Jesse Marsch before Wolves says he’s cranking every day - The Square Ball 17/3/22
DOUBLE SIX
Written by: Rob Conlon
Jesse Marsch isn’t just the new boss of Leeds United, he’s
the new boss of the Thorp Arch media room, starting press conferences by
telling journalists what he thinks they want to know before they even ask him a
question.
Marsch began his pre-Wolves presser with an all important
injury update, but kept the drums rolling by beginning with Junior Firpo, not
Kalvin Phillips and Liam Cooper. The bad news is Firpo is out for three to five
weeks with an MCL injury, so could still return before the end of the season,
right when we won’t need the worry. The good news is Phillips and Cooper are
back in full training and could be involved at Wolves on Friday night.
Then Marsch dropped a load of new maybes we didn’t know we
were meant to be worrying about. Jamie Shackleton and Lewis Bate are unlikely
to be warming the bench after picking up knocks against Scum’s kids; Patrick
Bamford is “a little sore” after a “very demanding” 45 minutes against Norwich;
and a scan on Rodrigo’s tight quad has found “a little bit of an old injury and
it’s just about managing some of the symptoms”. Bamford and Rodrigo should both
be fine, alongside Joffy Gelhardt, who has a back problem (from carrying our
hopes and dreams amirite!), “but we’re not totally certain”. Don’t panic,
though. Leo Hjelde should be back in training by the end of next week.
“We’ll make a decision today exactly what we do with that
and what the plan will be,” Marsch said of Phillips and Cooper’s chances of
playing, later vowing to stick to that plan, whatever it is.
“It’ll be the same as how we handled Patrick. We’ll make a
plan and we’ll stick to the plan. And the worst thing we can do at the moment
is have any kind of setback. I’m very disciplined when it comes to how we
manage the players physically. That is something that I know is of the utmost
importance, and it’s probably the biggest contributing factor to success or
failure, having a fully fit and fresh and healthy team.”
One of the recurring messages of Marsch’s first few weeks in
charge has been how he is going to be careful with his players’ fitness. Back
in his first press conference, he said:
“There’s been a little bit of a cycle here where guys have
been fighting through injuries, and often playing with injuries. And it means
that they’ve sometimes then picked up other injuries and put themselves more in
danger of missing minutes. And so what I need to do is help guys recover as
quickly as possible, but not endanger them and not overload them, to put them
in situations to further be in danger. And then, yeah, make sure that we have a
long term vision in place for what that’s going to mean. It’s again, I said
this before, it’s twelve games, it’s not three games, it’s not four games,
right? And I know that we need points, but we need to make sure that we’re
getting stronger as we move along and not weaker on that note.”
It seems like an easy soundbite to differentiate himself
from Marcelo Bielsa, who was regularly criticised inside and outside the
fanbase for pushing the players too hard and breaking them all at once. Perhaps
I’m being harsh on Jesse, and I’m certainly no medical expert, but the evidence
isn’t backing up what he’s saying so far. He stressed the importance of looking
beyond three games in terms of the players’ long-term fitness, yet in his first
three games he’s dragged Bamford to Leicester even though he could only play
ten minutes, left Tyler Roberts on the pitch with a season-ending injury, and
is talking about playing Rodrigo at Wolves while he’s carrying an old injury,
which is exactly the problem he referenced in his first presser. If a player
wasn’t fit to train properly under Bielsa, they didn’t play, and Bielsa was
criticised for that too. Or maybe all that rubbish about thinking long-term can
wait while we’re in a relegation battle, as Marsch seemed to acknowledge
himself.
“Even when I first came, I knew that getting the three main
guys back to full health was going to really dictate our success, right? I
mean, we have a good group, but you need your best players on the pitch, so my
focus has been working very closely with Rob Price and the medical team and the
athletic trainers to do everything we can to take rapid steps forward in an
intelligent way.”
It doesn’t help that we’re having to judge Marsch so much on
what he says because we only have a sample size of three games to judge what
he’s actually done. For all his talk about how much he values good
communication, it seemed to dawn on him just how much talking he’s been doing
recently after he answered a couple of questions by going off on long tangents
then asking to have the original question repeated. Being able to talk to his
players in English is a big help after coaching in Austria and Germany, but it
means he gets a bit carried away with the press:
“One thing that’s nice is for me to speak English again with
everybody because I know I can communicate more clearly that way. Even when I’m
standing in front of the team I feel I did it effectively in German, but I know
with my native tongue that I can really do that much better — except for right
now.”
Jesse was smiling in self-awareness at that point and got a
chuckle from a couple of journalists in the room. I find him a lot more
likeable when he seems like an actual human and not a Red Bull company man. He
got another laugh when saying his wife “went through hell” while attending her
first game at Elland Road against Norwich (it’s always like that, sorry), and I
can only presume it was Phil Hay and Graham Smyth pissing themselves when Marsch
was comparing Joffy’s winner against Norwich to the other contender for the
most dramatic moment of his coaching career:
“In 2010 I was in the World Cup as an assistant [for the
USA] and we scored a last second goal, Landon Donovan against Algeria, to win.
Maybe it’s not right to bring up here but we won the group phase and a country
called England finished second.”
The England national team was referenced again when Phil Hay
asked how Kalvin’s role will change now Leeds no longer play with a single defensive
midfielder, but with what the cool kids are calling a ‘double pivot’:
“We had a good conversation and he said that actually it’s
not that dissimilar from what they do with the national team. So he plays a lot
in there with Declan Rice and they share a lot of responsibilities as a double
six against the ball. They tried to do some of the similar things with
pressing, they talk about counter pressing. Obviously it’s not exactly the same
but there are similarities and Kalvin’s an intelligent guy so I think he’ll be
able to adjust relatively quickly.
“He had a really, really strong training session yesterday,
really strong, as did Liam. They played with intensity and played with the
ideas that we’re trying to implement with and without the ball. So yeah, I
mean, I’m excited. I’m really excited to get him on the pitch. And so we’re
obviously getting closer and closer with both.”
The change from referring to the defensive midfielder as the
number four under Bielsa to number six hasn’t gone unnoticed. It’s already
filtered down to the Under-23s, with Jack Jenkins swapping his four for a six,
but hopefully someone can show Jesse a few videos of Billy Bremner, David Batty
and Scott Wootton (as evidence of what happens when you give it to a defender)
during the international break to sort that out.
The break also gives Marsch the chance to evaluate his staff
— who are “cranking every day” — and decide where they need help after Bielsa’s
army of disciples left with him.
“We will add to the staff eventually. Right now it’s a
little bit of just trying to get the rhythm with everybody we have here and I’m
very thankful for, you know, I spoke about Mark Jackson, I think in the first
press conference, he’s been amazing, amazing. Willie and Aaron, our two video
analysts, have invested a lot. Marcos [Abad], the goalkeeper coach, has worked
very closely with us.
“So we’re cranking every day. We’re probably all doing about
two, three more jobs than we should be. But it’s also worked, right. So yeah, I
haven’t had enough time to even think about how to build things out from now.
Once we get to the FIFA break, we’ll be able to take a little bit of a pause
and then we play once every week and then we’ll have a little bit more time to
really sort everything out more and more for what things need to look like as
we continue to move forward.
“But the way we’re managing things I think has been very
effective. I think the players are very clear every match and there’s been a
lot of efficiency. So that’s been good, but there’s been a lot of work put on
all of our shoulders, which at the moment is okay.”
You know what, he’s right. Marsch has got a lot of work on
his shoulders right now. So let the man crank in peace.
