Its really important that City win tomorrow and at the weekend to advance in both competitions. If they make the FA Cup and CL semis, they will have only one open midweek the entire rest of the season. One of the open dates here will be their rescheduled league match this coming weekend and another will end up being their rescheduled league match from the weekend they play the FA Cup semifinal.
4/5 - Open
4/12 - European quarters
4/19 - European quarters
4/26 - PL matches
5/3 - Open
5/10 - European semis
5/17 -European semis
5/24 - Open
Weāre going to have all three of these midweeks open and I think weāll be able to do more rotating in the Europa League than they will in the CL given the relative priority placed on the competitions.
Mostly agree. I donāt think we have much room for rotation in Europe.
It wont work for us if we want to win this trophy.
Sunday is a cup semi final equivalent for us.
We have players coming back from injury. This Thursday aside we will have good options to rotate, but does depend on the QF draw (assuming we can progress)
No donāt think we do. The competition gets harder our best side wins this tournament potentially.
Our rotation doesnāt. Seen the problems we encountered last week and in PSV.
We havenāt played too half our potential in any outings this season with this policy.
Been good enough to get us here, we now need to go as near full strength as we can.
2 legs for the QFs and SFs. Priority has to be the PL so think we have to rotate to some extent. Saka looks knackered atm. Whoever plays in the match needs to give 100% and we need to be careful against more injuries or burn out. Of course if we wrap the PL League up early, we can focus on the EL.
If our full strength team is the side that started most of the fall, then I could still see some subset of Jorginho, Trossard, Nketiah, Nelson, Vieira, Tomiyasu, ESR, or Tierney rotating in for Europa League games (not all of them at once). Take 6-7 from the starting XI and 4-5 from that group and its still a very helpful bit of rotation. Although I do think Ramsdale plus the starting CBs should be playing in every match unless its a case of the tie being already decided in the first leg or something.
Pep is going to play his absolute best XI in every CL match I think. He obviously has a deep squad but heāll be looking to maximize his chances of winning that trophy above anything else.
8 points ahead going into the international break would be absolutely huge, even with an extra game played it puts pressure on City to actually get points in the game in hand
