Arsenal and Chelsea stars Bukayo Saka and Raheem Sterling have been criticised for their displays in England’s 1-0 defeat to Italy last night.
As usual Gazzetta dello Sport have provided their ratings from the game, offering scores on the player’s performances out of ten.
Like most of the European media they’re usually quite harsh with their scoring and it was the same, with nobody on either side scoring higher than a seven.
It’s a particularly chastening report for the Arsenal and Chelsea men, though, who are among the lowest scorers overall.
The newspaper hands Saka, who started in an unfamiliar left-wing back position in the game, the worst rating of all the players on the pitch with a 4.5 out of ten.
They say the Arsenal was ‘still in shock’ after his last appearance against Italy, the European Championship final, and was a ‘ghost’ throughout the game.
His performance was so bad it’s barely worthy of description in their eyes, although they do hand some criticism to Gareth Southgate and say he ‘hurt him’ by leaving the Arsenal man in the game for so long.
Chelsea’s Sterling, meanwhile, gets a 5.5 out of ten for his display, which is described as one with ‘more smoke than fire’.
The newspaper does say that the forward did some good things in the game but overall, it was a case of ‘a bit of fiddling, lost balls’ and wrong decisions.
In fact, they believe that he got ‘caught up in the frenzy’ and that led to an erratic display with no end product, a criticism that’s been heard before when it comes to the Chelsea man.
All in all, a bad evening for both, who it seems will have to work hard to convince anyone in Italy about their ability.
