Roy Hodgson tells England’s Raheem Sterling to toughen up after boos

Roy Hodgson has urged Raheem Sterling to develop “a thicker skin” after the Liverpool winger was booed relentlessly by the home support and struggled to make any impact as England spluttered to a disappointing goalless draw against the Republic of Ireland.

The visitors produced only three shots on target, the first just before the hour mark, in a soporific display which prompted ITV, which had shown the countries’ first meeting in Dublin for 20 years, to apologise on its official Twitter feed for the lack of quality being served up. Hodgson admitted his side, while unbeaten now in 10 matches, have failed to maintain recent improved standards with his focus drawn to Sterling. The winger, unsettled by his contract dispute at Liverpool and with his future unresolved, suffered at the hands of his club’s considerable local support and was withdrawn midway through the second half with form and confidence clearly shattered.
 
''He’s going through a bad time publicly,” said Hodgson. “You can’t expect people just to shrug off the criticism he has been receiving. He does ever so well and tries to shrug it off, let his football do the talking, but he needed this game to realise that, if he is going to get it out of his system, he’s going to have to work harder still and get a thicker skin than he has at the moment.”
 
Asked whether he had any reservations about playing Sterling in next Sunday’s Euro 2016 qualifier against Slovenia, Hodgson added: “No, I trust Sterling. But players are not robots. He’s done some fantastic things for us and today he didn’t hit those heights, but it’ll take a lot before I and the English national team turn away from Raheem Sterling.”
 
Paul Scholes, working as a pundit for ITV, suggested the winger’s confidence “is shot to pieces” and described the whole occasion as “a waste of an afternoon”. The broadcasters’ tongue-in-cheek tweeted assessment included the apology, the suggestion the home goalkeeper Kieren Westwood might have “fallen asleep” when he was replaced by Shay Given, and that the Republic’s former non-league player, Harry Arter, would be “used to this standard”.

Hodgson would not comment on those criticisms but did admit his team had failed to provide many plus points. “The positives are harder for me to find than they would have been for Martin [O’Neill],” he said. “We set ourselves high standards and got nowhere near them in the first half.
 
''It was marginally better in the second, but we are very critical of ourselves. We’ve had a good run, a year almost unbeaten, and came here believing if we played our best football we could win the game. But we never got close to that. We didn’t lose, but we have to accept – myself and the players – there were a lot of things we could have done better.
 
''It’s important we are critical and continue to set ourselves high standards. We want to go to France and do well there, and we’ll have to play better than we did today. Ireland defended exceptionally well and were more than worth the draw. There were far too many situations where we didn’t win the duels we wanted to, and didn’t make anywhere near enough use of the moments when we got into the final third. We didn’t threaten a goal.”