by bigmick » Sat Apr 05, 2008 2:56 am
Like most pro rotation "Rafa style" arguments, the "the players play more games than they did twenty years ago" sounds good but it doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Fortunately for those wish to prove the stat and the statement to be correct, as has been pointed out we were banned from Europe during this particular year so it just about is. Nobody will convince me however that this is what Rafa meant when he said it, he didn't think to himself "I know what, Ill defend rotation by picking on that particular period where the club was banned from Europe as it's true to say we'll play more games in this season that we did in that one". He most probably didn't consider that the league was forty two games in those days rather than thirty eight, and figured that the Champions league as opposed to a knockout European Cup would involve many more fixtures. It's by no means a crime on his part that he got a bit mixed up, but that is certainly what happened in my view.
All that said though, I think I would agree with anybody who says that football has changed from twenty years ago (or indeed from the late seventies to todays modern era) and that a manager would need to change the team more than they did in those days. Football these days is more of an explosive sport, players are more finely tuned athletes and like high performance sports cars as opposed to Hillman Hunters, there is probably more that can go wrong with them. So for me making the argument that we never had to rotate in the past is as wrong as saying we play more games than we did in previous eras. We play broadly the same amount of games, but the nature of those games is different, and the players need to be rotated more than they were then.
Despite all that of course, Rafa has massively overdone it in each of his four seasons at Liverpool. Given the fact that we have now settled on a team pattern, and indeed to a lesser or greater extent a team, I wonder what the pro's views on the situation are now? It seems to me he was either wrong before or he's wrong now, as his methodology has radically altered over the last six weeks or so. Would people like to see him begin next season in a similar way to the way he's going now, or would they like to return to seventy five changes to the team in the first fifteen matches or whatever it was. Do people think that fourteen points or so off the top of the league at this stage is about as good as we actually are, just above Everton, or do they think we might have been closer with more conventional selection methods? Do they think all the team changes made absolutely no difference to our results whatsoever, even helped us to get as many popints as we did perhaps?
I noted Sabre's interjection about the Arsenal situation and it's an interesting one. I kind of agree that Arsenal could probably have rotated a bit more after Christmas to rest the players for the final push for the title, but it was I suspect a thin squad rathter than dogma which prevented it happening. The two other points worth mentioning are of course that they fielded a settled team constantly and got the results and performances as their reward in the first half of the season. We got neither to be frank and I would be interested to hear whether people think they would have gone quite as well if Wenger had been "Rafa styling". Also, when you consider that they were unheralded before the season started, and they are supposedly dead on their feet now, I must say despite all of that they still looked like a pretty good team to me the other night. As I've said a couple of times, they look tired, but our "Rafa styled" players weren't exactly leaping around like delayed gazelles either.
Last edited by
bigmick on Sat Apr 05, 2008 3:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
"se e in una bottigla ed e bianco, e latte".
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