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.”
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