Leeds United 0-3 Aston Villa: Accelerating - The Square Ball 11/3/22

TRANSITION

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

I was as ready as I could be to embrace this change I didn’t want. Some things in favour of a new manager of Leeds United were new things to learn, new things to see, new things to discuss. Games in the fourth season of Marcelo Bielsa followed the same patterns as games in the first season, as games Athletic Bilbao played in 2012, as games of Chile in 2007. In his first season a video of one of our goals was overlaid with one Chile had scored. Ten years apart, they were exactly the same. That was astonishing — that he could drill Championship players in the moves so quickly, and that the ideas could still work. But it did get a bit samey, and hard to watch when we weren’t winning. How would we play in the next game? The same. We were just going to keep getting on with it until it came to an end. So I have relished making Jesse Marsch’s arrival an opportunity to learn some new stuff.

I don’t claim to be a tactical expert, nor do I want to be. I find reducing everything to German terms and numbers quite alienating when the concepts being described are pretty obvious to anyone who likes watching games. I don’t really see the value in hours of study about a particular tactical match-up when, a few minutes after kick-off, I can see what the two teams are doing. Often it’s nothing like what was predicted anyway.

But with Marsch, the selling point is the way of playing, and because he’s spent a lot of time selling it in webinars and on podcasts and in public coaching sessions, his ideas are easily available to consume online. I am working through a folder of Jesse Marsch mp3s, because when he is so open about his ideas — or Red Bull’s ideas — it feels rude not to consume his content. Why else would Red Bull make so much content if it’s not to be consumed? Marsch, himself, being one such piece of content.

Through the RB system, Marsch, who has described himself as their ‘company man’, is a product of a scientific school that has selling taurine drinks as its first aim. Their strategy for making those drinks seem quaffable involves bending the rules of various sports to Red Bull’s will. Their takeovers of various clubs aren’t just sponsorships, they’re proofs of technological concepts designed to make you think their energy drinks must be as revolutionary as their sports science. This must be the future, even if it tastes like piss. So get it drunk, stay awake and buy some more.

We were supposed to be seeing something of this future at Elland Road this week, in Marsch’s first home game as Leeds United’s head coach, against Aston Villa. That he’s been brought in to fix this season is almost a byproduct of how he is being presented. Angus Kinnear’s programme notes for the game did not refer to sacking Marcelo Bielsa and hiring Jesse Marsch, but to ‘the acceleration of the coaching transition’ that was going to happen in summer anyway, apparently. Paying tribute to Bielsa’s work, Kinnear also used the dictionary corner word ‘spizzerinctum’ (defined as ‘will to succeed’) and described the era as a ‘cultural revolution’, a self-regarding reference to his programme notes from earlier in the season when he compared the idea of sharing broadcasting revenue with EFL clubs with famines in China under Mao. I’m not sure Bielsa will have appreciated Kinnear telling jokes about Kinnear in what was supposed to be a eulogy to the coach whose work earned this Kinnear a healthy promotion bonus that wasn’t coming his way from Paul Heckingbottom, but I wonder how much of a toss Bielsa gives for the Leeds board’s words now anyway, since last week’s deeds.

They have more words, though. The board has ‘absolute confidence’, Kinnear continues, that Marsch ‘is the man to continue our aggressive trajectory’ for the next three years. Despite a ‘precarious’ league position, Marsch is ‘undaunted, and has joined with a clear vision of the tactical adaptations that are required and can be quickly executed’.

Marsch was sent out at Elland Road ahead of either team, so his name could be announced over the tannoy, and he received an ovation from the crowd. By the end, what was left of the crowd was booing him back down the tunnel. Three years, guys? The salute badge was supposed to last for a hundred.

It might not be a cultural revolution Kinnear can crack wise about, but the night felt significant for its cultural changes. Even looking at the technical area and not only not seeing Bielsa, but not seeing anybody, while Marsch was presumably debating in the dugout, made a big difference to the landscape. Rail seating was being used for the first time at the back of the Kop, something that is very successful in Germany; the Leeds version of the Scott Joplin ‘Follow, Follow, Follow’ song got an airing. The team was coughing through its ersatz version of Red Bull’s signature gegenpressing, and at one moment in the second half I wondered if we were experiencing some mass delusion experiment version of the Bundesliga in an arena Victor Orta has long identified as Latin in temperament. Maybe that’s why the crowd was so staunch in its support, even in defeat, of the football of Marcelo Bielsa. Maybe that’s why the crowd hated everything it saw in its place.

What was startling in this match was not the failure but the success, the desperately poor impact of that, and the crowd’s reaction to it. The Leeds players have been listening to Jesse Marsch. They were doing what he asks them to do. And these things were not popular. Why did the players keep giving the ball away? Because they kept running fast towards Villa’s packed penalty spot, like they’re supposed to, and losing it. Why was the team so narrow? Because it’s supposed to be. Why did the midfielders keep chipping balls into the penalty area that Villa dealt with easily? Because they’re supposed to. Why was it so easy for Villa to switch to an unmarked winger? Because the players are told to press the ball and leave the rest of the pitch open. By the end Elland Road was howling for controlled possession, getting players out wide to the touchlines, accurate build-up around the box, for the full-back to block off the opposite winger.

You might as well have screamed for Bielsa to mark zonally. This is now how Leeds will play. And setting aside the risk of relegation — I have to set it aside, because it’s unthinkable — this is how the board want their Leeds to play. Marsch has been an internal option for replacing Bielsa for at least a couple of years. Whether in March this year or August, the ‘transition’ to this style of football was coming, because the people in charge of Leeds have been looking at Bielsa’s football, even back when it was good, so good I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Leeds team play such brilliant stuff in my life, and thinking to themselves, this is how it could be better.

It was better than this at Leicester, that shouldn’t be forgotten. And it might be better if the players get better at it, given time, that right now they don’t have. Better suited players could arrive this summer, although surely the point of this transition was that the current players could adapt. Every style of play comes down, in the end, to execution; every tactical theory succeeds or fails depending on whether the players are good at doing it. Everything I heard or consumed in advance about Marsch’s ideas, I liked; those Red Bull teams have had success. (We’ll gloss Salzburg on Tuesday, 4-0 behind Bayern Munich at half-time, losing 7-1 in the end.) And maybe there’s something I’m missing about the tactical nuances, the evolution from Bielsa’s style. I’m new to the topics Marsch is presenting. I’m willing to learn and desperate to enjoy. But if I haven’t spent years knowing much about tactics, I have learned to recognise the pressure behind my eyeballs that is a physical sign of bad vibes a coming.

As it is I’m left wondering what the difference is between the Marsch/RB style as presented to us in this game, and the old kick, run and gerrat ’em football of Neil Warnock. One of Marsch’s instructions is that, if there’s not a better option, stick the ball up towards the penalty spot and try to win the second ball, and if that’s not ‘getting it in the mixer’ I don’t know what is. The net result of this was Raphinha, a wonderfully skilful player, choosing that as an easy way of doing the minimum, sending aimless balls towards a Dan James-less box. Narrowness, as seen in RB’s 4-2-2-2, was the reason Brian McDermott, and the club as a whole, was so relieved when a January transfer window let him sign two wingers for the squad Warnock had left him. The constant exhortation to tackle the other team’s defenders reminds me of the tactics board leaked from a Warnock team talk at Leeds, a marker-pen 4-4-2 with ‘rash rash rash’ scrawled across the attacking third.

The difference is that Warnock’s version charmed Elland Road in his first home game (not counting the one he took out of Neil Redfearn’s hands at half-time). It was against Southampton, and after the 4-1 pummelling by Birmingham City in Simon Grayson’s last match, the constant attacking Warnock had us playing got Leeds fans thrilled. Well, most of them. Again, I don’t claim to be a tactical expert, but even I could see it was aimless garbage, that any chances were being created through sheer luck, not skill. Also, we lost 1-0. I was utterly bemused that so many people seemed to think it was good.

That’s not a problem today. Nobody inside Elland Road thought what Leeds did was good, unless they were supporting Aston Villa. For them it was hilarious to be 3-0 up and singing, ‘Where’s Bielsa gone?’ Nobody in the Leeds crowd wanted this game to be like it was. Everyone in the Leeds crowd was willing to make it work, everyone in the Leeds crowd was ready to support the new look and the new coach, everyone in the Leeds crowd wants this to go well, for this season, for the next three years. But even if they’re not immersed in the tactical literature, a lot of people in the Leeds crowd have seen a lot of football over the years. And they’ve seen a lot of football that was better than this over the years, and not much that was worse. Jesse Marsch thinks the problem was the players fearing failing. Them and me and us, aye.