Lack of rotation: Will this hurt us deeper in the season?

All our key players dropping like flies. Season is a write off at this stage. Just don't mess up top 4.
 
Starting to take a toll in recent weeks
 
I'd forget about the FA cup. Top 4 has to be the priority.

We never had the depth to contend for all competitions once we suffered injuries
 
Today of all days, ten Hag decides to rotate. He's been dreadful in this regard.
 
Last week I thought we would take it all, now I don't see us winning a game anymore. I should find a new hobby, football is too stressful for me
 
The thinking that playing so many games won't affect players, is just extremely silly.
 
Name Changed said:
I'd forget about the FA cup. Top 4 has to be the priority.

We never had the depth to contend for all competitions once we suffered injuries
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This, feck the EL, nice little bonus but Sevilla are going to drag us all the way into hell and take an eye. Top 4 now after such a season would be fantastic progress.
 
Name Changed said:
I'd forget about the FA cup. Top 4 has to be the priority.

We never had the depth to contend for all competitions once we suffered injuries
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feck that. There's a real chance city win a treble. We need to push them all the way in the fa Cup as well
 
arnie_ni said:
feck that. There's a real chance city win a treble. We need to push them all the way in the fa Cup as well
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I would argue that Brighton would be in a better position to beat City than we will. They can focus everything into that match.
 
mu4c_20le said:
This, feck the EL, nice little bonus but Sevilla are going to drag us all the way into hell and take an eye. Top 4 now after such a season would be fantastic progress.
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Missing out on top 4 will be a disaster. It will severely cripple us in bringing in certain players. We simply have to get top 4.
 
led_scholes said:
We should have gave up on fa cup. That's the biggest mistake we have done.
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Fa Cup is only one game a round so not doing that much harm imo. Europa, however, is playing 2 games in round of 32 vs Barca, 2 games in round of 16 vs Betis and 2 games in quarters vs Sevilla.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
One of whom (Varane) has been extremely carefully managed over the course of this season. Just goes to show there’s more to injuries than the number of games played.
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Who are you comparing him to? Bruno? This is an injury prone player who has played just shy of 3000 minutes for club and country this season. He retired from his national team before turning 30 because his body couldn’t take the toil. I’d say number of games has a lot to say for someone who has missed 25 games through various injuries in under two seasons.
 
Samid said:
Who are you comparing him to? Bruno? This is an injury prone player who has played just shy of 3000 minutes for club and country this season. He retired from his national team before turning 30 because his body couldn’t take the toil. I’d say number of games has a lot to say for someone who has missed 25 games through various injuries in under two seasons.
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ETH has been very careful with Varane. That’s my point. He’s often avoided playing him twice/week when other players aren’t getting breaks at all. He’s probably been our most rotated first XI player. Which you seem to think gives magical protection from injury. Evidently not.
 
To be fair to ten Hag, our bench quality is a disaster.

Had he rotated more, it might have meant no Carabao Cup and well out of the top 4.

While I think he could have done better in his selection in some games, he also needs more time to build a rotatable squad.
 
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It's starting to get a bit gloomy looking. I want to be optimistic but the dream of winning three trophies just looks too much of an ask for this squad. Just too many games, too many of the better players suffering injuries, and it's a huge ask what with the battle for top 4 as well.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
ETH has been very careful with Varane. That’s my point. He’s often avoided playing him twice/week when other players aren’t getting breaks at all. He’s probably been our most rotated first XI player. Which you seem to think gives magical protection from injury. Evidently not.
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He’s an injury prone player. He has missed 25 of 97 games through injuries since he signed. That’s literally the definition of an injury prone player. Being very careful with him should be a given.

You can continue with your straw man all you want. None of that changes the reality, which is that we are the business end of the season and are missing one key player after another.
 
Samid said:
He’s an injury prone player. He has missed 25 of 97 games through injuries since he signed. That’s literally the definition of an injury prone player. Being very careful with him should be a given.

You can continue with your straw man all you want. None of that changes the reality, which is that we are the business end of the season and are missing one key player after another.
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There is no straw man. You just can’t accept the fact that the member of our first team that had his minutes most carefully managed represents 50% of tonight’s injury “crisis”. Not to mention that our most injured player all season (Martial) has been treated with kid gloves too.

In fact, you can’t even seem to handle the fact that players get injured at all. We’ve had much worse situations with injuries in multiple previous seasons, including when Fergie was in full tinker bell mode. Not to mention we’ve never had to cope with the fixture congestion we’ve had this season. If anything we’ve been relatively free of overuse injuries. Isn’t Luke Shaw the only player to pull a hamstring all season?

We currently have five players out of our entire first team squad absent with injuries (two of him got frequent injuries long before they racked up many games and one of whom was injured in a clumsy tackle) The horror.
 
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He's rotated when he can, maybe the odd game you'd have thought we could have got away with a couple less of the first names on the team sheet types. But I just can't blame him for not trusting the backups, they're mostly so far below the level required. Which will probably become depressingly clear once again over the next few weeks.
 
spiriticon said:
To be fair to ten Hag, our bench quality is a disaster.

Had he rotated more, it might have meant no Carabao Cup and well out of the top 4.

While I think he could have done better in his selection in some games, he also needs more time to build a rotatable squad.
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Basically this. Of course the usual suspects are out for blood, but we know why that is.
 
Judas said:
He's rotated when he can, maybe the odd game you'd have thought we could have got away with a couple less of the first names on the team sheet types. But I just can't blame him for not trusting the backups, they're mostly so far below the level required. Which will probably become depressingly clear once again over the next few weeks.
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He really hasn't. We even played our strongest team at home v Nottingham during the most condensed period of time, despite having 3-0 advantage from the away game. We basically played our very strongest team with little to no rotation until recently.
 
Samid said:
He’s an injury prone player. He has missed 25 of 97 games through injuries since he signed. That’s literally the definition of an injury prone player. Being very careful with him should be a given.

You can continue with your straw man all you want. None of that changes the reality, which is that we are the business end of the season and are missing one key player after another.
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You don't think Varane has been rested enough then?
 
Sarni said:
He really hasn't. We even played our strongest team at home v Nottingham during the most condensed period of time, despite having 3-0 advantage from the away game. We basically played our very strongest team with little to no rotation until recently.
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Your posts are quite clear, your mind has been made up about Ten Hag, I genuinely thought you’ve been wumming these past few months, but it’s clearly not the case.

The reasons to not rotate, overall, are obvious when you see who we have in reserve.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
We currently have five players out of our entire first team squad absent with injuries
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Rashford, Shaw, Garnacho, Varane, Martinez, Van de Beek, McTominay. That's seven. Yes, I also tend to forget about Donny existing, can't blame you for that.
 
Judas said:
Your posts are quite clear, your mind has been made up about Ten Hag, I genuinely thought you’ve been wumming these past few months, but it’s clearly not the case.

The reasons to not rotate, overall, are obvious when you see who we have in reserve.
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The first part is obviously nonsense, I was very critical of him in his early days and I still think he made a lot of mistakes that could have been avoided but he's been largely good for us and I obviously want him to succeed. It doesn't mean he should be immune to criticism, especially as many of his weaknesses that we have witnessed over the last few months are exactly the same things Ajax fans warned us about. To pretend that he has not made some very weird decisions would be delusional.

There was literally no reason to not rotate your key players for the game I quoted. We were at home, Nottingham gave up and we won 3-0 at their ground. There was no way we were losing 3-0 to Nottingham at home, even with our second string side + youngsters. Just impossible.
 
Siorac said:
Rashford, Shaw, Garnacho, Varane, Martinez, Van de Beek, McTominay. That's seven. Yes, I also tend to forget about Donny existing, can't blame you for that.
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Hehe. VdB is easily forgotten alright.

When you go through those injuries it undermines the main argument in this thread anyway. Which is that we've a load of injuries from making players play too many games. VdB's played less than 200 minutes all season. Garnacho is < 500. So we can ignore them. Shaw and Varane have both always been injury prone. So there's no real change with either of them. And ETH has obviously been careful to manage their minutes as a result. Varane's averaged a start in only 1 in 2 cup games (Shaw only slightly more) And they've both average a day off in 1 in 3 league games.

Which leaves Rashford, Martinez and McT as the only injuries which can be blamed on being overplayed. And McT has always been prone to missing games with a niggle, here and there. Likewise Rashford. Then we have Martinez, who got a decent break in terms of competitive action, during and immediately after the World Cup. So we really don't have any evidence of the self-inflicted crisis you'd think from the premise of this thread. Certainly nothing we haven't seen loads of times before. In seasons which didn't feature the ridiculous dead queen/world cup congestion that ETH has had to deal with.

Klopp's first season was a good example of a proper injury crisis, due to players being asked to work much harder than they'd ever done before. They seemed to lose players with hammie twings in almost every game they played. What we're going through isn't close to what they went through.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Hehe. VdB is easily forgotten alright.

When you go through those injuries it undermines the main argument in this thread anyway. Which is that we've a load of injuries from making players play too many games. VdB's played less than 200 minutes all season. Garnacho is < 500. So we can ignore them. Shaw and Varane have both always been injury prone. So there's no real change with either of them. And ETH has obviously been careful to manage their minutes as a result. Varane's averaged a start in only 1 in 2 cup games (Shaw only slightly more) And they've both average a day off in 1 in 3 league games.

Which leaves Rashford, Martinez and McT as the only injuries which can be blamed on being overplayed. And McT has always been prone to missing games with a niggle, here and there. Likewise Rashford. Then we have Martinez, who got a decent break in terms of competitive action, during and immediately after the World Cup. So we really don't have any evidence of the self-inflicted crisis you'd think from the premise of this thread. Certainly nothing we haven't seen loads of times before. In seasons which didn't feature the ridiculous dead queen/world cup congestion that ETH has had to deal with.

Klopp's first season was a good example of a proper injury crisis, due to players being asked to work much harder than they'd ever done before. They seemed to lose players with hammie twings in almost every game they played. What we're going through isn't close to what they went through.
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I don't think it's just injuries, it's also the fact we look gassed after 60th minute mark in nearly every game we play. There's definitely signs of fatigue in the way we perform.
 
Sarni said:
I don't think it's just injuries, it's also the fact we look gassed after 60th minute mark in nearly every game we play. There's definitely signs of fatigue in the way we perform.
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I dunno. That was the pattern yesterday but we’ve also had games recently where we played better after half time than we did in the first half.

I think we also need to consider that the players playing the most minutes have generally been our best/most important players. Where resting them would cause a huge drop in the team performance. So our shitty bench is forcing ETH’s hand.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I dunno. That was the pattern yesterday but we’ve also had games recently where we played better after half time than we did in the first half.

I think we also need to consider that the players playing the most minutes have generally been our best/most important players. Where resting them would cause a huge drop in the team performance. So our shitty bench is forcing ETH’s hand.
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Which games? Everton game was easy across the whole game, Newcastle we were shit in both, Brentford we were worse in the second half, Southampton we did not exist (naturally down to 10 men), Liverpool was a collapse. It's only really Betis and Barcelona games where we were better after the break.
 
Eriksen was also out for considerable amount of time. It's not like when players deem fit, they can go in play like nothing happened. It will take several games to have them back in the groove, that affecting their performance.

While players that aren't injured but playing so many minutes, it will eventually affecting their performance and can't give 100% in all those games.

Now playing more games also mean more chances to get carded and suspended, just like our chubby wabby case.
 
Ayoba said:
I agree. Just have to somehow limp our way to top 4.
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Because top 4 means so much if you are 3 games in and fans already appreciate it’s an unrealistic target to think anything else…so we ain’t realistically winning the CL with this team…we need new owners where we are finishing in the league is giving us nothing
 
Samid said:


Lack of rotation hurting us into the following season.
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We should evaluate how many games Shaw could play in a season and how often and depending on that have a proper LB who could play the rest of it. Given that we have already given him the extension, we should be planning better to prevent another player who is constantly in treatment.
 
RedorDead21 said:
Because top 4 means so much if you are 3 games in and fans already appreciate it’s an unrealistic target to think anything else…so we ain’t realistically winning the CL with this team…we need new owners where we are finishing in the league is giving us nothing
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Post you Quoted was from last season but Do carry on with your rant .
 
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