Marcelo Bielsa – lucky man
Marcelo Bielsa really can count himself truly blessed in his current situation at Leeds United. He’s in charge of a club of global pedigree and immense potential, and he’s assembled a squad rich with talent and promise. On top of that, Bielsa himself is lauded by some of the game’s foremost coaches as the granddaddy of them all, the guru, the one who’s influenced the best of the rest. Bielsa, in short, has a heck of a lot going for him.
But it doesn’t end there. For Bielsa, lauded as the Master by football’s movers and shakers, has a massive army of armchair experts behind him, poised ready to bestow upon him the benefits of their tactical acumen at the first sign of the smallest problem or misfortune. Some of the experts would replace Bamford with Nketiah, others would play both as a twin spearhead. Still others would replace Harrison with Costa, and there are also those who would drop Hernandez and play Harrison/Roberts/Costa in that role. This group include those who praised Hernandez as the best in the league following a masterclass late last season, but no matter. Drop him now, they say, for they know best.
In fact, it’s odd that these sedentary experts are all so sure that they know best as, though they all reckon they know better than Bielsa, still there’s great disagreement between them as a group. Surely, they can’t all be right? Is there even the glimmer of a possibility, then, that Bielsa actually does know best about the group of players he works with, day in and day out?
United are, after all, top of the Championship, having won five games and having failed to win the other three when they most certainly should have. But they’re firmly on course to win the league if they can maintain even this slightly less than perfect form. Still, that’s not good enough for the “Dave from Beeston” types out there, nor yet the Twitter tendency. From the way these “supporters” carry on, you might imagine they know more about the game than poor old Marcelo.
Here’s a thought, though. What if we all just let Bielsa get on with it, just on the off-chance that Pep Guardiola, and other super coaches, are right about him. Why don’t we all get off Bamford’s back as well, just in case the sports psychologist chaps have a point about mass criticism having an adverse effect on confidence and performance. You never know, it might just work, this controversial idea of letting the pros get on with it.
Who knows – maybe, at the end of the season, with the league title on the sideboard, we’ll all be saying, well, who’d have thought it. That global legend Marcelo Bielsa really did know what he was on about, after all.
On a slightly less acidly sarcastic note, how good it was to see United and Bielsa get a FIFA fair play award for gifting Villa a goal after Leeds had taken the lead in, ahem, controversial circumstances. I actually don’t agree that there was anything amiss with the Leeds goal that day, but Marcelo obviously felt uncomfortable about it, and what he says goes, as I’ve been hinting all column long. But this FIFA award has been particularly enjoyable for the distress it has caused among certain figures in the game who have a nosebleed if forced to give United any credit for anything. I won’t name names, let’s just say that the anti-Leeds brigade are many in number if slightly short of charm – and they’ve been distinctly rattled by this FIFA award thing. All of which is – let’s be honest – distinctly satisfactory.
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