Bielsa’s fitness coach Delaval: ‘Being at Leeds was like being in a washing machine… And then one day it stops’ - The Athletic 19/4/22
By Daniel Taylor
“Usually, the fans ask the board to sack the manager.
Sometimes they will hold up flags inside the stadium with the message, ‘Sack
the manager’. With Leeds, however, we lost against Liverpool and the fans were
still shouting in support of the manager. The fans were amazing with us, and
this means more than anything.”
We are talking about Marcelo Bielsa’s final weeks at Leeds
United and Benoit Delaval is trying to find the words to sum up all the
different emotions of their three and a half years together at Elland Road.
“Being at Leeds was like being in a washing machine, turning
you round and round,” he says. “You keep being spun, over and over again. And
then, one day, it stops and it’s so strange. You’re at home, and you don’t know
what to do. You drop off your children at school and you pick them up. In
between, you try to keep busy. But there is something missing.”
Delaval is the first member of Bielsa’s close staff to speak
in-depth since everything changed on February 27, and it does not need long in
his company to realise how that decision has impacted his life.
“I couldn’t watch the first three games after we had been
sacked,” he says. “It’s difficult to explain how it felt. The first three games
were against Leicester, Aston Villa and Norwich, and the only way I can
describe it is that I was not ready to watch.
“It was the first time I had ever been fired — I was still
so emotionally involved.
“It was strange and frustrating to be out of the club. I
knew the games were on, but it was too difficult for me to watch. So my family
watched the games downstairs while I stayed upstairs and did some work on my
PhD (doctorate).”
To introduce him properly, Delaval was the specialist
fitness coach whose training regime helped to turn Leeds into the machine that
delivered the longed-for promotion back to the Premier League after 16 years in
the second and third tiers and, for a long time, seemed happy to go toe-to-toe
with everyone.
Delaval did his work largely out of the limelight and says
there have been only three or four occasions, as he lives just outside Leeds,
when he has been recognised on trips into a city he has come to love. Yet that
doesn’t change the importance of his role during an era when Bielsa was king and
opponents marvelled at Leeds’ conditioning.
“The idea was to be as fit as possible — and fitter than our
opponents,” says Delaval. “We wanted to be a proactive team. The idea was to
impose our football on the opponents, rather than the other way round. We
worked a lot. If we weren’t able to make a difference from a technical or
tactical point of view, we knew there might be a moment when our physical
qualities could help us win a game. We had a demanding style. And it was
important for us to be the fittest team in the league.”
Delaval speaks from a position of authority, given that he
has devoted his working life to getting footballers into their absolute peak
conditions. His PhD is to devise an “evidence-based protocol” for players to
recover from post-match fatigue in congested periods of the season.
It was Delaval who put in place the all-action training
matches that came to be known as “Murderball”. And, for a long time, it was
glorious.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, then manager of Manchester United, described Leeds as “the fittest team in the Premier League”. Dean Smith said the same while he was in charge of Villa. Steve Bruce repeated the compliment as Newcastle United head coach. Others, too.
At the end of last season, data showed Leeds had the best sprinting
statistics of any team in Europe, as the graph below illustrates. Look at
Leeds, all on their own up in the top right-hand corner: Bielsa’s players
sprinted longer distances and more often per game than anyone else — by an
enormous margin.
Patrick Bamford, Kalvin Phillips and other Leeds players
have attributed the team’s recent successes, in part, to their meticulously
planned training regime.
“I have so many memories,” says Delaval. “When I go back to
my first season with Leeds, I think about the time we were losing 2-0 to Aston
Villa at half-time and came back to win 3-2, with Kemar Roofe scoring the
winner in added time. That was very satisfying because if we didn’t have a good
fitness level it would have been difficult to lift our game like that from two
goals down.
“I remember us going to Birmingham City (in December 2019)
and winning 5-4 and, again, it told us a lot about the team. Birmingham made it
4-4 after 90 minutes (had been played). We scored the winning goal in the last
minute of added time. This was something special, too.”
Even if Leeds lost a player to a red card, they were so
supremely fit it was difficult sometimes for opponents to take advantage of the
extra man.
The time, for example, when Leeds went to Manchester last
April, to face a City team who were closing in on the Premier League title, and
came away with a victory Delaval will never forget.
“We were down to 10 men just before half-time because Liam
Cooper had received a red card,” he says, talking with an expression of
unmistakable pride on his face. “I remember us losing Gaetano Berardi to a red
card in the first half of one match against Millwall in the Championship. At
Millwall, we tried to play, even with 10 men (and ended up losing, 2-1).
Against Manchester City, it was different. We had to defend and defend. Then,
finally, we won the game with a goal from Stuart Dallas in added time.
“With Leeds, it felt sometimes like anything was possible.”
Before we go any further, we should probably make it clear
that Delaval has no appetite to respond to the allegations from Jesse Marsch,
the new Leeds manager, that Bielsa was guilty of over-working and over-training
the players.
The Athletic’s initial interview with Delaval took place 10
days before Marsch went public to claim the players were mentally and
physically worn out by Bielsa’s requirements.
Delaval is aware of what’s been said, and it would be fair
to assume he did not expect it. However, he has taken the view there is nothing
to be gained from becoming engaged in a war of words with Marsch here. It is
not Delaval’s style.
And, besides, Bielsa and his staff could probably be
forgiven for thinking they are under no pressure to defend the methodology that
was, lest it be forgotten, crucial to Leeds’ success since 2018.
“We had the fittest team because the style we played helped
us to be the fittest team,” says Delaval. “We achieved a lot together. We know
what we did. Leeds had been outside the Premier League for 16 years. This was
massive for the club.”
Delaval’s background came as a promising athlete (he ran the
Manchester marathon two weeks ago, finishing in 2hrs 58mins) who studied at the
university in Lille, the city in northern France where he grew up. Also an
accomplished cyclist, badminton player and “Conference level” footballer, he
initially had ambitions to become a sports teacher before deciding he wanted to
be at the sharp end of professional sport and, aged 20, taking a job in the
academy of his hometown’s Ligue 1 club.
Delaval held various roles at Lille for 14 years, helping the development of Eden Hazard, Divock Origi, Lucas Digne, Yves Bissouma, Nicolas Pepe and Benjamin Pavard, among others.
Then, in May 2017, Bielsa began his short spell as Lille
manager. It lasted only six months but Delaval, by now working with the first
team, had made a favourable impression and Bielsa needed a fitness coach when
he accepted the offer to manage Leeds the following summer.
When Bielsa asked Salim Lamrani, another member of his
backroom staff, for a second opinion, the response was emphatic.
“Benoit is by far the best colleague I have had in my
professional life,” Lamrani told him.
Delaval moved to Leeds with his wife, Axelle, and their two
children, Emma and Mael. His job was to devise a training regime that fitted in
with Bielsa’s wish to have a team that could outrun every opponent they faced.
“Marcelo pushed us all every day,” says Delaval. “Both of us are big workers.
It was demanding, challenging, interesting. Like me, Marcelo believed in work
and preparation.”
The Frenchman’s philosophy can be summed up by his fondness
for famed scientist Louis Pasteur’s quote that “chance favours the prepared
mind”. No detail was too small (Delaval even studied the curve of the sun above
Elland Road, to find out which side of the pitch was preferable for goalkeeper
Illan Meslier). He also cites the famous old quote from Gary Player, the
nine-time Major golf champion, that “the harder you work, the luckier you get”
and that permeated everything at Leeds’ training ground. Murderball, for
starters.
“The idea was to have Murderball as close as possible to a
normal game,” says Delaval. “The average Premier League game lasts 96 minutes
but the effective playing time is less than 60 minutes. So we tried, in
Murderball, to go by the effective playing time. It was very quick, very
intense. No corners, no offsides, no throw-ins. We had members of staff who
returned a ball as soon as it went out.
“We blew for the big fouls — but only the big ones.
“What I don’t know is who came up with the Murderball name.
This term came in very quickly. I also used it when I spoke to players. It was
funny. But it was strange, too, that it created so much talk, because almost
every club in the world has this kind of match, 11-v-11 on a full pitch, every
single week. It was very demanding for the players, and when it finished they
were very fatigued. After that, though, it made the games easier for them.”
At the same time, Delaval put in place an “injury-prevention
pyramid” to try to strike the balance between working the players hard but not
to the point where they might break down. “We will always have injuries in
football, but the idea is to prevent as many as we can. We had programmes based
on the age of the player, their positions, their injury history. We worked on
it every single day.”
This included individually tailored programmes to prepare for matches and training sessions. “If a player had an ACL (knee) injury the year before, he would have a specific plan,” says Delaval. “If a player had two hamstring injuries in the previous six months, there would be a specific plan. The player who had undergone surgery on his ankle would have a specific plan. The player with weakness in his calves had a specific plan. We had programmes depending on the players’ needs. It was always a question of balance.”
Did it work? Perhaps the best way to answer that question is
to remember these were some golden years for Leeds: the play-offs, automatic
promotion as champions, then finishing ninth in their first year back in the
top division, before results deteriorated and injuries took hold this season.
But Delaval also has the statistical evidence to back up his firmly held belief
that Leeds’ injury issues have not been as widespread as some believe.
His data shows that, in Bielsa’s entire time at Elland Road,
their highest spike of injuries totted up to eight absentees. Some clubs had
fewer, others more. Leicester City, for example, were missing 12 players
through injury at one stage this season, according to the Premier Injuries
database. Everton and Norwich City have both had 10 out at once, as have
Manchester City and (twice) Liverpool last season.
Leeds have been particularly hurt this season by the
long-term injuries that deprived them of Bamford, Phillips and Cooper, and so
dramatically altered the spine of the team. Yet Delaval has also looked at the
availability rate for Leeds’ first-team players after the 26-game mark (when
Bielsa was sacked) compared to previous years. The numbers, he says, are just
the same as two of their other three seasons at the club.
“The difference this season is that we had more major injuries,”
says Delaval. “Even worse, they were major injuries for key players. The
availability rate is exactly the same but when you lose key players at the same
time, the difference is massive.”
It was late in Bielsa’s first season and Cooper, the Leeds
captain, waited for Delaval after training and broke the news, grim-faced, that
the players wanted a meeting because of some problems that needed airing.
As Delaval entered the changing room, the mood seemed tense.
The first player to speak out was Ezgjan Alioski. Training, the man known as
Gianni complained, was unbearable. The players were worn out. It could not go
on any longer or they would all be broken.
Luke Ayling was next to complain that the workouts were too
long and too rigorous. Then it was Mateusz Klich’s turn to say it was time for
Delaval to put the players out of their misery and kill off Murderball.
Delaval felt his world caving in.
“There were maybe 20 to 25 players. ‘We are tired’, they
were saying, ‘We train too much, it’s too hard; we’re not in condition to play
the next game’. I could not believe what I was hearing. ‘Wow, what’s happened?’
The last training session had been really good. I hadn’t seen any signs of the
players not feeling great. There were no clues at all, no red flags.
“I also knew that if I received this kind of complaint from
my players, I had to inform the technical staff. In my head, I was already
starting to think about the consequences.”
At which point striker Roofe — who had christened the
Frenchman “Uncle Ben” — could not hold in the laughter any more. It spread like
wildfire. And suddenly it was pandemonium and the players were jumping on
Delaval.
April Fool! Or, as it is known in France, Poisson d’Avril
(April fish).
It is a lovely memory now and an example, perhaps, of the
togetherness that existed between Bielsa’s staff and the group of players who
reminded Leeds’ supporters that, finally, the club were ready to compete at the
top level again.
“We had a good connection,” says Delaval. “I was always very
honest with the players. If I had to say to someone, ‘Congratulations, what you
did today was unbelievable’, I would say this. But if I had to say, ‘Fuck off.
This behaviour was not right’, I would say that too. I respected the players
and I think I had that respect back. From the start, the connection was very
good.”
All of which made it so hard when Leeds took what their
chairman, Andrea Radrizzani, has described as the “toughest decision” of his
time at the club just under two months ago.
“It was emotional for me,” says Delaval. “I had lived my
life with Leeds for three and a half years and then, in 24 hours, it was all
over. When you move house, you have time to say goodbye to everyone. But
football is so quick. The club released the news on Sunday morning. We went to
say goodbye to the players on Monday, but it was all so sudden.”
Colleagues at Leeds talk about Delaval being diligent,
driven and so courteous — thanking Bielsa’s translator, sentence by sentence,
on some occasions — the manager would often comment, “How polite Benoit is.”
Leeds had won the award because of the team’s reaction to
scoring against promotion rivals Villa while an opposition player was down
injured late in a game at Elland Road that April. Bielsa had asked Delaval to
attend the ceremony because the decision to let Villa score, unchallenged,
directly from the restart was largely influenced by his fitness coach.
“I didn’t convince Marcelo it was the right thing to do,”
says Delaval, who flew out to Italy with skipper Cooper and read out Bielsa’s
acceptance speech from the stage. “I helped him, maybe. Or I supported him. He
asked what we should do. I was the one on the bench who said, ‘Yes, we can do
this’, and Liam was the one on the pitch who said the same.”
As for what he does next, Delaval is loyal to Bielsa and so
is waiting to see whether the 66-year-old Argentinian manages again in Europe.
However, Delaval is also keeping an open mind in case another opportunity comes
up in England. He still lives on the outskirts of Leeds and talks like an
honorary Yorkshireman.
“You can feel the unity of the city. It’s strange for a big
English city to have only one football club, but this is the strength of
Leeds,” he says. “From the start, my connection with the city has been good. My
wife is happy here. My children are happy. The culture and spirit and mentality
of the English people is fantastic. We fell in love with the city and the
country.”
And now, seven weeks after the 4-0 home defeat by Tottenham
Hotspur that ended the Bielsa era, Delaval feels able to watch Leeds again.
The first time was the televised match against Wolves at
Molineux and it was another reminder about the way this club can play with
people’s emotions. Leeds were 2-0 down after an hour at Molineux that Friday
night. Full-time: Wolves 2, Leeds 3. The winning goal, scored by Ayling, came
in stoppage time.
“I know in football that everything can happen until the
last whistle, and that applies even more so with Leeds,” says Delaval, smiling.
“These players never give up. They always have the support of the fans.
