The FA CUP Fourth Round ** Spoilers ** [24th - 27th January 2020]

Soldato
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Those are the options to avoid the congestion. I'm sure he'd be moaning if he wasn't allowed to play them during the break too.

They were competitive games played with most of the first team. Nothing like friendlies with 7+ substitutions.

Messi and Ronaldo as examples generally play more minutes than any premier league player but regardless of that it's down to the clubs to manage player fitness by utilising their squad.
 
Don
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Those are the options to avoid the congestion. I'm sure he'd be moaning if he wasn't allowed to play them during the break too.

They were competitive games played with most of the first team. Nothing like friendlies with 7+ substitutions.

Messi and Ronaldo as examples generally play more minutes than any premier league player but regardless of that it's down to the clubs to manage player fitness by utilising their squad.
Playing during the winter break is an option to avoid congestion? Isn't the idea of a winter break that you take a break? There is a need for a winter break and there are clearly too many games being played with not enough time to fit them in and the worrying thing is that there's plans for even more games. UEFA are already planning to expand the CL by an extra 4 games and in 18 months there will be the new, bigger Club World Cup which Liverpool are due to be involved in. In this particular situation we could field a similar side to that of the 1st game without too many issues but again, Klopp is making a point that something must change and nobody can pretend he's not right. Look at the number of players that picked up injuries over the Xmas/New Year period.

And Wolves qualifers were competitive games in name only. I've just had a look at the Wolves side that faced Pyunik (yea, I have no idea who they are too) and there was no Patricio, no Neves, no Jota, no Jimenez in their starting line-up. I can't find the number of actual friendlies Wolves played but I'm certain that it would have been less than what they played the previous season and that these qualifers replaced those games.
 
Soldato
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Yes i know it's not ideal but playing it then is more beneficial than fitting it in an a later time. It all boils down to having big squads and using them. Liverpool are just a victim of their own success as has been every team that goes deep in every competition they are involved in. Same situation with the injuries, utilise the whole squad.

I thought they played a significant amount of first teamers early on.
 
Don
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It's not just about Liverpool and this is something that a lot of people will ignore but Klopp's been talking about this for 4 years now, bringing it up when City had a crazy January/February period last year and when Newcastle picked up 4 injuries in 1 game a few weeks back. It would be easy for Klopp to do or say nothing. As I said before, there's players in our squad that could do with a game and the game could easily be scheduled for the Tuesday and he could then send everybody away for a break on Tuesday night instead of after our League game on Saturday. It wouldn't be ideal but it's not a massive issue either but I suspect Klopp sees it as an ideal opportunity to prove a much bigger point.

Every International tournament we seem to go into with major injury issues and or bemoan our lack of a winter break when we don't do well. The PL have tried to create a break this season but it's nothing more than a bodge job. We simply play too many games in too short a time. The issues regarding players fitness and welfare have always been there but this season things have come to a head because not only hasn't it been great for players fitness but Liverpool have proven that if a team is successful then it becomes physically impossible to fit all these games in. The FA and Football League should be thankful that we took the decision to play our kids vs Villa because had we played them on the proposed alternate date (with a stronger side and won) then we'd now be scheduled to play 3 games in our winter break, 2 of which would have been scheduled on the same midweek.

The amount of games PL sides, particularly those in Europe, are meant to play and the scheduling is fundamentally flawed. Liverpool this season have proven that and changes need to be made. If people don't want to scrap FA Cup replays then scrap the League Cup or at least scrap it for sides who are in Europe. We're the only major European country that has a 2nd domestic cup anymore and if that was no longer around then you could bring the FA Cup games forward, creating more room in the calendar so that teams can have a proper winter break rather than the bodge job that we've got now.
 
Don
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As if the replay wasn't already Shrewsbury's world cup final, they're now playing for the opportunity to play at Stamford Bridge in the next round too.
 
Soldato
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Really? Thought we went into training mode after the second goal and struggled to get out of it.

No there was one point where we had the ball for 10mins and almost got the 3rd but then it got interrupted with a lot of fouls and time wasted on players injured.

Arsenal where about to kill the game off until about 10mins worth of extra time was generated
 
Soldato
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It was decent all things considered - rotated a fair bit without it coming back to bite, good to see Saka and Eddie score, get more than a single goal cushion, Mustafi refrained from doing anything overly suicidal, etc. Only time it got nervy was once it had gone past the 8 minutes of allotted ET but held on.
 
Don
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Well it doesn't look like Klopp was bluffing. Ticket prices for our FA Cup replay: Adults £15, Young Adults £5 and Kids £1. Shrewsbury will be lucky to earn £200k based on those prices compared to over £1m more had it been priced as a regular game.
 
Soldato
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Well it doesn't look like Klopp was bluffing. Ticket prices for our FA Cup replay: Adults £15, Young Adults £5 and Kids £1. Shrewsbury will be lucky to earn £200k based on those prices compared to over £1m more had it been priced as a regular game.
Based on his press conference today he def isn't bluffing. I honestly don't get the up roar, it's pundits fueling the none existent fire.

Situation aside if he wanted he could field under 23 anyway
 
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