Of course it's not Gomes's fault as such. But one needs to understand the dressing room dynamics to judge the situation.
History:
Rakitic was good, more or less took Xavi's place, won titles, played like a tiger and played well.
Then the management brought in Arda Turan to take his place. It didn't work. Then they bought Gomes, brought back Denis (Rafinha was still there to compete) and Roberto was made a false defender, who also competed for Rakitic's midfield post. Then they announced the rotation strategy, which would ALWAYS be a dampening or pull downing factor for the players who don't play or are on the bench to play the last 15 minutes of a game.
Thus it's not Gomes's fault (though he became the preferred one) but his very presence that tells the involved player "I'm not needed anymore" or "the management has no confidence in me anymore".
This may effectively screw up a player mentally, as I've already mentioned that in detail in this emotionally unbalanced forum not long ago.
Thus you can't keep 2-3 players to "fight" for a given post, because at the end it becomes counter productive and results in situations like the present one.
If any of you have ever attended a coaching course, it has been taught in the second week. You need a REGULAR starting team, confident, calm and ambitious players, but the experimentation should NOT ever happen on the highest level.
New players can always be purchased and SLOWLY amalgamated to the post of an ageing one, but that should never result either the loss of confidence to a regular player or the starting ones should never ever feel that they need to COVER for the experiments or the resulted tohuva bohu...
Neither are you.
