We round up the key Fantasy Premier League (FPL) talking points of the day in FPL Daily, a series that services weekdays where there is no press conference round-up or Premier League match.
DIAS UNLIKELY TO START
Pep Guardiola has revealed Ruben Dias (£6.1m) will travel with the Man City squad for Wednesday’s Champions League quarter-final second leg against Atletico Madrid.
The Portuguese skipper has missed the past six weeks through injury but returned to training on Monday.
However, the City boss was keen to point out that Dias will not start given his lack of full training and game time.
“He travels with us. From the beginning tomorrow? No. He did one training session after six weeks off. It is premature, but the fact he is back with the schedule we have is good. Everyone will be important and Ruben is.” – Pep Guardiola on Ruben Dias
There was also an encouraging update regarding Cole Palmer (£4.5m), who has missed several weeks with a foot injury.
“He is much, much better but I don’t think he will travel. I will finish the list later. Maybe if he feels good. He feels better and we tried to avoid surgery. The doctor says we will try to avoid it, hopefully…” – Pep Guardiola on Cole Palmer
KLOPP HINTS AT UCL ROTATION
Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp has spoken to the media to preview Wednesday’s Champions League tie against Benfica and confirmed that there are no new injuries to report.
However, a bit of rotation could be on the cards given the Reds’ relentless schedule, with Ibrahima Konate (£5.1m), Luis Diaz (£8.0m) and Roberto Firmino (£8.7m) candidates to come into the starting XI.
“The next game has no influence on the line-up for tomorrow night, but the last game has. We have to see, a really super-intense schedule. No one injured as far as I know in this moment, but we need to have a look at who is fresh enough for this game. We see it as a super important game, we won the first leg 3-1 and I know for people who have nothing to do with the game, it’s halfway through and then you play City left and right of the game. And then it’s like the focus could be somewhere else – we see it slightly different, to be honest!” – Jurgen Klopp
MARSCH ON INJURIES
Jesse Marsch arrived at Leeds in February and has largely done a good job since, securing three wins and a draw from his opening six games in charge.
However, upon his arrival he had to deal with a lengthy injury list, which he has suggested was a consequence of Marcelo Bielsa’s training methodologies.
“The injury issues had a lot to do with the training methodologies, the players were over-trained. That led them to being physically, mentally, psychologically and emotionally in a difficult place to recover from week-to-week and game-to-game. I have a very specific methodology in the way I work and I’ve had a reputation for having high running data in the way we play, but also having healthy, fit and strong players so we can meet the demands we want. So, we tried to put that into place to help the players, I think that has helped a lot.
The one with Patrick (Bamford) I felt terrible about because the responsibility of a coach is to take care of players and to make sure you’re not injuring them and putting them in harms way. In the end, it didn’t go the way I wanted with Patrick and I always feel like it is my responsibility to get that right. But for the most part, we are getting healthy and strong with almost the entire group.
Absolutely. From afar, you could see it on their faces and you could see in the 15th minute of some of those games that they were already at the maximum, and that shouldn’t be the case. I know there were a lot of games where the guys had to play over and over again because of injuries, but I find that in this sport, you have to have a fit team. But the more your team is fit, healthy and performing at a high level, that is how you create success. Again, I have worked very carefully through methodologies of how we train, how we play, how everything fits together to make sure that we have a healthy group that is at top fitness and form so we can compete for as many points as possible.” – Jesse Marsch
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