Blame the calendar, not the manager who rotates

Rotation gets treated as a tactical vice when it is a scheduling problem being absorbed by whoever picks the team.

Somebody makes six changes for a midweek cup tie, the team loses, and the manager is accused of disrespecting the competition. Nobody involved in that conversation mentions that the fixture sits between two league matches four days apart, at the end of a run of eight games in twenty-six days, in a season that started six weeks after the last one finished for anybody who played an international tournament.

The manager did not create that schedule. He is the last person in the chain and he absorbs all of the criticism for a decision that the calendar made for him weeks earlier. Meanwhile the bodies that expanded the competitions, added group stages and moved tournaments into the summer face no consequence at all, because their decisions arrive as a fixture list rather than as a team sheet.

There is a technical point behind the annoyance. Recovery from a match is not a fixed number of hours. It varies by position, by minutes played, by how much high-intensity work the game demanded and by travel. A centre back in a controlled home win is close to fresh in three days. A pressing midfielder after an away game with a flight is not close to fresh in five. Rotation is the only mechanism a manager has to match those differing curves onto a fixture list built as though every player were identical.

What I would like to see, and will not, is a competition that admits this by rule. Minimum rest periods between fixtures, enforced rather than requested, with the broadcaster taking the inconvenience instead of the athlete. It exists in other sports in various forms and it is treated in football as impossible, which usually means expensive.

There is a fair criticism of rotation to be made and it is not the one people make. Changing six players at once breaks the relationships that a team depends on, and relationships are slower to rebuild than legs. A manager who rotates in blocks of two or three keeps combinations intact. One who rotates in blocks of six is fielding a group of strangers and is often surprised by the result.

Rotate carefully, then. But rotate. The alternative is a fine squad in April and no squad at all in May.