Liverpool legend Jamie Carragher has revealed that Daniel Sturridge once confronted him after he suggested on punditry duty that the Reds should sell the striker.
The pair ended up sharing a dressing room on a post-season tour even though Carragher had retired and begun working for Sky Sports. And Sturridge brought up the comments before they entered the field alongside one another to represent Liverpool.
“It was Sturridge — he was still playing at the end with Jurgen Klopp,” Carragher said on the latest edition of The Overlap, brought to you by Sky Bet. “You wouldn’t believe this, but when I stopped playing for a couple of years, Liverpool asked me and Steven Gerrard to go on an end-of-season game in Australia.
“Liverpool couldn’t sell out the tickets to fill out this stadium in Australia, so they asked me, Stevie, and Steve McManaman to play with the team. I’d said that they’d needed to sell Daniel Sturridge, and he confronted me in the dressing room when we got over there.
“And I thought, ‘Fair play, good on you’. There is nothing worse than someone backing down, so I wasn’t going to. Sometimes, if I was a player with a journalist, I might say something and they’d back down and say sorry. But no, just front it.”
(Image: Sky Sports)
That game was in 2017 and Liverpool won 3-0 against Sydney FC. Sturridge, Alberto Moreno and Roberto Firmino all scored in a comfortable win over the team who had won the A-league title earlier that month.
Sturridge stayed for another two seasons at Anfield before he joined Trabzonspor. He won the Champions League with the Reds in 2019 and stopped playing altogether in 2022.
Liverpool.com says: Sturridge is now an excellent pundit himself so he will have a good understanding of what impact his words can have. He was a superb player for the Reds, scoring at a rate of almost a goal every other game, but he just wasn’t fit enough for long enough. In the end, only his injuries stopped him from becoming one of the best players in the world.
