Hope battles desperation as Marcelo Bielsa’s road to Promised Land gets bumpy Much-loved Argentine coach is again putting Leeds fans through emotional wringer, writes Matt Dickinson “How is Jean-Kévin Augustin’s fitness?” Perhaps only Marcelo Bielsa, out of any coach in world football, could have turned that simple inquiry into a 20-minute, almost 1500-word monologue yesterday; an answer so long that the French striker had time to pull a hamstring and still recover before his manager was done. Bielsa’s response took in not just one man’s fitness but the form of several others, Financial Fair Play, criticism of his use of various loan players at Leeds United, and, just perhaps, some quantum physics and Argentine philosophy, though with his assistant Diego Flores struggling to keep up the translation as Bielsa tapped a table, wagged fingers and aligned recording devices with all the obsessiveness he applies to his tactics, who knows what other ground he covered before concluding by asking the bemused journalist, “So, do you think I’m right?” They say it is exhausting to work under the painstaking 64-year-old. And that is just to be his translator. Five questions were answered in one hour of impassioned talk that made you wonder if Bielsa’s closing insistence — “I don’t feel I am showing tension” — was his only bluff. At the end of it all came the message that Augustin will only play for Leeds when Bielsa thinks he is ready which is not the one that most fans wanted as they crave an upturn to the faltering SkyBet Championship form — three defeats in the past four games, without a goal in any of those losses — which is making another melodrama out of a club which never in their history have seemed to make things easy. As if Bielsa’s Leeds were not already a fascinating tale of desperation and hope battling with resurgent dread, this was an hour at the training ground to make you feel the pressure almost tangibly. This is Leeds’s tenth season of trying to escape the second tier, to finally be freed of the legacy of financial implosion, three years in League One and all the other humiliations that were the price of Peter Ridsdale “living the dream” around the turn of the millennium. “If not now then ever?” was the tone of Leeds fans I spoke to this week given that in Bielsa they are guided by one of the most singular coaches in world football. At a club that turned to Dave Hockaday and Paul Heckingbottom among ten coaches who fell short in the past decade, appointing Bielsa, this revered Argentine sage, has felt like putting all the chips down on one last, big bet. For so much of the journey since he arrived in the summer of 2018 and set about moving even the electrical sockets at the training ground to be symmetrical (yes, really), Bielsa has more than justified the faith; transforming players such as Kalvin Phillips, playing the bold, pro-active football for which he is renowned, and taking Leeds tantalisingly close to the Promised Land. But after faltering last season, beaten in the play-offs, some cannot help but see this latest wobble and fear the worst. How to handle such expectations? “There are no expectations. There are doubts. The supporters are not believing any more in our team,” Bielsa responded. He seems incapable of talking in platitudes, even when it may seem wise. It was an honest reflection of the angst which seemed to reach a crescendo after Saturday’s home defeat by Wigan Athletic. Former players have felt it necessary to take to media channels to urge patience. “We need to calm down and we will go up,” Gary Kelly, the former full back, said. Tony Dorigo said: “Let’s put our dummies back in our mouths, dust ourselves off ready to go again. We’re second and calm is required.” Bielsa’s characteristically unorthodox reaction to rising anxiety this week was to make a presentation to his players of Tottenham Hotspur beating Manchester City 2-0 despite having only three shots to City’s 19. His thinking was to help his team “understand how unfair it is what we are experiencing in this moment” by showing them someone else’s injustice. Ever the statistician, he talked of 35 crosses against Wigan; 18 into the penalty area with 15 clear chances. “It was impossible to concede one goal and we conceded one goal. It was impossible not to score and we didn’t score. It was impossible to lose and we lost. It was impossible not to win and we lost.” This was all said not as a whine but with bafflement at a world that refused to conform to his wisdom. As he once said: “If football was played by robots, I’d win everything.” Among his explanations was that Wigan constantly interrupted the game, reducing the time the ball was in play from about 60 minutes to 40 and “we need those minutes to attack more times”. Some supporters would argue that he simply requires a more prolific striker than Patrick Bamford, with his patchy finishing; hence great, and perhaps unrealistic, expectations on Augustin. Bielsa added that he could take the evidence of, say, Spurs’ success against City to play counter-attacking football, sitting in their own half, hoping to eke out a victory. “But I cannot imagine football like that,” he said. It felt like a challenge to the Leeds fans, and perhaps to his own players, to keep faith in the principles that have got them this far. One thing he will not do is compromise, which is partly what has seen him hailed as a guru among some of the world’s leading coaches, with Pep Guardiola and Mauricio Pochettino two of the most devoted Bielsistas. They talk in awe of a coaching genius. Back in Argentina, from a family of politicians and architects, Bielsa is worshipped at Newell’s Old Boys in Rosario to such an extent that they named the stadium after him. It was a club where he won trophies, which is something he has done remarkably little of considering his status. The “tyranny of trophies”, he calls it, with his reputation based on the inventive adventure of his best teams like the relentlessly pressing 3-3-1-3 of Chile at the 2010 World Cup rather than anything as prosaic as silverware. Many players attest to how his coaching methods — largely based on incessant repetition of drills, often without the ball — have opened their eyes not just to a different way of playing but to physical limits they never knew they possessed. Against that is a record since his time at Chile which has often involved early promise, as at Athletic Bilbao and Marseilles, followed by on-pitch struggles or off-field arguments with owners. He resigned from Lazio before even taking up the post, citing broken promises on recruitment, and lasted four months at Lille. Someone who observed his work closely in France talked of Bielsa showing a pattern of struggling to keep a team in a good psychological state whenever results start going wrong, especially given the challenge of communicating through an interpreter. He likes to keep a distance from his players — he says that if he gets too close he will only be disappointed — so it will be fascinating to see if he can keep the Leeds players in the right mental shape through what looks certain to be a fraught few months. Bielsa disputes a common charge that his high-intensity approach wears out players when they reach the decisive period, but there is no doubt that his methods do require exceptional fitness, which is why he did not put Augustin on the bench against Wigan, to the frustration of many fans. Yesterday, Bielsa said that the France Under-21 striker would be worth up to £40 million with his pedigree, but there was a reason why Leeds got him on loan, from RB Leipzig after a disappointing spell with Monaco. “Kévin, in the last eight months played three full matches,” he said. There was a clear message that the fans and Augustin may have to be patient as Leeds head into games away to fourth-place Nottingham Forest tomorrow and Brentford, who are fifth, on Tuesday on the back of a run which has seen an 11-point gap over the third-place team, now Fulham, cut to only three. Augustin played in what the Leeds players call the weekly “Murderball” training session when Bielsa pits 11 against 11 in an intense session, but the manager is not about to be swayed by terrace demands. These are big weeks which will decide if Leeds go up and probably whether Bielsa stays. The Premier League would be all the richer for his methods, his candour and his apparent disregard for norms. The taxi driver on the way out of the Thorp Arch training ground insisted that he had regularly spotted Bielsa on a three-mile walk to work from the flat he rents above a sweet shop in Wetherby. Social media buzzes with the latest spotting of Bielsa in Morrisons or huddled in a café in his tracksuit (the one he wore to a black-tie gala dinner), pouring over some coaching dossier like those that landed him in trouble for Spygate when Leeds were fined £200,000 after an intern employed by Bielsa was caught observing Derby County’s training. Bielsa’s admission that this was something he had done all his career was as notable as the original offence. Any man who could spark that controversy and still end up winning a Fifa Fair Play award for ordering his players to concede against Aston Villa, after a disputed Leeds goal, is not (as another manager once said), “one from a bottle” but a pretty special one. In Leeds, they love him for his brilliance and his quirks but they also suffer, like the game in December when Leeds were 3-0 up against Cardiff City after an hour but somehow drew. “We don’t know how to play without playing,” he explained yesterday. He insists that his team must keep “taking risks, try to be protagonists”. As if the stakes were not high enough, this style is making for a lurching campaign at the club which plummeted out of the top flight in 2004, weighed down by so much baggage that they were always going to keep sinking. In the biggest city in Europe without a top- flight club, they are closer than ever to the craved return. And they dare not think what it will mean if Bielsa — this brilliant, stubborn obsessive — cannot lead them back.
This b'stard needs his eyes gouged out. Every single negative thing that's happened to us is listed here. Clearly not interested in the positives, and certainly not interested in the magnificent football - especially being a Chief Sports Writer for the Times. It's just a topical piece to join in the increasing tumult to undermine Bielsa & the club. I hate guys like that with a passion. Wonder who he supports? A fellow promotion contender, perhaps? For someone he seems to have reached the peak of his career, position-wise, he's very, very, very lazy in his 'journalism'. He presents facts that are either misleading or plainly wrong. Why does he mention that Bielsa lives above a sweet shop? WTF has that got to do with anything? As it happens, he's wrong. It's an uninformed rumour. It's a Podiatrist's that he lives above. My Podiatrist. Rented out to him from my ex-neighbour's brother. So take it as read that I know a bit more about it than this clown. So we've been in the Championship for 10 years, have we? I count 13. The list goes on. Hatchet job. Clearly hates Leeds. But not as much as I hate him & his ilk. Would love to meet him in a dark alley & see if he can breath with OLOF's sock rammed down his throat.
As you know these days Jock, most journalists put their articles together from social media. Don't let it affect your blood pressure mate
Aye, but this isn't one of the hopeful 'clickbaiters'. This is a man at the top of his profession. Supposed to be respected. How can you respect this cnut after a character assassination piece like this?
I don't want to know what happens after the sock ramming bit.i can't stand to hear a grown man screaming.
Seems we all like Emma and we all need cheering up a bit. I'm just trying to sort a logistical nightmare I've just realised I've put myself in. Have to go to Newcastle Tuesday for Wednesday and Thursday meetings. Booked train tickets that work pay for going up Tues mid-day. Forgot I was going to the Brentford game Tuesday night!!!! Now working out logistics of driving to Brentford, finding somewhere to park and then driving up to Newcastle after the game
Think the only character assassination is coming from you WJ. Think you’re way too defensive on this one. Aside from the factual inaccuracies... I thought it was a good piece, it says how bielsa would grace the premier league it talked about how he improves players, it talks about how he takes them to new fitness levels, it admires his honesty. It also talks about the idiosyncrasies. Are the living in a flat and walking home a character assassination... they’re painting an oddball not interested in driving Ferrari’s, someone who goes against the norm in life and football. Which of his comments on bielsa the man do you disagree with?
