Slot on importance of rotating vs wanting to play same 11 each week

NicheSportMedia

Liverpool boss Arne Slot on the importance of rotating his squad but also the desire to sometimes play the same 11 players each week Melwood, Liverpool, UK

Transcript

00:00What goes through your mind when you are deciding team selection?

00:06I know the old cliché is it's one game at a time,

00:09but in your mind do you actually probably know your line-up against PSG and Meccafile?

00:15Do you think that far ahead?

00:17No, no. No, not as much as you might think.

00:23Of course you do know what to expect now from PSG and you do know what to expect from Newcastle,

00:29but for me the most important game is the one against Southampton.

00:33If there would be three or five days in-between the last game and this one,

00:39I would have probably started the same XI again,

00:42even if there were only two days in-between for the next one.

00:46But since there are only two days in-between and we had to fight really hard,

00:50and it's not the first game after being three or four weeks out,

00:54it's probably the 50th game in three months.

00:59I don't know how many.

01:00So you take that into account, but you take the quality from the team you face,

01:04you take the form of the players, you take how fit they are,

01:08which players fit best together.

01:12So if you look at it, we started off with Lucho and Djoko,

01:16where Djoko is a type of player, nine-and-a-half for me almost.

01:21He's almost a midfielder as a striker.

01:26And then I finished the game with Curtis, who's a midfielder from the left,

01:28and Darwin, who's more of a real nine.

01:30So these combinations you look at depending on the opposition

01:34and the formation of the other team.

01:37The good thing for us, because you guys are only focused on Paris Saint-Germain,

01:43is that Southampton has the same formation if they have the ball as Paris Saint-Germain has.

01:49So now we need to do much better without the ball,

01:53so to press Southampton than we did against Paris Saint-Germain,

01:56so it's another good test for us.

02:00Only Nottingham Forest have used fewer players than Liverpool in the Premier League.

02:05Do you like having a tight squad like that, or in either world,

02:10for a manager, would you have a bigger squad?

02:13I see the advantages of playing mostly with the same team,

02:18because they get used to each other, so that helps.

02:23But I also am aware of the fact that you cannot play a season with 11 players,

02:27so that's why you saw sometimes players rotating.

02:31And I don't do this with 20 or 25, but mostly with 14 or 15, if possible.

02:36And the other ones don't always get the playing time they deserve.

02:39I think Javier is a great example of that, he's done so well for this club.

02:44He trains well, but he's in competition with Mo Salah and Dominic Sobreslai.

02:50Now, I don't think Mo was happy that I took him off five minutes before the end,

02:53if I looked at his body language.

02:57And there's a reason for that, because he is a player that can score a goal for us,

03:01even if he's not even playing his best game.

03:04So that's why I hardly take him off, now I did,

03:08and Dominic Sobreslai, you could call him a machine,

03:12every time you play him on the pitch, he's the one that runs most.

03:16And that's what makes it sometimes hard for Javier,

03:19that's why I like it so much how he did when he came in, only five minutes.

03:23Some players are sometimes frustrated if they only get five minutes,

03:26but in our team it has never happened.

03:30Maybe once or twice.

03:33But in general it has never happened, yeah.

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