Official Leeds United Thread

Discussion in 'Soccer Board' started by ChileanNole, Aug 29, 2011.

  1. ChileanNole

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    Agree on all fronts. Was shocked at how effective Poveda looked but midfield needs help for sure. Before season started I would have been very happy with 6 pts after the first 4. Over the moon with anything more than that and in all honesty we should have 8 but just happy at how we’ve played so far. In Bielsa We Trust.
     
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  2. ChileanNole

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  3. The Goat

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    I know we have been looking for another winger but I would have prioritized another 8 to be a backup or play alongside Klich like Forshaw. Seems like we are signing Raphina so hope there is another trick up the sleeve.
     
  4. ChileanNole

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    Worried that we did not sign a midfielder. Raphinha will be interesting. Both Costa and Harrison have been playing great to start the season and Poveda was class last match. Bielsa is not one to usually make abrupt changes so we will probably see him as a sub first.
     
  5. ChileanNole

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  6. ChileanNole

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    Forgot that the English transfer market is still open so still a chance to sign a midfielder.
     
  7. The Goat

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    I know we have been linked to Cantwell who is interesting. Maybe Bielsa thinks he can do a job in the middle of the park like Klich.
     
  8. ChileanNole

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    Our 2 Spanish internationals are starting against Portugal and Koch is starting for Germany.
     
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  9. ChileanNole

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    This looks amazing:

     
  10. The Goat

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    Frustrating match that reminded me of Championship games. This tweet summed it up for me there.

     
  11. ChileanNole

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    I take back every single bad thing I’ve ever said about Bramford. Harrison the unsung hero. Thought Rodrigo played well but could have had one. Great result even better performance. Buzzing.
     
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  12. The Goat

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    Harrison was beating Matty Cash all night like he stole something.

    Great looking performance. Shackleton came on and bossed the middle too.
     
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  13. ChileanNole

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    Totally agree on Shackleton. Genius move to shift Klich deeper and allow Shackleton to go forward he looked so confident.
     
  14. yesman

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    good result today mates. hope bamford is ok. few more pts and we're probably clear
     
  15. ChileanNole

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    Huge games against Fulham and Sheffield coming up to lock that. Especially when we have City, Liverpool and Man U after that. Need at least 4 if not 6 from the next 2 matches.
     
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  16. ChileanNole

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  17. The Goat

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    The Cookstown Cafu with the brace. Couldn't have seen a win like that 3 years ago when we were being managed by Heckingbottom. ALAW.
     
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  18. yesman

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    Incredible win mates. Still buzzing. feel for coops getting sent off like that when you see raph nearly bludgeoned to death. What a storyline tho.
     
  19. yesman

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  20. yesman

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  21. yesman

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    your PL2 Division 2 champions just getting better:

     
  22. Gallant Knight

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    small club
     
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  23. yesman

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  24. yesman

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    Beat out AC Milan for our new left back. Loads of potential, things didn’t work out at barca last two years for him behind Alba.

     
    #324 yesman, Jul 6, 2021
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2021
  25. yesman

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    #325 yesman, Jul 8, 2021
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2021
  26. Gallant Knight

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  27. yesman

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    I'll let the defending PL2 (division 2) champs sort that out at thorp arch.
     
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  28. yesman

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  29. yesman

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    club record for fuckin dan james, let's poll the fanbase:

     
  30. yesman

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  31. The mad Puto

    The mad Puto Well-Known Member
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    Bielsismo will save this lad. I’m excited for him. In other matters, one can’t help but grin like an idiot at how giddy Patty Bamford is to be called up for England.
     
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  32. Sam Elliott

    Sam Elliott Job title: Assistant Bouncer at the Double Deuce
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    Hes a hard worker, you've got a player who certainly will never get his effort or commitment to the club called into question.
     
  33. yesman

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    Fits the system well, supposedly. Has to be a reason Bielsa is obsessed with him. From my bum on the couch perspective I worry he's just an advanced version of ian poveda who is all pace no feel or head for the game. We shall see, not my money happy to add to the squad.
     
  34. The mad Puto

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    James is stronger, faster, and obviously more proven. They’re not the same profile of player. Poveda’s quickness is annulled by the fact he weighs like 130lbs soaking wet. He gets pushed off the ball too easily at this level. James was excellent for Swansea and has looked sharp with Wales. Not panning out at at a club like Man United is nothing to be ashamed of. And it’s not like he wasn’t ever an option for Ole. He clearly earned his playing time there as Ole had him start twice already this season. There’ve been rumblings of experimenting with giving raphinha a more central role but we’ll see. Also who knows how much longer a player of Raph’s caliber will stay at Leeds before a mega club comes knocking.
     
    #334 The mad Puto, Aug 31, 2021
    Last edited: Aug 31, 2021
  35. The Goat

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    This is some bad business at the price. The idea of Raphinha moving in to become a 10 is one that makes no sense considering he is at his best running at defenders not distributing the ball like Pablo.

    It isn't my money and I get Bielsa has been infatuated with him, but 28 million on another winger when help in the middle is needed seems poor.
     
  36. The Goat

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    About time to put Cooper out to pasture. Ayling has looked terrible as well outside of the wonder goal vs the Mancs.

    Just overall haven't been as sharp this year with ball possession and it has been a real problem.
     
  37. The mad Puto

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    Yuge win for Leedsito. Raphinha has you saying “oh my days” every week. Bielsismo lives. Hope Paddy’s back soon. We miss him.
     
  38. The mad Puto

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    LEEDS CARAJO LA CTM
     
  39. snowfx2

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  40. yesman

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    [​IMG]
     
    #340 yesman, Jan 11, 2022
    Last edited: Jan 11, 2022
  41. The mad Puto

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    The home win vs Burnleh was massive. Elland Road was in peak form. It’s been a constantly improvising patchwork of a season and funnily enough we’re only 4 points behind a team like Palace with a game in hand ourselves and the narrative on their end is that it’s been a very exciting and successful first season so far for Paddy Vieira.

    Minor miracle we’re 8 points clear with all the injuries. Injuries for example completely derailed Sheffield United last season, a club that went from top half and fighting for a European spot to a historically bad relegation campaign the next.

    Edit: Getting Forshaw back the way he’s playing has been yuge especially with Phillips now out for a while as well.
     
    #341 The mad Puto, Jan 11, 2022
    Last edited: Jan 11, 2022
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  42. yesman

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    Forshaw has been incredible. Cannot believe he's been able to raise his game to this level. We need to do some business and soon though. Newcastle are not going down and Burnley are well versed in fighting from where they are now. We need a midfielder, someone who is creative in the final 3rd, and a seasoned backup goalie for Meslier.
     
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  43. The mad Puto

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    Few times I’ve been more proud of this Bielsa side than that first half just now at West Ham. First twenty minutes taking it to them pressing like rabid dogs while also imperious in possession just completely playing them out of their own park looking like Leeds, the visiting club, is the European side of the two.

    Then of course ridiculous misfortune again with two injuries within 2 minutes and having to sub out both Forshaw and Firpo for a couple of teenagers. Concede on a corner and then get it right back to be up 2-1 at the half and Dan James could have made it 3-1 twice at the end.

    Leeds Carajo vibes on this Sunday morn.

    86F1223D-AACF-4E73-94BD-941D8988FA4C.png

    20 minutes in ^
     
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  44. The mad Puto

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    They fucking did the thing. Absolute masterclass and with all the injuries it’s just unheard of. Get the fuck out of here Bielsa. How do you do what you do, you beautiful wizard brained bastard. What a gift for the fans today. So happy for Jackie as well.
     
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  45. The Goat

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    Amazing win. I can't even say these injuries are getting out of hand because that happened a month plus ago.
     
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  46. The Goat

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    This Bielsa news/rumors are crushing. Especially when the board hasn't backed him with players amid a massive injury crisis. I have no confidence Marsch does anything for the squad and the more likely thing that turns results around will be because Phillips/Bamford/Dallas come back.
     
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  47. The mad Puto

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    https://www.thesquareball.net/leeds-united/leeds-united-0-4-tottenham-let-down/

    My tether came close to snapping a few times in the Championship, and in February 2020, after our second annual defeat to Wigan, I opened a match report by asking Marcelo Bielsa, what the fuck was that?

    Same question now, but directed at the players. Or more accurately, where the fuck are you?

    We’ll come to the pitch. But look at your television and radio this week. Adam Forshaw before Liverpool. Adam Forshaw after. Adam Forshaw before Tottenham. Adam Forshaw after. The squad is small but it’s not that small. Doesn’t anyone else have anything to say for themselves?

    Meanwhile, Marcelo Bielsa. I watched him being dragged from interview to interview to press conference after the 4-0 defeat to Spurs, while news reports that broke five minutes to full-time were predicting his sacking. His post-match duties took long enough for any writers in the audience to get all the colour they needed. Elland Road’s cruel old stands emptied. The wind blew harder, lifting litter and debris across the pitch, while he talked in front of the boards advertising multi-million pound sponsors. Somewhere on the far side, in the family stand, one child had stayed behind to sing. As Bielsa and Andres Clavijo did their best to explain, that young voice cried, ‘Marcelo Bielsa!’

    Bielsa said on Friday that he’s alone, the only one who believes in him. I hope he heard that kid.

    Bielsa has looked increasingly alone as this week has gone by, separated from the players who, when they speak, say they owe him everything. They do, but they haven’t been playing like it. Even after this match, Bielsa said that if the players are losing faith in his methods, that’s his fault. “Clearly I can’t ignore that those who make an effort and get nothing in return, they start to doubt what they do.” He was defending them to the last, as he defended them from the very start. Few would have blamed Bielsa if, when he arrived in 2018, his first act had been to sell every last player at the club and start again.

    It’s wrong to say the players are getting nothing in return for the effort they give to implementing Marcelo Bielsa’s ideas. What they have got from that is who they are. Stuart Dallas was not on the path to becoming a Premier League footballer after leaving ambitious Brentford for Massimo Cellino and Uwe Rosler’s Leeds and failing to impress for Steve Evans, Garry Monk, Thomas Christiansen or Paul Heckingbottom. Jack Harrison wasn’t being talked about for England caps when he was sitting on the bench with Tony Pulis at Middlesbrough. You’d have laughed at the idea of Luke Ayling playing for England before Bielsa came to Leeds, but only a queue of quality right-backs kept him away from the European Championships. That idea has become a joke again now, but I can’t see how that’s Marcelo Bielsa’s fault.

    Bielsa’s system, the system, has come in for a battering this week but he was right, on Friday, to say that nobody is pointing out any flaws he isn’t aware of, or that he hasn’t fixed before. He’s fixed them by getting the players to do their jobs properly and make the system work. This time last season, when Leeds were embarking on eleven games with one defeat, conceding just eight goals, Bielsa was asked what he had changed to improve the defending. Nothing, he said. “No, we’ve always tried to play in the same way,” he said. The players were simply getting used to playing in the Premier League, his way. “They’ve learned to avoid errors that are avoidable. I have the feeling that there has been a growth in the maturity and experience to manage these games.” It has been forgotten how often the same systems made Leeds virtually impenetrable in the Championship. For most of two seasons we didn’t measure Leeds’ defending by the goals conceded, but by the long passage of time before their opponents got the first of a handful of touches in United’s penalty area. When it did come to goals, Leeds conceded fewer than all but two clubs in Bielsa’s first season, fewer than all in his second.

    Have the players forgotten? In the defeat to Spurs, the defending that angered me most did not lead to a goal. Leeds were already 3-0 down anyway. But Spurs had a free-kick in their own half. Dallas, moved to midfield where he was player of the season last year, and asked to mark Ryan Sessegnon, let the Spurs player drift behind him and take a ten yard start on the pass Spurs lofted into space before Dallas even noticed he had moved. This isn’t a system failure. There isn’t much less you can ask of a footballer than to watch another footballer on the halfway line at a free-kick. This is players not doing their jobs properly.

    It’s hugely disappointing because we have come to expect so much more. Luke Ayling’s grit and goals carried the club to promotion. He’s become the place where promising attacks go to die. Mateusz Klich keeps trying but is consistently two yards the wrong side of every pass, and short of punch in every shot. Harrison crosses to Pat Bamford knowing he isn’t there, instead of thinking up something else to do. Fans say we’ve never replaced Pablo Hernandez; Raphinha is better than Hernandez ever was at his best, but he doesn’t dominate a game the way Hernandez did, until maybe the final ten minutes when his frustration makes him interested. If Junior Firpo and Diego Llorente are more than reputations, they should stop a second goal from Spurs that Barry Douglas and Gaetano Berardi could have dealt with, not step politely, inexplicably aside.

    To say none of Bielsa’s ideas can ever work is to forget last season, and the two before. But if the only concession Bielsa will make is the truth — that the lack of results is making the players lose faith in everything that has taken them to where they are now — then that’s the biggest drop in performance of them all, and the most disappointing. It’s Saturday night as I write this, and I wonder how the players are feeling, in houses they’ve bought with Premier League money they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t believed in Bielsa. They might lose faith. They get to keep the house.

    None of them will ever be made to explain this week, which never had to be as bad as it has been. If Bielsa is sacked they’ll still be here next week, talking about how grateful they are to the old gaffer but it’s time to look forward now. And if they win the games they should between now and the end of the season, nobody will ask them about the last seven days ever again. But it will stay on Bielsa’s CV forever, as a full stop.

    Not even the most optimistically deranged Leeds fan predicted much more than nothing from playing Manchester United, Liverpool and Spurs in seven days. Leeds just had to get through those games, survey the damage, and get on with things against Norwich, Watford, Brentford in particular; also Aston Villa, Wolves, Southampton, Palace, Brighton. Nine wins exactly have kept Brighton in the Premier League for the last four seasons. Four more wins should not be beyond Bielsa’s Leeds this season. But being outplayed by Everton made this week more important. And giving up at Anfield made this weekend’s game with Spurs more significant than it should ever have been. If the performances had been there this week, defeats could have been forgiven, the rest of the season faced down defiantly. But the players didn’t show up.

    The only one who has shown up, consistently, is Marcelo Bielsa, trying everything to recover the team of ten months ago, then being hauled into press conferences and interviews six times in seven days to answer for players to whom he gave life and who you imagine he would die defending. If all this season’s problems really are Bielsa’s fault, and if he is going, then there are no more excuses. Nobody will be able to blame the system, or the training, or the diet. It’s easy to imagine that, five years from now, Bielsa will telephone Stuart Dallas because an evening of deep thought will have made him realise that, somehow, asking him to mark Sessegnon at that free-kick was the wrong thing to do. It’s also easy to imagine, five years from now, today’s players realising they should be calling Bielsa to say sorry.

    Back in February 2020, when I started that report by wanting to smash down Bielsa’s door and scream at him until he explained why the fuck Wigan were destroying our promotion campaign again, I ended it by writing:

    This was my one, my one howl, my single j’accuse Bielsa. Although I know damn well Leeds can lose to Wigan without him, I want to lay this one at his door, where he expects it and accepts it. “It’s clear the responsibility is on me,” he said on Saturday. Leeds are, “a team that is aligned with what I ask of them, my ideas. That makes me more responsible because it’s my fault.”

    Even if it’s fatal, Leeds and Bielsa seem fated, and it’s too late to change. Right now, El Loco and Leeds maybe shouldn’t be together. We’ll find that out in May. But it would be madness for us to be apart.

    Circumstances meant we didn’t get the answer until July, but by then El Loco seemed like the one sane thing the world had left. We didn’t give up on Bielsa after the Derby County play-off semi-final, and in the end we got what he promised us. We didn’t give up on Bielsa after only winning two games in eleven during winter of 2019/20, and in the end we got what he promised us. We didn’t give up on Bielsa last season, when the team didn’t win more than two games in a row until March, and in the end we got a Premier League season better than we’d dared to ask for. Marcelo Bielsa, of course, will never give up, and that’s why they say he’s going to lose his job. ⬢
     
    #347 The mad Puto, Feb 26, 2022
    Last edited: Feb 26, 2022
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  48. The Goat

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    Wonder how often this gets sung the next game:

     
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  49. The mad Puto

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    https://www.thesquareball.net/leeds-united/goodbye-marcelo-bielsa-hello-premier-league/

    Marcelo Bielsa’s impact at Leeds United can be described and measured simply by writing down what he did, assembling the video clips being shared on social media, comparing the before and after pictures of the club, its players, its league position, its bank account, its future.

    His departure was always going to be difficult but his mid-season sacking feels like an occasion for grief. Not so much because he’s gone. We’ll always have memories for that. But grief because Leeds United is no longer different, and it was all over before the traditional kick-off time of Saturday, 3pm. I was dragged out of bed by BT Sports and the worldwide broadcasting market for a lunchtime match against Spurs, and sacking Marcelo Bielsa at the end of the game was the moment Leeds United became just another Premier League football club on just another Premier League day.

    It is being said that Bielsa transformed Leeds United and gave the club an identity the way he made Kalvin Phillips an international footballer, but neither is strictly true. As Phillips put it on Twitter, ‘You saw in me what I didn’t even see in myself.’ Bielsa’s genius was seeing what Phillips had, and finding ways of putting it to work. That’s why he once said that coaching Pablo Hernandez was making him a better coach: bringing Hernandez’s incredible abilities to the surface required ideas and techniques Bielsa hadn’t thought of before. He doesn’t invent what is within his players. He invents ways of getting it out.

    The same thing happened with Leeds United as a club, a fanbase and a city. Leeds came later than almost everywhere else in the world to association football, and never seemed to get used to the idea of it as a viable alternative to rugby. In the 1950s, United had the best player in the world, John Charles, but people wouldn’t go to watch Leeds because they said he made the rest of the team look bad and they wouldn’t pay to watch one player. In the 1960s Don Revie built the best team in the world, but it was his constant frustration that he couldn’t fill the stadium, and if he did, that the crowd would jeer if the afternoon’s 3-0 win wasn’t exciting enough. Howard Wilkinson managed the feat of bringing 250,000 people out onto the the streets of Leeds to applaud his champions, but he was a bit boring and not someone the raving fanbase could feel close to, so Vinnie Jones and Eric Cantona became the symbols of his success. Then they were gone, and half the city’s interest with them.

    The city of Leeds was about as disinterested in soccer as it had ever been when Marcelo Bielsa turned up. But he didn’t change what he found. Like he did with Kalvin Phillips, he recognised what was good in it, the hardcore loyalty, the quickly stirred passions that had flashed for Garry Monk and Thomas Christiansen. He had the secret to winning over this old rugby town. The problem for decades was that, for people to give up rugby, soccer in Leeds had to be exciting top quality, but it rarely was. But when Leeds people saw the football Bielsa was putting on in LS11, they went crazy for it.

    During our sixteen years away the Premier League was always the great promise and the great danger. Being outside it was the great frustration but also the great anarchic thrill. Leeds, like few other clubs, retained its identity through the first two decades of the 21st century while the Premier League gave in to the transformative weight of its money. Getting promoted to the top flight would mean success. But it was also going to mean the end of a lot of things that were fun.

    Bielsa managed to delay that inevitability and he did it by the force of his personality. Spygate was the moment Leeds completely united behind him because it pitted him and his ideas against every simplistic obnoxious trait in top level English football we had disdained from afar. The fairest goal, given to Aston Villa, was another moment when football showed its arse while Bielsa kept his and our dignity. Would we have respected Steve Evans letting the opposition score? I doubt it, but Bielsa hit upon a seam of innate integrity and justice among Leeds fans, a feeling generated by inverting how the 1975 European Cup final still burns us; the only thing Jack Charlton truly hated was unfairness.

    Bielsa’s public behaviour in the Premier League, towards his own club, towards officials and towards rules that have often punished him, has been an exemplary contrast to the erratic, disruptive behaviour of Antonio Conte in only the last week. We alone understood that his press conferences were given through a translator because that allowed Bielsa to give extended answers no other manager would dream of giving, clear and straight from the source, because by answering in Spanish he was guaranteeing a full unedited explanation of his thoughts as near to the way he thinks them as language can allow. Even if the translator next to him was struggling, we could work instead with the original Spanish text.

    Then there was his football. We know what it was like to watch. And, in the first Premier League season at least, it inspired so much rage outside West Yorkshire that we could enjoy it even more. The rest of the football world was so much more angry about our 6-2 defeat at Old Trafford than any Leeds fan was, and we revelled in the confusion our devotion was causing.

    All these things worked at Elland Road because they tapped into a feeling that was always there about what it means to be a Leeds United fan. Bielsa didn’t invent how we felt, he found the feelings in us and brought them out. Many people will have wanted to put tributes up in Leeds to Don Revie or Howard Wilkinson while they were here, but if they’d done one, others would have said they were daft. Only Marcelo Bielsa made people happy when artists went up their ladders with paint. Only Marcelo Bielsa makes fans want to tell the club to shove its planned tribute up its arse.

    Leeds United’s return to the modern Premier League was always going to be difficult, a football club out of its time landing in an era that prospers by making you hate it. Every Premier League commentary and post-match discussion is a breakdown of why the game you were excited to see has let you down. Winning has become so consuming that managers get blamed, abused then sacked for finishing second in the league. Written apologies are extracted from players guilty of scoring own goals or conceding penalties as if they’ve committed terrible crimes. The intensity makes everyone, owners, managers, players, agents, fans, miserable and angry. Somehow, so far, not at Leeds. Even after an extraordinary 14-2 aggregate week, there are fans at Leeds regretting that Bielsa is being sacked over something that should not be as important as it’s made out to be. Bielsa’s obsessive practice of his life’s work gives football the true seriousness it needs for us to remember that it’s only a game.

    It is sad that Bielsa couldn’t hold the modern Premier League off for longer, to preserve the graceful anarchy that defines Leeds United for a few more seasons. There was talk last summer that this season might be Bielsa’s last, whatever happened, but it was hard to see the rationale for preempting his future. What if Leeds had improved on last season’s 9th place? What limit would you put on Bielsa’s time? Since promotion, Leeds have spent around £150m in two seasons without significant player sales as part of a two-year strategy to keep the club in the Premier League. Over the next two years what could another £150m, perhaps spent better, produce in combination with Bielsa’s football? Nobody can name another coach Leeds could attract who could have done what Bielsa did with the squad and the funds he was given. Who would you pick over Bielsa to take the next influx of resources to the next level?

    Leeds United had a chance to keep resisting the ordinary, to buck the short term sack ’em trend. Perhaps some players were tired after four years of the same instructions. But when the instructions worked so well, replace those players and build a club to dominate a decade like Revie, or Ferguson or Wenger. It was to the Leeds board’s credit that Bielsa had stayed at Elland Road longer than at any other club. When he arrived his explosive departures from Lazio, Marseille and Lille were hot topics on his record. Leeds found a way to please him, and stood to be the first club to truly benefit from what he could, given time, be capable of building. One bad season swayed them from the possibility of ten years of the best coach they could hope to hire.

    It’s absurd that the most significant cause of our diversion from that path was beyond Bielsa’s control. During BT’s coverage of his last game, the screen showed Liam Cooper, Kalvin Phillips and Pat Bamford slumped together in the West Stand. The team’s record with and without Phillips speaks for itself. At Liverpool, injury to Virgil van Dijk changed their fortunes from champions with 99 points to a 3rd place finish with 69. This season, with him back, their points per game average has them on course for 87 points, enough to win last season’s Premier League. One bad season of injuries wasn’t enough to dislodge Jurgen Klopp, nor even four consecutive defeats, 10-3 on aggregate, culminating in a humiliating derby at Anfield; or a 7-2 capitulation to Villa with van Dijk on the pitch. After all the arguments about Bielsa’s systems and ideas, when it comes down to it, the difference between Leeds’ current position of 16th and the desired mid-table finish could just be the moment Bamford’s hamstring gave way when he celebrated his equaliser against Brentford. That’s not Bamford’s fault, but it’s not Bielsa’s either. And it’s a small reason for throwing away so much.

    It’s a shame how everything collapsed so easily. Maybe the Premier League really is too strong. After the Spurs game, I walked home north along Woodhouse Lane, against a stream of Otley Runners heading south. I’m sorry if my face ruined the vibe for any of them. What struck me about the fancy dress, as I ticked off countless Marios, Spice Girls/Boys, Austin Powers outfits and Smurfs, is how often I kept seeing the same outfits. The point of fancy dress is to stand out in an outrageous costume. But everyone was dressed the same as anyone else. What does it feel like to spend hours painting your body blue and your hair white, then going down the pub to show off your craziness, and realise you’re just one of a hundred all doing the same?

    Maybe it feels good. It’s fun as FOMO. The Otley Run has rules, as does the Premier League, as does everything else. Premier League sackings happen by the opened damful for a reason: because once one club does it, everyone else thinks they should too. It’s an easy way of pretending you’re thinking for yourself, when actually you’re just joining in, hoping not to be left behind. If Aston Villa’s chief executive started dressing up as Ginger Spice, Angus Kinnear would too.

    Sacking Marcelo Bielsa means Leeds United are already just another Premier League club, now. The one thing we dreaded back when promotion was still the aim. Bielsa’s football wasn’t perfect and his ideas weren’t perfect, but with his faults he gave our football club to us exactly how we imagined its best version could be.

    What the new manager is like and how long he lasts isn’t the issue. The grief is because the club as it was is gone. Premier League football might be vital to pay for a new, enormous, money-spinning West Stand, but will Bielsa-less football still bring 50,000 Leeds fans to watch it? Maybe it will be the new home for 50,000 Premier League fans instead. Leeds have stepped onto the merry-go-round now, of media games between manager and owner, incessant transfer speculation, complaints about referees, running the clock down to take a point. Press conferences might be in English but they won’t explain half as much. Our managers might win games but they won’t get from Leeds supporters the same love Bielsa made us realise we had within us to give. ⬢


    “Sacking Marcelo Bielsa means Leeds United are already just another Premier League club, now. The one thing we dreaded back when promotion was still the aim. Bielsa’s football wasn’t perfect and his ideas weren’t perfect, but with his faults he gave our football club to us exactly how we imagined its best version could be.

    What the new manager is like and how long he lasts isn’t the issue. The grief is because the club as it was is gone. Premier League football might be vital to pay for a new, enormous, money-spinning West Stand, but will Bielsa-less football still bring 50,000 Leeds fans to watch it? Maybe it will be the new home for 50,000 Premier League fans instead. Leeds have stepped onto the merry-go-round now, of media games between manager and owner, incessant transfer speculation, complaints about referees, running the clock down to take a point. Press conferences might be in English but they won’t explain half as much. Our managers might win games but they won’t get from Leeds supporters the same love Bielsa made us realise we had within us to give.”
     
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