It is not unlike a baseball game with bases loaded, bottom of the ninth (no pun intended) but no dugout of back up players.
Heskey regained his spot initially after Gerard Houllier's arrival as manager last season but Bent's £18million capture saw him revert to being a back-up player.
At 30, he did not want to hang around as a back-up player and ended up joining Blackburn but looking back, it is a decision Cole now regrets.
There are players from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Colombia; there is even a back-up player who was born in Brooklyn but whose parents, like so many other north-easterners, moved south to avoid the winter.But no story is more Miamian than that of Livan Hernandez, the Most Valuable Player of the World Series.
And Sa as well, because there will be a few clubs who don't have that back-up player and are still without players".
This season, back-up players for European competition have been that in name only.
"He didn't play much cricket, he was always one of the back-up players.
We had a manager and a coach and that was it, none of the back-up players have today.
When Jamie Roberts, Wallace and Lee Mears are giving the back-up players something to aim at the Lions look as good as anyone.
Liverpool's first XI are a match for most sides in the top flight, as they showed at Old Trafford, but Hodgson admits the weakness is in the back-up players.
England had hoped the gaps created by the loss of several big names would provide their back-up players, so successful when introduced to the Test side, with the chance to strut their stuff.
