Champions League:Rafael Benitez experienced an unfamiliar sensation when he travelled to Toulouse yesterday. For the first time during his tenure as Liverpool manager, Benitez, who last night said he now "trusts" every member of his squad, is spoilt for choice when it comes to team selection.

"We have a lot of good players now but we can only name 16 of them for Premier League matches and 18 for European games; our only problem now is that we have too many players," Benitez said before his side trained here ahead of this afternoon's first leg of their Champions League qualifier against Toulouse. "We may be in a very good rugby town here but I cannot start 15 players."

Although Peter Crouch was reputedly upset at not making the squad for Saturday's win at Aston Villa - and indeed told Benitez so during what is rumoured to have been a heated exchange - he was on yesterday's flight from Liverpool's John Lennon airport along with Javier Mascherano and Yossi Benayoun who were also excluded from the Villa trip.

This time it was Jermaine Pennant who had no seat on the plane and was left behind along with the injured Harry Kewell. Benitez does not expect Pennant to protest and has told his squad that being rotated will become an increasing fact of life at Anfield. He believes it is agents rather than players who stir up trouble with managers.

Hinting that Crouch's representative was behind his purported unhappiness, Benitez said: "I often say to agents you just look after yourselves and not the players. They should be working for the players and not for themselves."

Referring to his chat with Crouch, he joked: "I have prepared the same speech for all the players. I realise I will keep hearing the same question because I have a good squad and I have to decide but I will always have the same answer. We now have two players for every position. It is what we wanted and the situation when you play for a very big club."

Benitez knows it will be difficult to keep everyone happy but tried to make this balancing act sound simple. "We feel the team spirit is very good," he said. "On Sunday I spoke to a player regarding the (rotation) situation and was really pleased with his response. He said he would be ready when needed and accepted the situation like a professional."

The Spaniard feels such disappointments are an inevitable by-product of being part of a squad without "second stringers" - something which was not always the case in Liverpool's recent past. "We have very good players in the squad now, so it's not as if players coming into the team when people are rested will not be good enough," he said. "I have confidence in all of them.

"I see players working so hard in training, effectively saying 'don't forget I'm here'. Each week it might only be a small detail which determines who starts."

Liverpool's style is likely to be more attacking than in the past. "We need to score more goals away," said Benitez. "That's why we need a different approach." However, with temperatures in excess of 30 degrees forecast, the visiting game plan may yet need modification.

Toulouse - in France's third tier eight years ago - are unlikely to be soft touches. In the Champions League for the first time, they finished third in last season's league and last weekend beat Lyon, the champions, 1-0. The winner came from Johan Elmander, a Swedish striker much coveted by Manchester City and West Ham.

Benitez admits he keeps on watching re-runs of May's final defeat by Milan. "I am still not over that game in Athens because we came so close to winning," he said. "I think about it all the time."

Toulouse v Liverpool

Stade Municipal

Kick-off:3.30