Decision time over Sterling for Rodgers

Brendan Rodgers will have a big decision to make this morning when he sits down to select his team to face QPR.

It will involve Raheem Sterling, the player at the centre of a firestorm that has seen the competence of Roy Hodgson questioned, strained the relationship between Liverpool and England and opened up a wider debate about the dangers of burn-out in young players.

Sterling is Liverpool’s special player. Rodgers needs him on the field to help repair a mediocre start to the Premier League campaign that already looks to be slipping away after just seven games.

He also needs him to be fit and firing when Real Madrid come to Anfield in the Champions League on Wednesday. Having lost to Basel in the last game, Liverpool’s prospects of reaching the knock-out stages could be severely damaged by Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and the rest and Sterling is one of the few players who, on his day, can reciprocate that damage.

But can the 19-year-old play in both games? Is he still too tired? Have club and country simply exhausted his legs and his mind by relying on him too much over the past 10 months?

Since Sterling became a first-team regular last December, he has been involved in 49 matches for Liverpool and England. He’s had the pressures of a narrow failure in the title run-in and of being one of the fearless young lions who was supposed to have stormed the World Cup.

Since the end of May he’s played 1,682 minutes of football. In 2013, in the same period, he played just 615 minutes. He had three weeks off after Brazil, then joined up with Liverpool on their American tour. No outfield player at Anfield has played more minutes this season.

Rodgers rested him against Aston Villa but had to bring him on after an hour because the team was losing. Against Middlesbrough in the Capital One Cup, he stayed on for the whole 120 minutes to help ensure they went through.

With Luis Suarez gone, Daniel Sturridge injured and new signings like Mario Balotelli, Rickie Lambert and Lazar Markovic not exactly hitting the ground running, Rodgers hasn’t been able to protect Sterling as much as he may have liked.

Hodgson had more options available and when the player intimated that he was feeling a little leg-weary before the Estonia game, he was able to accommodate him. The England manager’s mistake was that he probably gave out too much information on the reasons for Sterling’s omission. The irony is that ahead of the international break Rodgers expressed a hope that Hodgson would rest Sterling if circumstances allowed it.

Liverpool have a particular way of dealing with players’ recovery after matches that an international manager simply can’t replicate. When you face two Euro 2016 qualifiers in three days, you’d do no training at all if the club’s guidelines of giving players two days off were rigidly adhered to.

International football has been expensive for Liverpool this season. They lost Daniel Sturridge for over a month after he hurt his thigh training with England and they’ve also had Joe Allen, Emre Can and Dejan Lovren injured while they’ve been away with their countries.

Those absences have added to Rodgers’ difficulties but they are not the core reason why his team have been underperforming in comparison to last season. There’s a general lack of spark in the players that did so well to take Manchester City to within two points of the title. The free-flowing, high-energy football that hallmarked the team as they chased their first championship since 1990 has been in evidence only in the away win at Tottenham.

New defenders, signed to stop the shipping of soft goals, have made no improvement. New strikers, brought in to offset the loss of Suarez, have not scored goals. So the next few days will be pivotal to the way Liverpool’s campaign pans out.

Lose at Loftus Road and there would be too much ground to make up for them to be considered serious contenders. Win and they still have an interest. Lose to Real on Wednesday and it will be a struggle to qualify from the group in second place. Win and they could even top it.

But if the state of a teenager’s mind and body is the key to their fate, then the rest of Liverpool’s squad aren’t doing their job.