Jamie Carragher has revealed Daniel Sturridge confronted him in Australia over comments he made about the striker's future at Liverpool.
Carragher joined Steven Gerrard and Steve McManamann as a Liverpool XI played Sydney FC in a pre-season exhibition match in Australia, and after the game, Sturridge pulled him aside to question as to why he had said Liverpool should sell the out-of-form England striker.
Speaking in an interview with Anfield Extra, which was later transcribed by This Is Anfield, Carragher detailed the pair's rather tense exchange Down Under.
As soon as I got on the plane, I could see Sturridge wasn’t his normal self with me. And he pulled me in Australia after the game, or at half time when we’d come off.
He said ‘why did you say they should sell me?’. I said ‘ooh, fair enough!’ I thought ‘I’m not having you putting me on the back foot’ so I went straight back and said ‘well, what else can they do?!’
He wasn’t too happy that I’d said that, but my point was that a player of his quality, you either play or you go.
I was happy he said it. It’s fair enough; we give stick out, and plenty of praise too, so who are we to say that someone can’t have an opinion on us?
If I was him, I wouldn’t want to be on the bench, and from Klopp’s point of view there is nobody else on the bench he could get money for, if he needed say £20m or £25m.
Listen, you could still keep him. If Daniel Sturridge is happy playing 25 games next season, you are not going to get many sub strikers with his quality.
But to be honest I’d seen Slaven Bilic speak about him towards the end of the season, so I thought ‘oh, he’ll end up at a West Ham or somewhere’. But you see his quality, it’s difficult to go and buy a striker with that.
As detailed in The Telegraph, earlier this season Carragher suggested Sturridge's "legs have gone," and said that when the striker doesn't score, his team is "basically down to 10 men."
