Marcelo Bielsa receives fitting Leeds United farewell with lingering anxiety consigned to the past - YEP 28/5/22
With Premier League safety secured, Leeds United can finally reflect on Marcelo Bielsa's tenure with a glint in their eye
By Graham Smyth
It seemed beyond the comprehension of certain pundits and
journalists why Marcelo Bielsa wasn’t ‘under pressure’ at Leeds United until
the very end.
They didn’t get why he spoke in Spanish and used a member of
his staff as a translator. They didn’t get why, in his first season in the
Premier League, there was no outrage from Whites fans after heavy defeats and
why there was no ‘plan B’ to speak of. They didn’t get him.
But Leeds fans did.
It is a hard thing to understand and articulate, especially
if you don’t share the love that he and the supporters had for Leeds United and
each other.
He was the man who gave them something to be proud of,
football to salivate over and a promotion to write in big, bold lettering in
the history books. He was the man who took mid-table Championship players and
transformed them to such an extent that they held down a top 10 position in the
Premier League. Bielsa made them running machines who could find each other
with a pass without thinking or even, at times, without looking. He made them
better, he made them fitter and he made them richer.
For Bielsa, Leeds fans were the ones who gave him and the
team a love that was unconditional. Of course it helped that he won so many
games in his first season and masterminded so many sparkling performances, but
his hope was that people would value performances and play a patient,
supportive role like in his romantic notion of English football’s days gone by.
So when, with the team sinking to a low ebb, the fans stayed with the team,
they gave him his wish.
It made no sense, to the neutral observer – if such a thing
exists when Leeds United play football – that those in the grounds sang through
the disappointment of defeats. But Bielsa and Leeds made complete sense –
defiant outsiders against all comers, against it all.
In football everything good comes to an end eventually and
the way this love affair reached its conclusion will forever be debated. The
team looked lost in their final games under Bielsa and answers to problems he
had previously solved suddenly escaped him. Things that had made Leeds so different
and so good took on the appearance of millstones dragging them down.
But the collective cry of anguish that greeted his sacking
said it all about the Argentine and his West Yorkshire family.
There is no doubt that it wounded Bielsa greatly, as it did
the fans, but both were left with memories of a time that didn’t have to be
understood by outsiders, because it was being lived by Leeds.
The smile on his face when he lifted the Championship trophy
was the same smile that greeted well wishers at his Wetherby flat when
promotion was secured, young supporters welcoming him to Elland Road on a match
day or devotees asking for a selfie in Morrisons.
With them, Bielsa was normal and that made him abnormal in
the modern game so the nostalgia for his era will not be restricted to goals
and points. For Leeds, for a time, he was perfect.
In Leeds he was understood.
