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Former Manchester United and England striker Wayne Rooney has questioned Liverpool head coach Arne Slot for his team selection against Galatasaray in the Champions League midweek.
Slot took star man Mohamed Salah out of the team and played summer signing Jeremie Frimpong on the wing in his place. Midfielder Dominik Szoboszlai was chosen to play at full-back ahead of either Frimpong or Conor Bradley, with the Reds losing 1-0 thanks to a penalty kick from Victor Osimhen.
Rooney believes that Ruben Amorim would have been hammered for playing players out of position if he had made a similar call at Manchester United, where the Portuguese is under pressure.
"When you win the league, like Slot did there last season with Liverpool, sometimes some of the decisions you make get overlooked," Rooney said on his BBC podcast.
"His decision to play a midfield player at right-back and a right-back at right-wing... if that was Ruben Amorim at Man United, he would get absolutely slaughtered."
Frimpong is a right-back on paper but the plan was always to use him in a more advanced role at times. He played as a wing-back for Bayer Leverkusen and is more known for his attacking attributes.
Szoboszolai, meanwhile, has played right-back to a very high level this season. The Hungarian is not a typical attacking midfielder and has the skillset to slot in at full-back.
Slot was asked during his post-match press conference whether the rotation negatively impacted his side and played a part in several individual errors being made.
"There can be so many reasons why an individual makes an error pass or a mistake," he said. "What you see is, and I think I explained this many times, is that there are a few players from us that missed pre-season so you simply cannot play them every single [game].
"Well, you can but then that could become a risk of players becoming injured. We have seen this more and more because the demands go up more and more and if the demands go up you have to prepare players for these demands.
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"That means it is not always that I want to rotate but sometimes I need to because a player is not ready to play three times 90 minutes in seven or eight days.
"I like my squad so much but we don’t have 25 or 26 [players], so if we end up with two, three or four injuries, 15 or 16 players, where Rio [Ngumoha] and Trey [Nyoni] are two of these 15 or 16, need to play almost all the minutes and then things can become complicated.
"But this is a decision we have made together, I completely believe in this, because if you have 25 it’s very hard to manage your squad. But as a result of that, with Hugo, Alex [Isak], Conor [Bradley] and [Alexis] Mac Allister not having the pre-season a player should have, that also results in the fact that I cannot play them every time."
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