The perfect training regime doesn’t exist - The Square Ball 12/4/22

SOFT TISSUE

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman

One benefit of longer days on the training pitch at Thorp Arch would be less time for the manager’s media appearances. Three days after turning bashful about his name being sung at Watford — “any time that it draws attention to me, I don’t necessarily like it” — Jesse Marsch was on Talksport’s Breakfast Show, telling them, “There’s even dialogue right now about comparing Marcelo and myself, which I find ridiculous,” before unpinning a narrative grenade and lobbing it right into the middle of the ‘Marsch or Bielsa?’ hot take complex.

Ally McCoist commented on the high number of injuries Leeds have had this season, and in particular how, “the spine of the team has suffered with injuries”. He asked Marsch, “How near are you to getting your team onto the pitch?”

Marsch replied:

“The injury issue, for me, had a lot to do with the training methodology. These players were over-trained and it led to them being physically, mentally, emotionally and psychologically in a difficult place to recover from week to week, game to game.

“I have a very specific methodology with the way I work and I’ve had a reputation for high running data, but also having healthy, fit, strong players – who can meet the standards of the game we want.”

“You could see it in their faces. You could see in the 15th minute that some of them were already at the max — and that shouldn’t be the case.

“I know there were a lot of games and guys had to play over and over again because of injuries. I find that in this sport, you have to have a fit team, but the more your best players are healthy and able to perform at a high level, that’s how you create success.

“I’ve worked very carefully through methodologies on how we train, how we play, and how that all fits together.”

None of which actually answered the question about how soon he’ll have a fit squad. Marsch did also acknowledge that he broke Pat Bamford by rushing him back but he keeps apologising for it so I guess that’s fine.

The real crux of this was Marsch giving Talksport such a hot button soundbite they must have been clipping it for socials before the word ‘overtrained’ was even out of his mouth; on their website, this part of the interview is introduced by describing Bielsa as ‘Marsch’s eccentric Argentinian predecessor’.

First let’s do the case for the defence of that ‘eccentric predecessor’, which is easy, because the results happened. Leeds were near the top of the Championship for two seasons, won it by ten points, then stormed into a 9th place finish in the Premier League, a club transformed from the middle-Championship dwelling Myanmar-touring mess it was in summer 2018. Even at the time of Bielsa’s sacking, Leeds were in a position that was only dreamed about for the previous decade. The physical improvement in the players was visible, too: the glow up was real. Whatever Bielsa’s methods were, they worked.

That doesn’t make him or his methods infallible, bulletproof or guaranteed forever. Bielsa, in common with other big thinkers, has a reply before every complaint — he knows the angles — and shortly before he was sacked, he summed up the job of a football coach as precisely as I’ve ever heard: “You have to undo what works before it stops working.”

Bielsa’s methods worked. Then they stopped working. He was supposed to change his methods before that happened. In other words, he was supposed to see the future. We ask all coaches to do this. It’s impossible. That’s why they’re always getting sacked.

More importantly, any debate about Bielsa methods or Marsch’s methods or anybody else’s methods will never ever end because the argument is built on an impossible premise: that there is any such thing as perfect training. If there is, the coach that discovers it will have a team of incredible athletes who will win every match and never get injured. Such perfection sounds impossible to me, and in the meantime, everyone is arguing about the imperfections of what is possible.

Bielsa’s methods always asked a lot of his players. Their efforts were astounding, especially in the Premier League when they didn’t have promotion to aim for. Teams around them and above them proved that you can achieve more than Leeds did without working as hard as Leeds were, and that must have been an ever present temptation as they paid in hours of sweat, exercise and dieting to finish in mid-table, two places above Aston Villa, who were sleeping their way to the middle.

Villa had switched to starting training at noon. “Teams normally train at 10.30am or 11am but we were training at different times when we came back [after lockdown] and now we train at 12pm,” Dean Smith told The Times:

“I thought players, young men, now, they’re different. They don’t go to bed like we used to at 11pm. They go to bed at two in the morning. They’ve all got an Xbox, a PS4 and they’re up later. I thought, okay, if they’re getting to bed later, let’s get them up later. Because sleep is such an important part of recovery. We stayed with 12pm training and I feel we get a little bit more from them as players.”

Of course, the next season, Villa sacked Smith, but it’s easy to imagine Kalvin Phillips on England duty comparing lifestyles with Tyrone Mings and wondering what it was all about. That he resisted and stuck with Bielsa’s ways for so long says a lot about him and the other Leeds players.

But something in the other direction caught my attention over the weekend and prompted this blog post. Over at The Athletic, Laurie Whitwell was reporting on the ‘disconnect’ between Ralf Rangnick and his team of arseholes:

The Athletic has been told about grumbles among players over the number of days off between the matches against Atletico Madrid and Leicester City — at one point a run of nine from 13. They were given a five-day break after going out of the Champions League, then those not on international duty had another four days free before coming back the Tuesday ahead of Leicester’s visit.

That day Carrington [training ground] hosted a friendly game against Blackpool’s first team. Mainly set up for United’s under-23s, several senior players featured in the first-half, yet because of the time away, at least one was concerned about going full pelt in case of suffering a muscle strain.

The so-called players at Old Trafford think they’re not being trained hard enough, if only to save their own backside because they reckon they’re risking injuring themselves. And Whitwell had another example of how this can happen, at Bayern Munich in 2017:

German magazine Kicker reported how Arjen Robben took to organising “secret” training sessions with teammates because those laid on by Carlo Ancelotti had not been strenuous enough.

What are we learning here? That some teams train more than others and at different times and some players think they work too hard and others organise extra training to make up for a perceived lack, and some players get injured through over-training and some players get injured from under-training and some players just get injured from training.

It’s almost as if the perfect training regime doesn’t exist, and if it did, everybody would follow it. One criticism of Bielsa was that he didn’t involve himself enough in any such quest, sticking firmly to his methods, but that’s not so; it was reported in the Championship that he used to increase the workload when the team was doing well, and reduce it when they were out of form; it was reported this season that he’d gone a different way, increasing intensity as results worsened, perhaps hoping the players could train their way out of trouble. He was searching for the perfect method, too.

Bielsa did not have perfect training plans, same as any other coach, but what he did in training achieved what other coaches could not achieve. This little Talksport tumult came on a day when Pep Guardiola was heard in a new interview with Telemundo, saying, “Give Bielsa my Barcelona and see how much [more] he wins. Give me his Leeds side and we would be in the Championship.” Marsch might be right that the players looked overtrained when he arrived, but that does not mean Bielsa’s methods were always wrong.

Marsch might also pause to remember that apologising for rushing Bamford back won’t help him play any sooner, and that his new training regime, while it might have reduced the “stress”, has yet to translate into any convincing ninety minute performances. And that if he really doesn’t like attention being drawn to him, when his “emphasis is about the team and about us as a group”, and thinks dialogue comparing him to Bielsa is “ridiculous”, he should avoid going on Talksport and instigating more of it. But he’s definitely going to be asked more about this at his next press conference so I guess the subject is still far from done.