https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...2019/aug/07/marcelo-bielsa-leeds-championship Despite a small squad and a handful of recruits the club’s performance at Bristol City put down a marker Ben Fisher please log in to view this image Kalvin Phillips (left) and Pablo Hernández are two key parts for Marcelo Bielsa at Leeds. Photograph: Mark Kerton/PA Leeds’s season is 90 minutes old but they could not have made a more convincing start than in their 3-1 win at Bristol City. The caveat is that blazing starts are nothing new under Marcelo Bielsa and he acknowledged that this is ground zero in terms of achieving the Premier League return he stuck around to realise. The wry smile and sheepish chuckle that greeted a question asking if his team’s suffocating performance in platinum and pink surpassed his expectations said as much. “I know perfectly well that this is a long season and all of the things that happen at the start of the season do not determine the finish. We suffered a lot in this situation last season,” he said. But the early evidence, as it was last season when Leeds won five of their opening six matches, is compelling. Even if Bielsa does tickle his squad by adding another new face before the transfer deadline on Thursday, other than the defender Ben White, who was peerless on debut on Sunday, and Hélder Costa, a summer addition from Wolverhampton, he is working with the same core of players, including a raft of youngsters from the club’s academy, with the 17-year-old Mateusz Bogusz the latest to make a big impression. “Everybody has highlighted that Pontus Jansson left but Ben came in and he looked like he had been there for years,” the striker Patrick Bamford said of the Brighton loanee. White coped with a couple of cannoned balls into his feet, took the sting out of attacks and prevented any sticky situations from festering. Despite key departures – Kemar Roofe has just followed Jansson and Bailey Peacock-Farrell out of the door – the spine of the team remains pristine; so strong, so stubborn. Bielsa has an inner circle of dependables that define them: Liam Cooper, Mateusz Klich, Kalvin Phillips and Pablo Hernández, who somehow did not get into the Championship team of the year last season. Because of how Leeds blew Bristol City away, Bielsa could afford to keep some of his powder dry at Ashton Gate, with Jack Clarke, the teenage forward back on loan at the club after joining Tottenham for £10m this summer, not called on and Ezgjan Alioski and Costa merely saying hello off the bench. Leeds hardly looked bereft of options with Gaetano Berardi and Luke Ayling still to return from suspension and injury respectively. Jansson has left for Brentford and Roofe joined Anderlecht on Tuesday but keeping hold of Phillips, a player tracked by Aston Villa this summer, was paramount because he provides Leeds’s zest. He is comfortable dropping into defence in Bielsa’s famed 3-3-1-3 and has made the anchorman role his own under the Argentinian in Leeds’s familiar 4-1-4-1 formation. It has not been plain sailing – Phillips was hooked twice before half-time last season – but, as his manager has suggested, when Phillips plays well, so do Leeds. Phillips is a midfield bouncer, first on the scene at the very scent of danger, but he also makes Leeds tick. He shakes off challenges, turns over possession, eats up ground and drives Leeds forward. For fans, Phillips is the local boy done good, having grown up in Armley, around the corner from Elland Road. The uproar around spying led to scrutiny of Bielsa’s integrity but he is a magnanimous character. Be it detailing his plans for the season on a piece of paper after bumping into fans in Wetherby, handing out sweets to young supporters at home games, naming his team before matches or ordering Jansson to allow Villa to score in the spirit of the game, Bielsa has proved to be a generous personality. Even the way Bielsa offered the world a peek inside his brain via that Powerpoint presentation in January was as daringly transparent as it was extraordinary. On Sunday Bielsa attempted to cool simmering tensions by approaching Lee Johnson at half-time to clear the air over a touchline disagreement between his physio and the City head coach. They sorted out their differences at the interval but Johnson was unhappy. “If you had a tactician watching the way they conduct their technical area, you’d see why,” he said. “They like to work that and listen, fair play to them, most clubs do the same.” Bielsa and Leeds are approaching uncharted territory – he is the first manager to start successive seasons at the club since Simon Grayson eight years ago – but something about this marriage feels sacred. For a team to put down as resounding a marker as they did on the back of another brutal summer of triple and quadruple sessions sets the tone for another tantalising campaign. The challenge is to be more durable and how bottomless this small Leeds squad will prove over a gruelling season remains to be seen but they have already offered answers to several questions in one fell swoop. Bielsa’s methods are no mystery, his thinking is no longer shrouded in secrecy but early evidence suggests Leeds will take some stopping.
Go on lets, because if we had lost I'm sure that the naysayers would have been all over the board and it would have been the end of the world and WWIII all rolled into one. I do get your point though and I'm not over playing it.
One of our key weaknesses is complacency, especially when we have the lead in last third or 20 minutes of game. We have a tendency to relax, take our eye off the ball and think the games won, and all they have to do in defence is meander along. I Guarantee it'll happen during season. Like I said previously, people talk in parrot fashion from they hear and read. That about Phillips is the biggest load of codswallop I've ever heard........Talk about going way way over top, this writers on Uranus. "Phillips is a midfield bouncer, first on the scene at the very scent of danger, but he also makes Leeds tick. He shakes off challenges, turns over possession, eats up ground and drives Leeds forward. For fans, Phillips is the local boy done good, having grown up in Armley, around the corner from Elland Road." Phillips is a midfield bouncer....REALLY!!........where, fantasy football? "First on the scene at the very scent of danger",.........effing hell, who is this idiot. Phillips goes missing a lot, and for most of goals against he's not where he should be. "But he also makes Leeds tick"........if Phillips makes Leeds tick then he's broken and overdue for a visit to watchmakers. Pablo makes Leeds tick, he's the go to man everyone looks too, and you can see that during matches. "He shakes off challenges".........what about all the ones where opposition players leave him behind...... "Turns over possession"........yep, gives possession to any Leeds player at side of him or behind him most of time, not to mention when his passes aren't accurate.. "Eats up ground and drives forward"...........Well, I'll go to our house ey, that's it, he must be talking about Forshaw cos Phillips very rarely eats up ground and pushes forward, well, maybe without the ball. This writer is obviously not a football player, or was dreaming about what he wishes would happen. I'm not saying Phillips is a crap player, but he's definitely none of the above..........people need to stop believing fake news.
If LL was 20+ years younger than KP, a post like that would have me thinking KP had molested LL or something equally horrifying. Such vitriol & hatred for a key player in the team you're supposed to be supporting. I've never even seen an opposition player relentlessly written about in such terms. But one of your own? Perhaps he thinks we don't get the message, so he has to seek out articles about his anti-hero so he has an opportunity once again to tear him apart? Or perhaps it is all about molestation - and KP gave him a knock-back?
I must admit, as an admin I’m supposed to remain neutral but it’s hard with posts like this from LL and the constant hatred towards KP leaves me wondering if it’s all just a big WUM Sometimes I think LL really does believe the stuff he writes about KP and other times I feel it’s done to get a reaction. Personally I’m very relieved we are hours away from the transfer window slamming shut and not a whisper about KP leaving us, if he’d been sold during this window we could kiss goodbye to any chance of promotion.
I’m beginning to think that you don’t even watch games let alone read them. So why has every coach / manager we’ve had kept picking him? And why does he appear to be of importance to the way Bielsa wants to play? Or is this just another WUM and cry for attention?
Second clip shows the guy who wrote the article knew exactly what he was talking about and @LeedsLover you keep saying you ask what he brings to the team and nobody tells you, well we do but you just ignore it, so take a look at that second clip in particular and see if you missed any of these I also notice you have brought up Pablo in comparison a few times now, Leeds United would be no good with 10 Pablos or 10 Phillips in the team, one is an attacking midfield player, the other a defensive, they have different roles, each equally important, I fail to understand why you seem to be turning it into a Phiilips vs Pablo competition
Thanks for that, Rich. I really enjoyed that. Perhaps it's Pablo's magnetism that bends all these 'boring square passes' into brilliant, to-the-toe passes?
But Ristac, in that first video we didn't score any goals so KP obviously played a diagonal forward defensive pass to the incorrect team mate. Any other midfielder in that position would have created 10 goals in that 36 second clip
I think he 100% believes it, which is mightily concerning. I've genuinely never come across someone who so utterly fails to comprehend the game of football. He claims complacency was our issue last season - we conceded 9 goals out of 50 past the 75th minute (not including the play-offs). One was against Villa and was fairly given, so I'm discounting that. Of the others, two came when we were down to 10 men (Forest and Stoke), which sounds more like fatigue than complacency. Two more came against West Brom when we were already 2-0 down and chasing the game. Quickly whittles that down to 4 out of 50. Hardly a sign of complacency - look at how many late goals we scored. If anything, our sluggish starts are what cost us last season, too often we gifted teams a head-start...
I see LL is still the punchbag for.offering a different view. Suggest you read some of his posts and then read some of your replies to him - really is no need for the vitriol and most of you are old enough to know better - give your heads a big shake.
A lot has happened in your absence. You'll find that a far greater amount of vitriol has been fired out in many directions by LL, often unprompted. Even polite criticism of his views has drawn breathtaking replies, including nonsensical diatribes and groundless accusations. Not just to the 'old hands' either - often to some of our newer posters who have no relationship with him or knowledge of his prior history. Wasn't it Pope that wrote 'a little learning is a dangerous thing'? How true in this case. You have a lot more reading to do before you come in here chucking accusations about. No malice, of course!
