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Unsurprisingly, injuries and exhaustion were the main issues at Brendan Rodgers' pre-QPR press conference, and the news for Liverpool fans is at least encouraging. Rodgers refused to confirm whether Daniel Sturridge, Emre Can, and Joe Allen would play, but all three are in full training with their teammates.
"We'll have to see tomorrow how Daniel is," cautioned the manager when he was asked whether or not Liverpool's star striker would be ready to start on Sunday. "He's training and looking well, so we've got Emre and Dan back in training, Joe too. But we'll have to see where he's at tomorrow and take it from there."
When the discussion turned to exhaustion, especially when it comes to young players, Rodgers again fell back on a line he's used before despite that at times this season action hasn't seemed to back up the words. Cautioning that rest and rotation are necessary is one thing, but so far Liverpool haven't seen a whole lot of it.
"Your best players can't play every single game, especially as a young player," he said. "Too many miles on the clock of a young player and you'll break him and he'll end his career at 26 or 27 and be a broken player, but every individual player you have to look at."
Despite that, and rather tellingly given how often some have already played this season, Rodgers insisted it isn't just about the games—the things fans and the media can see. It's also workloads in training. And he believes that, if he had to, he can tailor the workload to allow any of his players to play multiple matches in a short period.
"If I wanted to go with the same team on Sunday and Wednesday I could do that," he said, using Sunday's league match against QPR and Wednesday's Champions League tie against Real Madrid as examples. "There is planning forward, that's why we bulked up the squad in the summer, but I think I could do that."
