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
Melwood, Liverpool, UK
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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.