England boss Roy Hodgson needs a spark from Sterling

In the last few days, Roy Hodgson has had a taster of things to come if he loses in Switzerland on Monday night.

He was heavily criticised for an insipid performance against a poor Norwegian team in front of a half-empty Wembley.

The England manager lost his rag afterwards when it was suggested that having just two shots on target wasn’t very good. Well, the news is he ain’t seen nothing yet!

The knives have been sharpened in the interim. If England don’t come away from St Jakob-Park in Basle with at least a point, the reaction will not be pleasant.

It won’t matter that England will still have nine far easier games in which to secure one of the two top spots in Group E which will ensure their participation at France 2016.

Hodgson’s credibility with certain sections of the media and with an increasingly apathetic public is now stretched so thin that one more bad result will snap it.

Within seconds of a defeat to Switzerland, social media would go into meltdown. Within minutes, the late-night radio phone-ins would overspill with vitriol.

Within hours, newspapers would be printing headlines calling for him to be sacked. In the cold light of Tuesday morning, Hodgson would be universally portrayed as a failure.

He’d flopped at the World Cup and now he’d not delivered on the single testing occasion of a straightforward qualifying campaign.

The FA have no appetite to get rid of him. However, the atmosphere would be toxic and the apathy would only deepen.

The rest of the fixtures are easy. Hodgson will get no credit even if he takes maximum points. If he’s going to win anyone over, it has to be tomorrow.

So, while the stakes may not be high in terms of getting to the Finals, they certainly are for Hodgson.

He will argue that he didn’t get the breaks during the World Cup, and that his group of young players have exciting international futures ahead of them.

But there can only be sympathy with that viewpoint if he now shows he has the ability to maximise the impact of that raw talent in matches with a good deal less riding on them than those in Brazil.

With Ross Barkley injured, the brightest of those is Raheem Sterling. The 19-year-old was Man of the Match against Norway and he’s the one player who can genuinely tear any defence apart if used in the right way.

His Liverpool manager, Brendan Rodgers, has played him on both flanks and at the tip of a diamond behind two strikers, where he’s probably done the most damage.

Hodgson tends to play him wide, but has occasionally used him in the more central role. How Sterling is utilised in Basle may make a significant difference to the mood of those phone-ins and headlines.

Hodgson admits that he’s under pressure, but doesn’t consider that it’s been ratcheted up since the World Cup.

He dismisses that claim that he used “industrial language” during the press conference following the Norway game as evidence that he’s feeling the strain.

“You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel to find something negative to say if you focus on that,” he says.

“I’m a football coach. I played in the non-league with dockers when every other word was a swear word. I thought we’re all mature enough for a swear word not to send us into a fit of moral indignation.

“The pressure is the pressure. I don’t know that I can feel more pressure than I put myself under to do my best for the team.

“All you can do as a coach is do the job in a way you think is right and to really work hard at it. My job is to prepare football teams and I have to live with results.

“We won the game on Wednesday and lots of things were satisfying to me. Some weren’t, and we’ve worked on those.

“Now we go to Switzerland, and it’s a tougher game on paper. We will try to give the performance we need and the judgements will come afterwards.

“I accept that we might have to wait until the Euros in France to fully prove ourselves after the World Cup. But it might equally be that during the course of the coming months, people will see some exciting talent playing some exciting football.”

For Hodgson’s sake and England’s let’s hope so.