Jamie Carragher reveals the former Liverpool team-mate who confronted him in the dressing room after the Reds icon said the club ‘needed to sell’ him

Jamie Carragher has revealed he was confronted in the dressing-room by a former team-mate after comments he had made about an ex-Liverpool striker. 

Carragher was speaking on The Overlap Fan Debate, brought to you by Sky Bet, about his experiences in punditry alongside fellow former-player-turned-pundit Paul Scholes. 

The Liverpool icon has become one of Sky Sport’s most popular pundits, and is well regarded for his tactical insights. 

However, one of the perils of a transition into the punditry game is that ex-players can be forced into commenting on, and occasionally criticising, their old team-mates. 

This was the position that Carragher found himself in, after claiming that his former club needed to sell one of their strikers, only to be confronted by the player in the dressing room at an end of season game.  

‘It was Daniel Sturridge – he was still playing at the end with Jurgen Klopp,’ Carragher revealed. 

Sturridge played 160 times for Liverpool, scoring an impressive 68 goals, adding 20 assists

He was also part of the side that won the club’s sixth Champions League by beating Tottenham

‘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 backdown and say sorry, but no, just front it.’

Scholes also told of a Man United player asking to meet him as a result of something he had said on punditry duty. 

The player was seemingly left unhappy with his comments and requested to meet at the training ground, but Scholes’ acquiescence did not receive a response. 

Carragher is often surrounded in the Sky Sports studio by fellow ex-players who have turned to work in the media following their retirement, and he believes the commercial success of the Premier League has had a large part to play in this. 

‘We are lucky aren’t we – the Premier League is the biggest and the best. There are so many jobs and roles – not just in this country but in other countries too. We’re lucky that we’ve played in the Premier League and now what the Premier League has become.

Carragher told how he respected Sturridge for confronting him, but stood by his opinion

Paul Scholes also revealed he had to deal with a player who was left unhappy by his comments

‘When I’m at a big game – my whole life has been about going to watch Everton as a kid and playing for Liverpool all my career, then going to Anfield or Manchester United and I’m watching the best players.

‘ You get to walk around stadiums and dressing rooms, and you think “it’s alright this!”

‘Sometimes I do stop myself and I think that I’m lucky. It almost feels like the Premier League has taken over the world now. 

‘We’re looking at ourselves and we’ve done okay in our careers, which gives us these [pundit] opportunities. 

‘There are now many other opportunities for ex-players out there now because the Premier League is so great.

‘Sometimes I feel like the talk before the game is better than the actual game itself!’