It's a balancing act – do you take your first-choice player playing at 70% because they only had 44 hours to recover from the previous game or do you take a back-up who is at 100% and ready to go? It's always a difficult calculation, but I believe for a high-energy style that Klopp plays physical fitness might be more important – if the players are too tired to play the pressing game, the whole system becomes highly vulnerable. I've seen this happen to Klopp's Dortmund a couple of times – whenever their "gegenpressing" was not working because of tiredness, their defense got totally overwhelmed and cut to pieces by a far less talented team.
So now I don't believe Klopp will select any player if they are too tired to press and make runs for 90 minutes. Every player's recovery times are different, so I have no way of knowing which players have a chance to recover in time for Sunderland and which do not. But I think it's conceivable that we will see a lot of youngsters/back-ups in this game, particularly as many first-choice players looked spent and uncharacteristically sloppy against City already. I like Klopp's public attitude of "no excuses," but the reality is it's a difficult situation to play 2 games so close to each other, particularly with our style of play. It's not going to be a pretty game, that's for sure.
