Jurgen Klopp’s comments during his pre-Porto presser ahead of the club’s impending Champions League group stage clash hinted at the possibility of changes, as noted in tweets shared by David Maddock and James Pearce.
The Reds are set to take on Sergio Conceicao’s men having already guaranteed passage through to the knockout stages of Europe’s premier competition.
Klopp offers big hint he'll sack off tomorrow night's CL game: "We will obviously respect the competition, but we have to think about ourselves and our schedule first."
Youth team on parade then! #LFC
— David Maddock (@MaddockMirror) November 23, 2021
Klopp: "If I leave them all out we won't even have a team! We have to line up a team to win a football game. We need stability."
— James Pearce (@JamesPearceLFC) November 23, 2021
The German did insist, however, that this wouldn’t necessarily mean that he’d out an entirely different XI, highlighting the importance of ‘stability’ and ‘rhythm’.
READ MORE: What Drogba told Salah when he faced scoring slump with Roma
With a heavy fixture schedule coming up of 12 games between Wednesday and the end of December, Klopp can ill afford to not rest a few of his key stars in the remaining throwaway European fixtures.
Whilst we can certainly respect the need to maintain momentum, we should be capable of beating Porto on home soil with a few changes to the first-XI.
That’s not to disrespect the Primeira Liga outfit by any means, of course, and we’d certainly expect that a vaguely strong side will be put out to meet the threat posed by our upcoming opponents.
What are y’all smoking??? Not one single starter should be anywhere near the pitch against Porto. Same in two weeks against Milan. We already won the group so enough with the ‘respect’ the competition bs! We respected it by winning all games and running away with it already. We earned the right to rest our players especially since we have the thinnest squad of all top flight English teams, period. Do you want a repeat of when we lost Jota and Tsimikas for long period to stupid accidents in an equally meaningless game???