Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola on Sunday said that there was still room for improvement from Raheem Sterling after the forward’s astonishing performance in a 6-1 win over Southampton that returned his team to the top of the English Premier League.
The defending champions remain on course to better last season’s record-breaking tally of 106 goals after another emphatic display that leaves them with a plus-29 goal-difference just 11 games into the campaign.
Sterling was the pick of the attacking talents at the Etihad Stadium, scoring two goals and providing three assists as City raced into a 3-0 lead inside 18 minutes.
Photo: AFP
“He is a top player, but still he is so young to be considered the world’s best,” said Guardiola when asked to rank Sterling among the game’s leading players. “He is in incredible form, he is sharp, fast, clever, fighting, decisive, he can play both sides, and can play in the middle and receive the ball between the lines and commit the centerbanks with a lot of aggression.”
His performance means Sterling has now been directly involved in 40 league goals — scoring 24 and making 16 assists — since the start of last season.
“It was an incredible performance, but still with the young guys like him and Leroy [Sane] I would feel he can improve,” Guardiola said. “Still, he loses simple balls, like the Tottenham [Hotspur] game when he made an amazing assist in the first few minutes, but then lost a lot of balls.”
Wesley Hoedt turned Sane’s sixth-minute cross into his own goal before Sterling laid on the first of his assists, crossing for Sergio Aguero to claim the 150th Premier League goal of his career — putting the Argentine equal-eighth with Michael Owen in the division’s all-time goalscoring list.
Sterling crossed for David Silva to volley in the third and, after Ederson’s foul on Danny Ings allowed the Southampton forward to score from the penalty spot, Sterling scored in first-half stoppage-time after Aguero gamely kept a loose ball in play.
Aguero set up Sterling for the fifth, from a wide angle, in the 66th minute and Sane completed the rout from Sterling’s third assist.
It was a devastating display from Sterling, who only managed to score seven league goals in 2016-2017, Guardiola’s first season in charge.
“The difference is in his head,” Guardiola said. “The first season, he was scared, he was looking, who is the guy I am going to pass the ball to? He was not looking where the ’keeper was. We spoke about that and said try to score goals, it doesn’t matter if you miss it, be aggressive.”
Ever the perfectionist, Guardiola still saw enough to demand improvements.
“Of course, the way we played the first 20 minutes, yes,” he said when asked if City’s title rivals would be frightened by the latest victory. “But the team sent me some signals today that in some positions, some actions, we are not stable enough, but it is good. Improving after winning is so much easier than improving after losing.”
It was a view with which Southampton manager Mark Hughes would doubtless agree.
“We were more than a little bit too passive defensively,” Hughes said. “This game isn’t going to define our season and we need to make sure we are better when we play teams that aren’t as good as City.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
Rafael Nadal on Wednesday said the upcoming French Open would be the moment to “give everything and die” on the court after his comeback from injury in Barcelona was curtailed by Alex de Minaur. The 22-time Grand Slam title winner, back playing this week after three months on the sidelines, battled well, but eventually crumbled 7-5, 6-1 against the world No. 11 from Australia in the second round. Nadal, 37, who missed virtually all of last season, is hoping to compete at the French Open next month where he is the record 14-time champion. The Spaniard said the clash with De Minaur was
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but