His Man City affiliations don't affect my judgement because I'm going off his England performances.
Which is fine, up to a point. But given that the national side plays no more than a handful of competitive fixtures in a season, surely club form has to be the primary metric for selection?
Beyond that, the manager has to choose players to fit the system. Or has to choose a system that will work with the players at his disposal... Which brings us back to the question of why Sterling isn't able to recreate his club stats for England. Something obviously isn't clicking for him at national level - and it may well be, as you say, that we don't have that Paul Scholes type player in midfield, or that Kane isn't the right partner for him.
Unfortunately his England stats are - 2906 minutes played, 2 goals = 1453 minutes per goal vs Rashford's 350 mins per goal (3 England goals) and Emile Heskey's 485 in 3401 minutes (7 England Goals)
You're obviously including friendlies in your assessment. In competitive fixtures, which are the only ones that really count, Sterling has 2 goals from 1802 minutes played (27 caps), while Rashford has 1 goal from 646 minutes played (16 caps).
He compares badly to Emile Heskey (who was derided for his lack of England goals).
Emile Heskey was a bizarre player. I often thought he'd make a better defender than attacker, as his tackling was excellent, although his distribution was appalling.
He's got time to improve, and I think he needs to improve, his positional sense, his vision, his awareness of others, his ruthlessness in front of goal, quickly.
He's overrated at the moment though. I would say that, at 23 years of age, if he was going to be truly World class, then he'd be showing true World class by now.
Agree with you on all that.
We're desperately short of a "Paul Scholes" in front of Henderson.
If only Kevin de Bruyne had chosen his mother's nationality...
I've seen Jonjo Shelvey's name mentioned. He would add something interesting to the side - as long as he could avoid getting sent off.