Pass the smelling salts after spygate

TINKER, tailor, solider... manager.

It wasn’t exactly cloak and dagger stuff though was it? It wasn’t exactly George Smiley facing off against his great nemesis, Karla. Leeds United isn’t the Circus and Derby County isn’t Moscow Centre.

For all the clutching at pearls we’ve been forced to endure in the days since all of this came to light you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a scandal for the ages. Keith Andrews decried it as “disgusting”. Derby boss Frank Lampard, meanwhile, described it as “a hop, skip and a jump over the line”.

The crime? Leeds boss Marcelo Bielsa sent a spy – a scout really – to Derby County’s training ground to monitor their training ahead of a top of the table contest in the Championship last Friday evening.

The spy – the Peter Guillam to Bielsa’s Smiley – hid in the bushes with a pair of binoculars presumably to get look at what sort of selection and what sort of formation Lampard was considering for the game.

Once the scheme was uncovered – our Guillam was rumbled in the bushes adding an appropriate touch of Carry On to our le Carré adventure – Bielsa was straight up in admitting it. He kind of half apologised for it, looking rather bemused at having to do so, without make any rash promises to never do anything like that again.

He was dead right too. For all the kvetching about what he’d done, we can’t for the life of us see what he’s done wrong. As others have pointed out, Bielsa and Leeds didn’t actually break any rules.

Maybe it wasn’t particularly sportsmanlike, but so what? Bielsa saw an opportunity and he exploited it. Isn’t that what the best coaches do? Look for marginal gains? More power to the Argentine and shame on everyone else if they weren’t seeking to do likewise.

Besides the security and privacy of the a club’s training ground is their responsibility, not that of their rivals. Relying on some sort of Victorian notion of the Corinthian Spirit seems more than a little quaint in 2019.

What this non-story shouldn’t be allowed do is detract from the marvellous job Bielsa is doing. For the first time since their relegation, Leeds United look a real force again. By hook or by crook, Bielsa is dragging them back to respectability, back to the Premier League, back to where they belong and if it takes a little bit of healthy skulduggery to do so, so be it.

The Premier League has missed Leeds United. A proper club with a proper history in a proper city, with proper fans, they’ve been away from the top table for far too long. Bielsa’s bringing them back. Long may it continue.