IF PROMOTED, LEEDS PLAN TO SUSPEND SEASON TICKET SALES SO OCCASIONAL FANS CAN GO
Andrea Radrizzani, hung everything. Some £7m was spent buying striker Patrick Bamford (right) from Middlesbrough in July but the club offset that outlay by selling Ronaldo Vieira, an England Under-20 midfielder, to Sampdoria the following week. Bamford was one of only two permanent signings and Blackman one of four loan deals, an influx supplemented in January by the arrival of Spanish goalkeeper Kiko Casilla from Real Madrid.
Bielsa, in essence, picked up a squad who had lost their way badly and finished in the bottom half of the Championship last season, and propelled them to the top of the table at Christmas. For many weeks, left-back Barry Douglas was the only new face in his line-up.
Employing Bielsa came down to the theory that the input of a coach with disciples from Pep Guardiola at Manchester City to Diego Simeone at Atletico Madrid would elevate the performances of players who were also-rans under different management. Courting him was seen as such a long shot that Orta had no expectation of success when Radrizzani told him to make the phone call. “I think it’s impossible for him to come,” insisted Orta.
Bielsa, in the spirit of Gordon Strachan, the last Leeds captain to win promotion from the second tier, trains his squad as he expects them to play. He runs them into the ground, applies heavy amounts of tactical repetition and uses a large backroom team to coach players individually. The improvement of footballers who were all at sea in the same league 12 months ago is credited in part to the tailored work Bielsa does with them. Every Wednesday, 45 minutes are set aside for a ‘murderball’ session: 11 vs 11 with no free-kicks and the ball in play constantly. The Argentine uses one of his assistants to officiate, but tackles fly in and the contest rages unchecked.
Pontus Jansson, Leeds’ Swedish defender, found Bielsa to be uncompromising. “He has a philosophy that if you are tired, then you should train even harder,” Jansson (above) explained. Yet despite the intensity of it all, Bielsa chose to run with a small group by the standards of the Championship, using fewer than 20 senior professionals and asking the academy to plug any gaps. Seven under-23s have made first-team bows this season, wet behind the ears but good enough for Bielsa, and he fights the modern notion that squad rotation is fundamental. “When a team wins regularly, no one is tired,” he claimed. Also, in his mind, fewer surplus players means fewer noses put out of joint.
The revolution has not been without issues. Injuries have gone through the roof since pre-season, though medical staff there say soft-tissue damage – an indicator that players have been pushed to the point where their bodies give in – is lower than average. Bielsa also found himself in the eye of a unhelpful storm in January, when one of his many interns was stopped by police after being spotted outside Derby County’s training
ground 24 hours before the Rams lost 2-0 at Elland Road. In what immediately became known as ‘Spygate’, the Argentine admitted to sending staff to watch every Championship club’s training sessions – although security features at different complexes meant those scouts were able to observe only 11 – and Leeds were fined £200,000 by the Football League for conduct which, in the governing body’s own words, “fell significantly short of the standards expected”.
Bielsa was nonplussed about the anger he incurred. Watching the opposition prepare was common practice in Argentina, and every one of his training sessions at Athletic Bilbao, his employers between 2011 and 2013, took place in public. The week after his intern was confronted in Derby, Bielsa held a 66-minute briefing at Thorp Arch to detail his pre-match analysis in full and explain why, in light of him possessing so much legitimate detail about Frank Lampard’s team, “I don’t need to go to watch a training session of an opponent to know how the opponent plays”.
So what was the point of doing it, then? “It allows me to keep my anxiety low,” admitted Bielsa. “We think by doing that and gathering information, we get closer to a victory, even though we know it’s not true. In my case, I’m stupid enough to allow myself this behaviour.” An extraordinary look into Bielsa’s machine shone a light on his obsessional and paranoid attitude – not unlike Don Revie, whose dossiers at Leeds during the 1960s and ’70s were years ahead of their time.
The Argentine’s engagement with the media is limited but fascinating; a gradual drip of his thoughts and anecdotes which let everyone listening into his head, slowly. There are no one-on-one interviews, no impromptu press briefings (his ‘Spygate’ presentation aside) and nothing offered outside of the pre- and post-match conferences. Bielsa has said on more than one occasion that he owes every reporter the same right to question him and hear him speak, but some in South America say he was stung in the early stages of his career by an off-the-record discussion that came back to bite him.
When journalists gather, he speaks without a time limit. His introduction at Elland Road ran for more than an hour and 20 minutes – so long, in fact, that Bielsa stopped midway through and asked his translator if he needed a break. The manager’s harsh gaze avoids all eye contact, usually fixed to the floor, while his face gives very little away.
Translator Salim Lamrani is an academic who joined Bielsa’s staff at Lille, having first come into contact with the Argentine while he was managing Marseille.
Lamrani’s task is an unenviable one: he’s a Frenchman translating English into Spanish and back again for a coach whose own grasp of English is not yet strong enough for him to speak fluently. After all, Bielsa turns 64 in July and this is his first job in England. The Whites arranged language lessons for him when he agreed to come onboard.