Bielsa before Everton says there’s no time - The Square Ball 11/2/22

I READ, I SEE, I LISTEN

Written by: Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman

Fixture congestion, caused by more games being organised by more organisations to make more money, has been a regular theme of Marcelo Bielsa’s press conferences this season. Speaking two days after the game at Aston Villa, without the usual two day gap between his media duties and the next game at Everton, the lack of time for recovery and preparation came up, not just in what Bielsa said directly about it but in everything else.

It’s actually an interesting contrast when Bielsa goes into this morning’s mode, an opportunity to feel how fans of other clubs must feel when their manager goes through the basic motions. Sometimes, when people say Bielsa’s gnomic answers, refracted through translation, acquire mystery through their delivery rather than their substance, they’re right. It’s just that even when Bielsa is being brief, he can’t deliver any other way. For example:

“We’re thinking of this game. Of course there are a series of games that come after that are very difficult, but fundamentally we are focusing on this game. [Correcting himself about the games ahead] A sequence that has its difficulties, not that they’re difficult.”

What Bielsa is saying here is that obviously there are some tough games coming up before the end of February but he’s just focused on three points this Saturday. Perfect. It’s the right answer! See also:

“Of course, evaluating the positions in the league offers conclusions, but with more than fifty points left to play for, the conclusions currently have to be linked with what’s left. But it’s also true what happens now starts designing the future.”

The league table doesn’t look great for us at the moment, but there’s a lot of points still to play for and all we can do here and now is get three points on Saturday. It’s an answer as old as promotion and relegation. Here’s another good one, about whether it’s more important to win on Saturday now Norwich are picking up a few points:

“Every game, every point picked up has repercussions, whether that’s at the bottom of the table or in the middle of the table.”

Every game is important. Of course it is. Why are we even discussing this.

What about looking back to the Aston Villa game, what does it say about the players’ character that they came back from 3-1 down?

“In seasons like the one we’re going through where there’s constant adversity, it’s important to face it with mental toughness.”

The lads have been up against it this season and it’s important to stay strong. This goes without saying, or at least it would, if people didn’t keep asking about it. Will we get another game as exciting as the Villa match, though?

“It’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen in a game of football. It depends on things that are only verified on the pitch. You can’t manage the characteristic of the game without first seeing how each team plans to play the game.”

The shady version of that answer would be, ‘We’ll have to wait and see how boring and defensive Everton are’, but the real meaning is, ‘We’ll have to see how the game develops.’ As for whether Bielsa can enjoy exciting games, when he’s coaching in them:

“Always in the function of the coach, the consequence of what the team does is very important. I’m referring to what’s gained or what’s lost. That makes it difficult to enjoy what happens because you’re constantly analysing it to try to make the right decisions.”

He’s concentrating too much on trying to get a result to enjoy it himself. It really just needed a chuckle and a ‘I just hope I can send the fans home happy with three points’, but even in this mood Bielsa is never that gross.

He did, of course, give a little more than the average. He refuses to take credit for any improvement Dan James is showing as a striker — “James is a product of his virtues, not the habits he may have acquired here” — but a bit of what he said about James and Rodrigo helps understand why they play ahead of, say, Joe Gelhardt. They work well together:

“Rodrigo has the ability to play as a centre-forward and James is constantly opening up spaces for him. And I say they complement each other because Rodrigo has a good final pass and James makes a lot of movements into space to be set up.”

So Rodrigo can be more dangerous with James playing ahead of him, because James creates space for Rodrigo to get into the penalty area and try to score, while James’ runs also benefit from Rodrigo’s ability to find him with a pass. Bielsa seems pretty happy with how Leeds are attacking lately — “We’ve scored nine goals in the last four games, it allows us to think it’s an attack that works” — but lapsed back into obvious mode when explaining how he’s choosing the forward line:

“Fundamentally, I think about the offensive game of the team, how best the four positions in attack articulate, the availability of the players to consider, and the form of each of them. Depending on that I see which is the best decision to make.”

He looks, thinks and decides. We could get that down to two words: he decides.

There was an interesting bit about covering for Kalvin Phillips’ absence and how Robin Koch has been doing, with Bielsa explaining that each player he’s used in ‘the Kalvin role’, as we see it, brings their own characteristics and plays the role a little differently:

“That position that Kalvin plays, we’ve had [Adam] Forshaw, Pascal [Struijk] and Robin [Koch], and in my opinion none of them have failed in it. Each of them has a different profile. Forshaw is a more creative player when he plays in that defensive midfield position. Koch is a player that thinks about the equilibrium and the balance of the team defensively. And Pascal is a player that gives it a lot of presence and solidity when he plays in front of the defence. In some way through them, we’ve resolved the demands of that position.”

Mention of Phillips brings us to injury news, of which there was not much and thankfully nothing new (this was 9am, though, anything could have happened by now). Junior Firpo is “healthy” but they’re not going to risk rushing him back against Everton; Pat Bamford, Liam Cooper and Phillips are all still out, but there was a Kalvin update that sounded good:

“He is expected to return in the first few days of March and his recovery has been going as was predicted.”

And that leads us to the parts of the press conference that got Bielsa revving, even as he tried to take his foot off the accelerator and avoid ‘generating polemics’. Asked what preparation he had time for between the Villa and Everton games, the answer was, ‘none’, but this time he didn’t settle for so many words:

“No, there’s no time for preparation, because there’s not enough recovery time either. The games are scheduled clearly ignoring that aspect. All the commercial aspects and the compromises that are made by the commitments of selling the matches mean that decisions are made solely on the basis of that, and all the other aspects that make a competition balanced and fair for all the contenders are not taken into account.

“The teams face each other in different conditions and the games are planned without the possibility of rest and ignoring potential injuries. But that’s the same for everybody, and there are aspects that increase the complexity of the problem to be solved. There are also aspects which can be resolved in a much better way than the one chosen. But the compromises that should be made to improve the quality of the spectacle and for the fairness of the competition are a second thought.”

Bielsa has talked a lot about this over the last few months, how the need to play more games to make more money is leading to a reduction in quality that will ultimately mean the games are worth less, which will create a need to play more games to generate the money that is lost, which will reduce the quality even further, and so on until football has destroyed itself. When asked to expand on it here, and offer solutions, Bielsa made a couple of points. First, that he’s suggested how to solve it already:

“I’ve already given my opinion on it: to play less, which means there’s going to be less revenue, meaning the less revenue there is, we’re going to have to earn less, all of us.”

Second, and I don’t think he’s been able to make this point as clearly as he’d like before, that it’s not the organisation of just one league that is causing the problem. The English league, he says, “is the best organised one, with the best players.” The “big disorganisation” he refers to means the the conflicting interests of different organisations, so that:

“All these games being played on top of each other, Chelsea playing in one competition [the FIFA Club World Cup], the AFCON, it’s taking away the nature of the competitions, all the competitions are worse because of it.”

Bielsa didn’t mention these, but to illustrate his point, last weekend was the FA Cup, this weekend it’s the FA Premier League, next week it’s the UEFA Champions League and Europa League, with the FIFA Club World Cup coming fast after the FIFA World Cup qualifiers in the CONMEBOL region at the same time as the AFCON tournament. Each organisation is trying to fit as many games into its own competitions as possible to make as much money as possible, and nobody is doing anything to make the games better.

Although some people in England are. It sounds like Bielsa somehow found the time to do some field research recently:

“This week I was able to see how the academies are formed. What English football does for the formation of their young players is truly extraordinary, and the the management of that organisation (The FA) demand that English players constantly be better. Evidently the product of that work is being shown, the quality of the youth football in England is very high. The organisation for football for a young person is very high and England has capitalised on all of that, they were runners-up in the Euros. They have an enormous amount of young players with a big future so evidently it works to improve the quality of competition.”

…but that work is prevented from being a total success by the pressure of the fixture congestion he’d already alluded to.

The other thing Bielsa wanted to stress is that he is not the originator of any of these ideas. He reads articles on the subject, and when he looks at football, he agrees that the articles are right. He’s wary of naming anyone or anything, because he wants that analysis to continue without the distraction of a controversial “polemic” around what Bielsa — “I’m a foreigner and I’m a part of the structure of a club” — is saying:

“The media knows this perfectly, they explain it a lot better than I do. Nothing of what I say will be a product of my analysis. I read, I see, I listen and I verify [that] what I read, listen and hear is compatible [i.e. true]. That’s why I say what I say. But sincerely you guys could avoid having to ask this question, because the opinion or the response I give is a response of everything I’ve read. Apart from that there’s a great capacity for analysis. Journalism that I read in England, I don’t want to give specific articles or those who write them in particular, nor the subjects of reference in those articles, because that will generate polemics around those comments. The opinion that is published [in the media] has a lot of influence over the public opinion, on the subjects of the structure and the morals. The capacity for analysis [in the media] is very high in these subjects. Great article over the analysis of behaviour it loses the shine in hours but something polemic of the same subject is more lasting.”

That last line is mega-garbled but what I think Bielsa is saying is that the media have a problem because good detailed analysis gets read and forgotten quickly, whereas attaching a personality and a controversy makes it ‘news’ or a ‘polemic’, making the story last longer, but distracting from what it should actually be about. Which is, as I end this blog post that has ‘Bielsa says’ in big letters in the headline at the top, exactly where I’ll leave it.