From the Times, I believe:
Brilliance of Stuart Dallas is reward for Marcelo Bielsa’s belief in ignoring players' limitations.
The Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year award, won this week by Rúben Dias, has been around since 1947-48, and the debate over the best player in any given season even longer. In such a complex and dynamic game as football, coming up with an objectively right answer is impossible, and understandably the focus tends to fall on the best defender, creator or goalscorer.
As football becomes more systemic and roles become less discrete, I think a certain type of player is being undervalued by these awards, and perhaps by the discourse in general: players who basically do everything well. There are not many of them, but they play a crucial role in every part of the field and every phase of the game: defence, attack, build-up, transition — it is just that they are spread a bit too thinly for anyone to notice.
I would have had Joshua Kimmich in my Ballon d’Or top five for the past two years. And I cannot help but feel that this year’s Premier League player-of-the-season debate has ignored a candidate hiding in plain sight: one who has scored more non-penalty goals than Jamie Vardy, created more chances than Christian Pulisic, made more passes into the final third than Paul Pogba, and won more tackles than N’Golo Kanté.
To get an idea of just how extraordinary Stuart Dallas’s season has been, consider that no one in any of the past seven Premier League campaigns had scored eight times, excluding penalties, created 25 chances, passed the ball into the final third on 200 occasions and won 40 tackles and interceptions apiece. (Santi Cazorla was the previous player to achieve this statistical smorgasbord.) In fact, this season, you could knock each of those numbers down — six non-penalty goals, 20 chances created, 150 passes into the final third, 30 tackles won and interceptions each — and Dallas would still stand alone.
And sure, you could twiddle those numbers slightly, raise the bar for creation and lower the bar for ball progression, and come up with a different, do-it-all midfielder, such as Bruno Fernandes, Mason Mount or James Ward-Prowse. You could find a subtler measure of defensive contribution than tackles and interceptions. But still — how amazing is it that one of the best, most rounded players in the Premier League this season, arguably the most influential in every part of the game, is a 30-year-old in a promoted team, in his first season in a top division, who used to work as a joiner?
An ingrained defeatism, a constricting focus on the limitations of one’s own players, has become such an indelible part of manager-speak over recent years that we have become inured to it.
This is a typical quote from a Steve Bruce press conference: “For the foreseeable future the team will play, unfortunately, the way we have to set up. The players [don’t] have the ability to play the way I’d envisaged.” Even Carlo Ancelotti is not immune to this way of thinking. “The quality of the team has to improve next season,” the Everton manager said this week. “I’m not a magician.”
Marcelo Bielsa is not a magician either. But he does have one trick: he never speaks like this. The focus of his coaching, and his public-facing management, is almost entirely on drawing out and knitting together what his players can do, not working around what they cannot. He does not compromise his principles or circumscribe his ambitions to fit the perceived limitations of his squad. His approach to the job, his response to the existential unfairness of leading one of the smaller teams in an era of rampant financial stratification, is to kindle a fire, not to build a firewall.
The liberation of Dallas is an example of what can be achieved when you focus on maximising what a player can do, not minimising what they can do wrong. How many coaches would have looked at a 30-year-old with no Premier League experience and no outstanding physical attributes, who had not scored more than six goals in a season since his part-time days at Crusaders in Northern Ireland, and wondered how to cover him up, to condense his role to the simplest possible brief? Bielsa has played him in six positions, all to good effect, and turned a completely unheralded player into a cut-price Kimmich, a latter-day Javier Zanetti. He has, as he put it — though he was not giving himself the credit when he said this — allowed Dallas “to show a part of himself we didn’t know he had”.
The business of narrowing your horizons to fit the supposed limitations of your squad is a losing game. It is pessimism dressed up as pragmatism. It is a spiral of doom. You do not give your players the chance to access those untapped parts of themselves, so they leave, so you end up with a slightly worse squad, so you trim your ambitions even more. It leads to that purgatory where a team is playing for nothing other than its own survival. It leads, ultimately, to the sort of pointlessly one-sided games and seasons of stagnant limbo that make a far more eloquent argument for the formation of a Super League than Andrea Agnelli or Florentino Pérez ever could.
Because Leeds are fixated on getting the best out of themselves and their system, rather than masking their deficiencies or stopping their opponents, because they want possession rather than fear it, their games have been appointment viewing. They have been the most exciting team in the Premier League this season. Their matches have featured more shots than anyone else’s, and the second-highest number of goals.
There is a received wisdom, which has been allowed to ossify over many years, that it is naïve for smaller teams to play this way, to believe that your players can go toe-to-toe with superior teams; that grim suppression rather than free expression is the sensible way. Leeds have blown that out of the water this season. They are guaranteed a top-half finish and could yet end up as high as eighth. They have scored almost as many goals per game (1.59) as they did in the Championship last season (1.67). Their full backs have racked up as many touches in the opposition box as those of the Champions League contenders.
Believing that Dallas could be one of the best players in the Premier League could be seen as a lunatic act of faith, a lucky gamble by an incorrigible idealist. But what Bielsa has shown is that this, actually, is the pragmatic way. There really is nothing else for it than to trust that players, at the highest level of competition, can be lifted, not carried.
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