1964white wrote: ↑Thu Oct 29, 2020 1:44 pm
Great article on Bielsa in Tuesdays' Daily Telegraph but I'm struggling to find a link to C&P it on here
Jason Burt the DT reporter did tweet this though
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When a Premier League club interviewed Marcelo Bielsa about becoming their manager a few years ago one senior executive later confided that he left the three-hour meeting thinking the Argentinian was either a genius or a madman – and therefore it was too great a risk to employ him. “I was worn out by the end,” the executive admitted.
Even Bielsa’s ‘interview’ with Leeds United apparently lasted an intense 13 hours as he spoke passionately about what he would do with the club having already prepped himself by watching every game from the previous season in full: 70 hours of football.
So now – if there was any doubt – we know. Bielsa is a genius. “El Loco” is obsessive rather than deranged. Leeds have returned to the Premier League after an absence of 16 years and have been the best addition to the division since Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle United in the mid-90s. Maybe there was a clue when Leeds lost their first game 4-3 to Liverpool. It is hard to think of a promoted side since ‘The Entertainers’ went up to the newly-formed Premier League in 1993 having made such a thrilling, fun impact.
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It is early days - they have only played six games and lost two of them – and so maybe this column is premature but each match has been an absolute joy to watch epitomised by their devastating second-half display away to Aston Villa who had won all four of their league fixtures up until that point but were so comprehensively beaten that manager Dean Smith was honest enough to admit they were fortunate to only lose 3-0.
In those six games, no opponent has had more of the ball than Leeds – including Liverpool and Manchester City - as they have averaged 57.4 per cent possession. Against Villa Bielsa dealt with injuries by playing his left-back at right-back, his right-back at centre-back, his centre-back in midfield - with his record-signing, who is Spain’s starting number nine, also continuing in midfield.
Although there has been significant investment of around £100million in transfers six of the Leeds’ team that started the Villa game were in Bielsa’s match-day squad when he took charge of his first fixture 26 months ago – a 3-1 win over Stoke City in the Championship. It may well, incredibly, have been eight of the 11 if Kalvin Phillips and captain Liam Cooper were not out.
Leeds were convincing winners at Villa Park
Leeds were convincing winners at Villa Park CREDIT: Tom Jenkins
The squad Bielsa inherited and who he analysed through those 70 hours of footage had finished 13th in the Championship, behind Ipswich Town who are now in League One, and Cooper, Phillips, Luke Ayling and Ezgjan Alioski all started the final game of that season, a win over Queens Park Rangers which was only their fourth in 16 games under Paul Heckingbottom who was then duly sacked. For many weeks in Bielsa’s first campaign the only new player in his team was left-back Barry Douglas.
What is so remarkable, therefore, is that Bielsa has not only been hugely successful in bringing Leeds back to the Premier League but has done so playing a particular brand of attacking football that is not easy to learn, that is time-consuming and demanding – and he has done so depending largely on the same core of players.
What that immediately does is blow the myth that managers cannot coach players into an attractive style of football – that, in fact, they have to adapt to what is available to them. For years some managers have trotted out the same line as an excuse for a functional, conservative approach: it is because they can only work with what they have got, or with the budget they have, and therefore the players are not good enough to play differently. If they had more money and could sign better players, the argument goes, they could play better.
Bielsa has exposed that through what he does best: working ferociously on the training pitch to improve the players. It cannot be that the squad he has is, by fortuitous coincidence, simply packed with technically-gifted footballers who for years have just been overlooked.
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