To be fair, with no Gallagher it means Sawyers or Livermore will have to come in.

And also, he was probably asked a question about this. He can't exactly answer that he doesn't rate one of his own players. He's saying to Sawyers, perhaps this is your chance to stake a claim in the team, not sure what's wrong with that?

I think its fairly obvious he prefers other players over Livermore and Sawyers. In fact I've been quite impressed with his judgement of a player.