Eddie Nketiah on Marcelo Bielsa 'overtraining' debate following Jesse Marsch Leeds United comments - YEP 19/4/22

Eddie Nketiah has weighed in on the debate sparked by Jesse Marsch's recent comments on Leeds United players being 'overtrained' during Marcelo Bielsa's tenure.

By Graham Smyth

The man who replaced Bielsa at Elland Road, following the Argentine's February sacking, told TalkSport last week that the club's severe 2021/22 injury problems were linked to what was happening in training at Thorp Arch prior to his arrival.

Leeds have lost a number of stars to hamstring injuries that required surgery this season and had to contend without some key players, like Kalvin Phillips, Liam Cooper and Patrick Bamford, for large parts of the campaign.

Bamford in particular has endured a torrid time, picking up multiple issues after coming back from an initial ankle problem and subsequent hamstring damage. His latest set-back, a tear of his plantar fascia, represented a recurrence of a previous injury. It happened at Wolves under the new regime and led Marsch to feel 'terrible' that he hadn't been able to protect the striker.

"The injury issues had a lot to do with the training methodologies, these players were over-trained," said Marsch of the problems he found when he arrived at the club.

"That led them to being physically, mentally, psychologically and emotionally in a difficult place to recover from week-to-week and game-to-game."

Nketiah spent the first half of the 2019/20 season at Leeds, on loan from Arsenal, and while he admits the intensity of Bielsa's methods caught him by surprise, still credits them for the improvements he made as an individual and the betterment of the players around him at Elland Road.

"Training is structured," he said of Bielsa's regime,.

"It was intense, but I find that when I look back at that it helped me so much because honestly, I always trained hard, but I went there, in training I was looking around thinking 'am I lazy?'

"It really takes you out of your comfort zone."

The striker had to bide his time to break into Bielsa's plans for the starting XI but just as he did, injury struck and having missed a month of action and felt like he would have to start the Argentine's process all over again, he decided to cut short his loan and return to the Emirates in January.

Asked, on The Beautiful Game podcast, for his thoughts on Marsch's comments about overtraining at Leeds, Nketiah appeared to defend Bielsa's ways.

"It's difficult," he said.

"It's difficult to say where's it's wrong because I felt like to be fair, he was getting the best out of the players that he had, everyone was improving a lot, even myself. I won't lie, training was hard. I was like, 'wow' - and that's probably the first time I really felt like I've been pulled out of my comfort zone, almost every day coming in feeling like I need to rest so I could be ready again.

"Obviously, it's difficult, you see that you get a lot of injuries, because over time to sustain that intensity whilst playing like that in games is just difficult, but in terms of development point of view, it does help a lot."