Jurgen Klopp has been told that he 'disrespected' the FA Cup by picking a senior team to play Aston Villa on Friday night.
As Klopp explained in the aftermath of the game, which the Reds won 4-1, he picked the team before it emerged that Villa would be playing a youth side.
And with no game for nine days, Klopp needed to get minutes into the legs of his first-team stars in order to keep them ticking over ahead of the trip to Manchester United next weekend.
"To be honest, I was a bit disappointed Liverpool didn't go with an U23s team," former Villa man and current talkSPORT pundit Tony Cascarino said.
"There will be many supporters around the country who would disagree with me on this, but I was wanting it to be on a level playing field.
"I didn’t want Liverpool to have Champions League -winning players to go against a Villa team that was more like U18s, actually, than U23s.
"I would have loved if Klopp had gone, ‘you know what, just because we’re Liverpool and we respect what’s happened at Villa Park, we’ll go with U23s too’.
"I wanted that to happen. I get why they didn’t, because it’s a competition Klopp feels they can win so he went strong so he could win the game.
"Listen, I might be wrong on this, because Villa players might have learned a lot from playing against a quality opposition with a lot of top players, and I’m sure they did.
“That’s the standard they’re looking at, that’s what they’ve got to get to and it’s a massive gap between where they are in their careers at the top level, so I get that side of it. That was the one benefit for the Villa youngsters.
"And every mum and dad that watched their son play on the telly would have been really proud of their performance.
"So I understand why Liverpool did it, I’m just not 100 per cent behind it."
Klopp outlined at full-time how his side would be playing a number of 11-versus-11 matches throughout the week between themselves in order to gain rhythm ahead of the visit of Manchester United to Anfield next Sunday.
And Aston Villa boss Mark Delaney also stated at full-time that bringing on Thiago at the break - a substitution that Liverpool always planned to make - was a sign of respect.
