How Can Marcelo Bielsa’s Friends Think He Talks Too Much? - The Square Ball 27/8/21

SO MANY WORDS

Written by Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman

There he is, the Wetherby pub bore, sitting in the corner all night, splitting one pint into two glasses with his yawning mate, while the landlord tuts and calculates takings per hour for his table. More drinking and less yakking would get the till ringing, but it doesn’t take much to set this bloke off. Just two Leeds fans at a nearby table, one saying to the other, ‘You see Raphinha got called up for Brazil? Good player, him.’

Aw hell’s bells, here we go, he’s off now isn’t he:

“He’s a very potent player and it’s very difficult to triumph in the Premier League if you don’t have this potency. This explosiveness and repetitions, quick physical responses. On top of that he sustains the efforts of any problems but players in those conditions, there are many in the Premier League. What there are very few players of, is the players of his talent with his feet to resolve a situation. Apart from that, being able to imagine the responses and be able to actually do them also.”

Yeah, so, like they said: good player, Raphinha. The thing is, Marcelo Bielsa, for he is this bore in the corner, seems to be aware of how his monologues go down:

“If I were with my friends, they would say, ‘so many words just to say that he plays well.’”

But can that really be true? Replace that imaginary scene above with another one. If, in a pub in Wetherby, two Leeds fans were idly chatting about Raphinha, and then actual Marcelo Bielsa himself politely offered an opinion from the corner table where he was writing tactical plans with his assistants, would those fans end up thinking, ‘Jeez, this bloke goes on a bit, doesn’t he?’ No, they would not. They would hardly be able to breathe despite their brains’ desperation for oxygen to help them imprint every moment spent in Bielsa’s presence so deeply into the best memories of their lives that the marrying of spouses and births of children were elbowed out. When he finished speaking, they would stay silent in the hope he might continue. After an appropriate pause, they might dare to encourage him to speak more, urging a few additional words on any subject they can think of, praying they can prolong the interaction without being disrespectful of this great person’s precious time.

So I guess the question is, what’s up with Marcelo’s friends, then, if they think he talks too much? We know this opinion from his enemies, who think all his blather is just ‘selling smoke’. But can he really have tired his friends out to the point they roll eyes and swap glances when he goes forth, multiplying their understanding of the game if only they’d stop fiddling with their phones? ‘Yeah, I guess so, Marcelo. Anyway, anybody see Emmerdale?’

What about his family? Surely his wife Laura Bracalenti, the architect, is given ample room in any discussion with her husband to share her ideas about urban agriculture as much as he discusses football with her. Unless he can’t help it? Many of us, after months indoors due to the pandemic, have been spilling words like water from a full jug since we’ve been back in society. Perhaps Bielsa is the same, and when he and his family are reunited after sometimes months apart, once the kids have talked up their hockey achievements, they fall silent for an hour or two to hear a lecture on Luke Ayling’s adaptation to a new throw-in technique? Bielsa once spent months in a convent, recovering from the monumental defeats football kept inflicting on him, only emerging when he felt his own company was beginning to drive him mad. Imagine being the first person to greet him after that retreat. They might have thought this madman would never stop talking. ‘So what you’re saying is, Marcelo,’ they might interrupt in a breath-long pause after a night’s talk has run on into breakfast, ‘Maradona was a good player?’

Bielsa’s life’s work has been about communicating ideas. But sometimes, when he catches himself speaking at length, it’s a reminder that most of what you need to know of this thoughts can be seen on football pitches. But that doesn’t mean, beyond his self-deprecation, we wouldn’t all gladly listen to Bielsa talking football all day. So here’s his pre-Burnley press conference on LUTV or in Leeds Live’s transcript. After Raphinha, there’s a lot of talk about our other new international call-up, Pat Bamford. How much credit do you think Bielsa is taking for helping Bamford make it into the England squad?

“If I thought I had merit in it, I would tell you. Sincerely, I see everything from the inside but I feel it’s what he’s done to make him evolve and resulted in him being called up.”

What Bamford has done, in Bielsa’s view, is “improved his range of efficiency”, or to put it another way, ‘stopped missing all the chances our tactics put on a plate for him’:

“There are centre-forwards who have very few chances at goal, and there are forwards who have plenty of chances. Bamford usually has chances during the games, and for him to have improved his range of efficiency has been an important step.”

Bielsa even ended up inverting the story of our win over Crewe, saying that while Bamford was important to the final score, the rest of the team had already done enough to deserve the win:

“The opposition were tired when he came on. The fundamental difference in the last ten minutes of the game [was that] Leeds scored three goals. But in the first eighty minutes, we created fifteen chances … Phillips had had a prior chance from a set-piece, as easy as the one that he scored. Rodrigo had some clear chances at goal too, and Tyler [Roberts] had clear chances, and the rest of the team shared chances also. To summarise, Bamford was very important, but what the rest of the team facilitated, what they did was also important.”

This was answering a question about whether the team could be over-reliant on Bamford, so it’s probably more to give credit to the rest of the team that Bielsa is implying we hardly needed him at all against Crewe.

So what, then, about the other player who had ‘some clear chances’ but didn’t score? Bielsa’s assessment of Rodrigo was even longer than that of Raphinha, and partially obscured by the noise of someone hoovering in the background (never change, Leeds). The key points are, Rodrigo is ace, his influence on the team is “less than we expected”, but that’s not his fault:

“Rodrigo is a player with all the faculties to triumph at Leeds and in English football. His football and technical resources can’t be better. His physical responses are one of the best in the team. He’s a very serious professional, very dedicated and very conscientious.

“In a parallel way, he’s had an important influence on the team, less than we expected, and when it’s about a player like Rodrigo, that doesn’t have aspects [problems] to correct … [all that’s left to do is] about me putting him in the team, and [him] having a higher repercussion in the team than he is currently having. I sincerely exempt him from any responsibility [for his lower influence] because in every game, every training session, he is impeccable … [any manager] would want him to triumph in their team.”

Lad’s just got to keep working hard in training, where he’s an example to the rest of the lads, and at the end of the day when he gets his rewards on the pitch Bielsa will be over the moon.

We’ll end with one of the most interesting parts of Bielsa’s talk today, as fans of the two Manchester clubs take turns buying and burning shirts with Cristiano Ronaldo’s name on the back. He was asked if fans place too much value on transfer news, and whether it’s an entirely media driven phenomenon. Bielsa’s says he can’t judge whether those are accurate statements, but:

“The transfer of a player normally indicates a team gets a signing that elevates their level, and this increases the hopes of the fans. Apart from that, it’s one of the aspects of information that has a lot of repercussion, where you can say a lot of things even if they are not true. It’s a scenario that is very attractive for the media companies.”

Not only one of his most interesting comments, but one of his most concise.