Bielsa before Aston Villa says nothing he says justifies the bad moment - The Square Ball 7/2/22

SUMMER LOVIN'

Written by: Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman

The best place to start with Marcelo Bielsa’s pre-Aston Villa press conference might be at the end, when he said that among, “All of these things that I’ve said in this conference [there] is nothing that justifies the bad moment that Leeds is going through. That is a product of something I should have managed better.”

There definitely seemed to be things on his mind, embers that have been glowing warm through the winter/international break and the closure of the transfer window. Before them, though, the injury news:

“Bamford hasn’t improved. He continues with the problems at the bottom of his foot and he hasn’t started jogging. So his situation continues the same way … [he] has an injury which we can’t predict when he will return because it depends on the pain going away so he can start jogging again and since the injury started, the pain hasn’t gone away. Of course, he’s going through the necessary treatments for the injury he has.”

Happiness is Pat Bamford and a newly born baby as of this weekend — congratulations Michaela and Pat! — but part of him must still be hopping mad at still being one-footed after the hamstring injury that came after the ankle injury. How close we were to having Pat back fit, though, and I wonder if we rewound time to the closing moments of the Brentford game, would we leave Bamford on the bench, or at least do without his last minute equaliser, if it saved his hamstring from the stress of celebrating that one-point goal?

Some better news:

“Shackleton, Forshaw and Cresswell are all healthy now. The four players that we still don’t count on are Firpo, who should be available for this weekend, or probably — because his injury involved his tendon, we may be cautious with his return. Phillips and Cooper, by the beginning of March, should be fully recovered … [they] are in the final stages of their recovery from their operations.”

I think Bielsa is still stung by critics claiming his methods have caused our injury crisis this season, because a question near the end of his hour press conference — about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of injuries — was seized for a reprise of Bielsa’s idea that there are too many games being played in football in general, too many of them for purely commercial gain:

“The excuse to earn more money is that we need a lot of money to pay the players because they want to earn more each time or the coaches/managers want to earn more each time … Of course, everybody wants to earn more, but there is a way to limit the ambition, the economic voracity … And of course the pandemic has multiplied the effects of this problem, but there’s only one solution that hasn’t been attempted – that we all earn less as a product of the situation, to earn less, to play less…”

Obviously, said Bielsa, with so many games the standards are dropping and there are more injuries, but less obviously, after making this point, he said:

Now I also want to say something: our injuries have not been due to an excess of games.

Because he counts only three ‘muscular injuries’ that could be attributed to overplaying. So the point of all this is confusing. I think, though, it might be that while overplaying isn’t causing the injuries, it’s preventing proper recovery, because players are needed before they’ve had the chance to get back up to full fitness:

“…there is an infinite amount of data that has to do with the fact the rest and recovery is not sufficient and is produced due to an excess of games.”

And this links with something Bielsa wanted to say, at length, about the Newcastle game. Which, in brief, comes down to why Joffy Gelhardt was the last attacker to come on:

“The fifteen days prior to the game against Newcastle, Gelhardt had an injury in his ankle, and the day prior to the game against Newcastle [I did] something that is not at all frequent. I organised a small football training session to verify whether, after fifteen days without football activity, he could participate in the game the following day.”

He was worried about Gelhardt’s fitness, but he did add that there was an order to his selections against Newcastle in that Dan James plays through the middle for Wales (albeit with a partner) and as Rodrigo started the game, to move him to striker meant bringing on Tyler Roberts as an attacking midfielder. Gelhardt is, at nineteen, trying to get involved in that order, but to Bielsa two weeks without playing wasn’t giving him the best chance of doing it, so for centre-forward he went with James first, then Rodrigo, then brought Gelhardt on after Roberts to make three central attackers with Rodrigo, which didn’t work. It was a tough choice, says Bielsa:

“I insist that was the decision I took most [time] to make, of Gelhardt coming on.”

But he also says that while he accepts the criticism of his decision, people should remember that you can’t judge things that haven’t happened. We can’t know for sure if bringing Joffy on would have been the right move, because it didn’t happen, so we don’t have any evidence for it:

“The decisions that you make, you are able to verify them, but the ones that are not made, they are always hypothetical.”

As a further hangover from the Newcastle game, Bielsa answered a question about whether hamstring injuries were increasing across football by defending what he said about Newcastle’s time-wasting. (This may be why the light at the end of the tunnel question that came later went into generalities about injuries in football, Bielsa realising he hadn’t answered about injuries earlier, like that Two Ronnies sketch where the questions and answers go out of sync. With hilarious consequences!) He wasn’t complaining about Newcastle’s tactics, he said, or using them as an excuse, merely pointing out that it’s up to the referee to deal with this stuff:

“I only said that the problem existed and that there’s resources to resolve it and I’m not the one in charge of that.”

Among the most emphatic answers was his discussion of the transfer window. Bielsa is happy with it — Leeds couldn’t get any players to improve the team, but that happens, and holding onto the best players was significant to Bielsa, as was the club’s willingness to attempt to spend £20m without selling anyone first — a reference to Brenden Aaronson. Bielsa also said it will be interesting to see what impact the winter transfers that did take place will have for clubs that did ’em. But the greatest interest was around an outgoer that didn’t go, and the possibility of Crysencio Summerville going to play somewhere else:

“Well, he spoke to me and he said he wanted to leave and I said there was no problem with him leaving.”

That’s right, we’re back in Cody Drameh town, where Bielsa won’t stand in the way of any player who says he wants to go, and won’t question their motives because he believes it’s up to the player to choose his own path:

“When a player signs a contract, he is saying he wants to belong. And it seems to me absolutely legitimate that he wants to stop belonging. It’s a possibility, it’s a right, and it’s perfectly fine.”

In this case, though, Summerville has not stopped belonging, and Bielsa says that’s because his own influence only extends so far. Bielsa can say a player can leave if he wants, but that’s only the sporting decision:

“Despite a sporting position, then the club has another look, because the players sign contracts and acquire obligations, and the obligations generate economic equations, and I don’t have the power to decide contractual and economic aspects.”

In other words, if the club didn’t get an offer that meets Summerville’s value, or couldn’t identify a replacement, they could prevent him leaving from a business perspective. Bielsa is pointing out that his is not the final say — “Just because I don’t oppose [them leaving] doesn’t mean that I decide. I have a part of the decision” — and he didn’t go near the subject of what will happen to Summerville now he’s stuck here. All he said was that, in every case like this, Bielsa will act — and has acted — in exactly the same way:

“So all the players who are in the club know that if they want to leave, I’m not going to oppose it. That’s good … like the Summerville case, there were ten players in similar situations, and in all cases I treat it the same way, as it can’t be otherwise.”

This has caught some attention. Ten players wanted to leave? When? That’s the key question, more important than witch-hunting who. There was an attempt at getting more on that, but Bielsa shut it down quite angrily, saying he only answered about Summerville because the information has become public:

“That all this is made public is not good for anyone, neither for me, nor for Summerville, nor for Leeds. But you have to see and know the world of football to know who makes it public, and what they are after by making it public. I am not accusing anyone, nor claiming any wrong behaviour. What I am talking about happens in all clubs, all the time, and as it is made public, I have an obligation to tell the truth. What I can’t do is answer, Who are the other ten?, if the last thing I want is for this to be commented on.”

But this wasn’t the first time Bielsa has alluded to lots of young players wanting to leave. In the Drameh dominated press conference before the West Ham game, he threw in two oblique references that didn’t get so hotly heard:

“A lot of young players who accompany the first-team have raised the desire not to continue within this organisation of ours … I tell you, there is not one, that most want to go.”

But as with today, I think what’s being lost in translation here is a sense of time, that’s not coming through in the grammatical tense, defining when these players wanted to go. Bielsa could mean ten players were queuing up behind Summerville in the last week of January trying to leave Leeds. Or he could be talking about young players at Leeds in general, many of whom have indeed gone. I might risk Bielsa’s ire with speculation, but working backwards through young players leaving either on loan or for good, I can name Drameh, Ian Poveda, Leif ‘very good’ Davis, Mateusz Bogusz, Alfie McCalmont, Elia Caprile, Robbie Gotts, Jordan Stevens, Ryan Edmondson, Niall Huggins, Oliver Casey, Bryce Hosannah, even Jack Clarke… some of those players will have been cut for quality, but a good number featured in Bielsa’s first team squads before going elsewhere. When they want to go, Bielsa said a few weeks ago, “for me I live that as a failure”.

But I don’t think he considers it unusual. I think what he was getting at about the ten players was what he says in the middle of the quote above:

“What I am talking about happens in all clubs, all the time”

He said ten players, but he could have said twenty, or 100. I think Bielsa just meant to say that, to him, the situation with Summerville is normal and wouldn’t be worth commenting on, if only someone hadn’t made it public for reasons that don’t help Summerville or the club. Most of what Bielsa said about all this was underlining that it’s not uncommon:

“…it’s the most natural thing in the world. A person wants to evolve, he considers that the place where he is does not allow him the same evolution that he would get elsewhere, and he raises the problem. This happens at all levels, and it happens all the time in the workplace. And there is nothing wrong with either someone’s desire not to continue, or my position of understanding that if they don’t want to stay.”

And like anything natural it goes back years. Here’s one of Leeds United’s greatest ever players, John Charles, when the Elland Road board turned down — again — his request to leave Second Division Leeds:

“I am still anxious to play First Division football, but what can I do? I was called into the meeting and told the club would not let me go. I was not really surprised.”

When Billy Bremner was young he was homesick, and it took all Don Revie’s powers of persuasion — of both Billy and his fiancee, Vicky, who he moved down to Leeds — to make him stay. Peter Lorimer made his debut in September 1962, aged fifteen, then fumed in the reserves about Revie only giving him one more game from then until September 1965. Jack Charlton spent his first ten years at Leeds trying to leave. “What I am talking about happens in all clubs, all the time,” said Bielsa, who I think is less angry about a youth team full of ambitious footballers than about having to explain simple fundamentals to the press.

See, for example, the Premier League Productions representative who wanted to ask him about the fairest goal of them all, given to Aston Villa back in 2019, and whether he’d do it again:

“In that moment, I did what I thought was appropriate.”

Would he do it again, though?

“I always say that, at the time, [I did] what I thought was the right thing to do. So you want to ask me if there is an identical move, if it would be the same. As the question doesn’t go anywhere, I hesitate to answer, but yes, I would do exactly the same thing.”

Bielsa would answer the same if he’d got things wrong. He will always do what he thinks is right, and as such, most of the answers to most of the questions he is asked feel self-evident. This same idea is there in his discussion of injuries. He arrived with sheets of paper for this, and used them when asked about the injury crisis to list all the ways he had dealt with it. When Firpo was injured, Dallas or Hjelde played; when Bamford was injured, Rodrigo or Roberts or James or Gelhardt; when Phillips was injured, Koch or Struijk or Forshaw. And so on. His point was that what everyone else has seen as a crisis, he has seen as a situation that he has always had resources to resolve:

“Of course I would have hoped that we didn’t have the problems that we have [with injuries] but the team also found the solutions. But of course the results are poor, [and] because the results are poor everything is made bigger. And with respect to the injuries, and any analysis that is made, I don’t want to give my opinion because when you’re going through a sporting moment which is negative, everything you say is read as an excuse.”

Which takes us back to the start:

“[Among] all of these things that I’ve said in this conference [there] is nothing that justifies the bad moment that Leeds is going through. That is a product of something I should have managed better.”

And I get the feeling that Bielsa doesn’t feel like talking about it is going to help. Only beating Aston Villa can do that.