney, at 16 he was a man physically. But they have a picture of me in each car, so the story is that I drive a car each day. He was always doing extra shooting after training. Sometimes you ask what the motive is.”More pernicious than the content of the articles, in his mind, is the way they are framed: the little asides, the giddy, superfluous mentions of his weekly wage and, in particular, the dog-whistle words — the hints that this young, successful, high-profile black footballer is not spending the money he has earned correctly, or that he has not earned it at all.“It is not just me,” he said. Footballer and father are the first two that come to Sterling’s mind, but it is the broader scope of who he is, and who he can be, that most engages him.He takes inspiration from Jay-Z, someone who “made money, and then looked for the next generation, put everything in place to find someone to follow him.” He continued: “If I don’t do it, if the one after me doesn’t do it, it will just keep going. Raheem Sterling is thinking about how his game has changed with age. “He got kicked around a little bit, but it was an unbelievable experience for him. “He has just turned 25, if he looks after himself, he could play for another 10 years. Each ran a set of pictures of the forward behind the wheel of various vehicles.“These were cars that I had had between the ages of 17 and 23,” he said. It focused not just on what had happened at Stamford Bridge, but why. He would cut inside and either cross or bend one into the far corner.