Marcelo Bielsa has earned right to see Leeds United job through to the end — bitter or otherwise
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Leeds could finish 8th instead of 15th under a new manager, but so what? Football is about more than just pragmatism and survival
Rick Broadbent
Thursday February 24 2022, 5.00pm, The Times
God, I hate football. Leeds United get stuffed again so Marcelo Bielsa must go. He’s a myth. No Plan B. No Mick McCarthy. Stop all the clocks, shore up the defence. Buy someone. Anyone. Does Eddie Gray have grandkids?
The worst Leeds team ever? It’s not even the worst Leeds team this year. Marching on in an altogether disjointed, disgruntled and increasingly ugly manner. It’s true. Twitter only sings when you’re winning.
Look, Leeds are in the mire and may even go down — the 6-0 defeat away to Liverpool the latest setback — but the rush to erase what Bielsa has done and expose him as a myth of Pep Guardiola and Mauricio Pochettino’s making (I mean, what do they know?) suggests some fans have taken one too many flying bottles to the head.
I have followed Leeds for nigh-on half a century. The good bits are these: the European Cup Final 1975 (sort of), Tony Currie, Howard Wilkinson 1989-1992, David O’Leary’s babies 1997-2002, the Champions League semi-final 2001, Tony Yeboah’s volley, Bielsa. The bad bits are these: riots, relegation, the National Front, Bowyer-Woodgate, more relegation, administration, League One, Ken Bates, Massimo Cellino, 13 managers in five years, most of it.
Bielsa took over an ailing club and transformed it. It was not that the football was beautiful — although it was, especially last season — but it was the fact that being beautiful mattered. I know a lot of pragmatists out there will think this is wishy-washy bullshit, but if you can enjoy a game when your team loses, that’s entertainment. I mean, what do you want from your team? We are conditioned to think it’s all about survival, about clinging on for dear life so you can cling on for dear life again next season. It’s like going to the theatre and not enjoying Romeo and Juliet because it doesn’t end well.
Of course, it’s not been beautiful or enjoyable at Leeds for a while and they no longer have the fit or form players, or the belief, to really give it a go. But most Leeds fans seemed to say they’d be happy with finishing 17th when the club was promoted, so why aren’t they happy with 15th now? Because Bielsa made them want more.
The myth-quibbling shows the festering lovelessness of football. I think it comes from the fact that your team, other than two or three expensively assembled conglomerates, is generally not great, so you spend half your time enjoying the misfortunes of other clubs instead.
So has Bielsa been found out? He is a flawed, obsessive figure with blind spots — his faith in Tyler Roberts probably surprises the player himself, the small squad concept is way too risky, the inability to defend corners maddening — but his system is not a shambles. It got an unpromotable club promoted. It was good enough to beat Manchester City away, with ten men. That was ten months ago.
Leeds have become a shambles because they have missed their best players, had an injury epidemic, and had too many players suffer a dip. Or they may have reverted to the mean and we have got to a point where Bielsa has mined the likes of Luke Ayling and Mateusz Klich for every last drop of their ability.
Every team suffers with injuries, but Leeds more so. It is because their man-to-man system requires Kalvin Phillips to win his battles. It needs Patrick Bamford to close down that space in the centre, as only he does, so centre halves don’t have acres of room to run into.
Without those two Leeds are really struggling, before we even get to Bamford’s goals and Phillips’s distribution. Liverpool can cope without Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané because of the depth in the squad, raiding Southampton and others, and the spiralling cycle of success. Leeds can’t. Half the team is generally out of position and they can’t win enough of those individual battles. It all falls down and the back-up is a bench full of teenagers. It’s like taking the key players out of the Spice Girls and what you’re left with is scary and babies.
Leeds should have added to the squad but attracting players to a club with no recent history of success is hard, and players in that £20 million market are gambles. People talk about net spend but the gross one is a more significant marker because promoted teams do not have anything to sell and need to build. During Bielsa’s reign Liverpool have spent about another £200 million more than Leeds. And they have a brilliant manager. Go figure.
Leeds did try to get Brenden Aaronson, the United States midfielder, from Red Bull Salzburg. It didn’t happen. Ten players, effectively anyone on the fringes, wanted to leave on loan during last month’s window, which shows how hard it is at clubs fighting for a foothold.
But here are things to like about Bielsa before you call for his head.
He never blames the referee, VAR or bad luck.
He does not allow his team to harangue referees (probably why Dan James did not get his penalty against Liverpool).
His players almost never dive (Bamford’s against Villa was nearly three years ago).
He favours trying to win by bravery rather than scraping a goal from a corner.
He is reckless.
He inspired Felipe Cussen, a visiting poet from Santiago University, to excuse himself during a recital in Leeds and return in full home kit. He then told bemused academics and literati that they were lucky to have Bielsa in their city. Why? “I could talk about Bielsa all day,” he once told me on the phone from Chile. “He does not speak like a poet but he has the same problem of trying to find words to say something very difficult. He talks a lot about beauty in football. You can be effective or romantic and it is very clear he is the second of those.”
Wishy-washy nonsense, you say. Let’s be effective. “Do we think a British coach in charge of Leeds right now would be getting the sack?” tweeted Richard Keys, who does not get this romance thing. Well, Leeds have sacked loads of British managers, and foreign ones too. That wasn’t every effective. Bielsa has earned the right to see this through to the end — bitter or otherwise.
I would love to see how he would do with top players. If a Leeds team largely pooled from the Championship, with a few additions, can play as well as they did last season, what could he do with City or Liverpool? I am not sure players of that class would buy into the project.
We will never know, of course, because he will leave in the summer and, at 66, probably call it a day. Leeds will then get a more pragmatic manager and may even have better league finishes — i.e eighth — but it won’t be as thrilling.
I saw another tweet today saying that Bielsa had no credit in the bank. Jesus H Bremner. The writing is on the Twitter wall before the paint on that mural has even dried