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Following a string of shaky defensive performances, Brendan Rodgers is reportedly prepared to offer a chance for some of the club's second choice defenders to rotate in against Bordeaux on Thursday in the Europa League. The headliner for most fans will be Mamadou Sakho, who is expected to slot into the left side of the defence in place of the calamitous Dejan Lovren.
There is also some speculation that Alberto Moreno could be in line to start at left back ahead of Joe Gomez, who has looked shaky defensively the past few games and capped things off with a terribly timed challenge that gave Manchester United a penalty and their second goal on Saturday. Gomez remains hugely promising, but it has become increasingly hard to ignore that he is an 18-year-old being played out of position.
Philippe Coutinho is also set to return after he missed Saturday's match through suspension, and a number of youth and fringe players are also in contention. While some rotation is surely necessary, and while some of the players Rodgers hasn't given a chance yet clearly deserve to be given one, many fans will be wary if the manager goes beyond simply rotating a few players and instead rings in wholesale changes.
There was some talk at the start of the season that Rodgers could employ A and B teams in the league and cup competitions, and doing so on Thursday would suggest the manager is no closer to figuring out how to manage his squad to cope with the demands of multiple competitions in year four of his tenure and a year after bombing out of a relatively easy Champions League group and the Europa knockout rounds.
Top continental managers have long shown that the best way to find success across multiple fronts is through rotation that seeks to keep the majority of the squad intact from one match to the next while always rotating in a few fringe players at different positions each time. Using rotation effectively to manage a large squad across multiple competitions is part of the job description for the game's best. So far Rodgers has failed at this.
Still, no matter what the squad as a whole looks like come Thursday, many fans will be happy simply to learn of the expected return to the starting eleven for Sakho and a likely return for Moreno, both of which are moves that seemed as though they should have happened in the league following the West Ham debacle and that following the United loss are now well beyond due.
