Marcelo Bielsa’s legacy at Leeds United will live forever, believes Eddie Gray - Yorkshire Post 22/3/22
Eddie Gray says Marcelo Bielsa’s legacy will never leave Leeds United, even though the Argentinian has.
By Stuart Rayner
Gray believes excitement has always been important at Elland
Road, and Bielsa could never be accused of not providing that.
He was sacked in February after a remarkable
three-and-a-half seasons which saw him take the club back into the Premier
League after 16 years away, finish ninth in their first season back in the top
flight, then get embroiled in a relegation battle this term.
But it was about more than just results with Bielsa, it was
the football he played and his eccentric personality which endeared him to
Elland Road.
Few people are better placed to put events at the club into
their proper historical context.
The Glaswegian joined the club as a 16-year-old winger, and
spiritually at least, never left.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest players to wear the
white shirt, he was a stalwart of Don Revie’s most successful teams, and was on
the payroll until 1985, by which time he had gone from player to player-manager
to manager, overseeing the emergence of players such as John Sheridan, Denis
Irwin and Scott Sellars.
After managing Whitby Town, Rochdale and Hull City, he was
brought back in to work with the youth team by Leeds’s last title-winning
manager Howard Wilkinson, this time nurturing the likes of Harry Kewell, Ian
Harte, Alan Smith and Jonathan Woodgate, and was David O’Leary’s assistant when
the club enjoyed success in the Champions League and UEFA Cup.
He had a spell as caretaker manager in 2003 then a decade
covering his beloved club in the media before returning as an ambassador.
“Marcelo’s legacy at the football club will live forever –
what he did for the club, the position they were in when he came, his
philosophy in the game, he fired the imagination up in the city of Leeds,” says
Gray. “The supporters took to him right away because he was a bit eccentric as
well.
“What other manager do you see who comes out and sits on a
bucket?!
“That gave him an affinity with the fans right away but the
most important thing was the way the team played, getting results, getting us
out of the Championship and competing in the Premier League.
“It’s obviously very disappointing how things turned out for
him. Football’s a results game and if you don’t get results, you’re always
going to be under pressure this season.
“We were still playing the same way, we were just conceding
too many goals and when things like that happen at a football club, decisions
are going to be made.
“A lot of supporters might not have agreed with the decision
to let Marcelo go but if you were in the same position come the end of the
season, it’d get a bit nervous for everybody.
“But what he did for the football club will never be
forgotten. He turned the whole fortunes around.”
“When Howard came
(in 1988), he changed the fortunes of the football club completely,” he
recalls.
“He shocked me one
day because I was doing a bit of media work and he phoned me up and said he’d
like me to come down to the ground. I said, ‘I hope it’s not anything I’ve been
saying about your team because I think I’ve treated them quite fairly.’
“He said it was
nothing to do with that so I came down and him and (managing director) Bill
Fotherby were in the office and he said to me, ‘I want you to come back to the
club and work with me and Paul Hart. I want players at this football club that
get me off my seat and excite me.’”
If there is one word that epitomised Bielsa’s time at Leeds,
it was excitement.