Jesse Marsch tests await Leeds United with boxes unticked after £100m summer and Oz insights - YEP 28/7/22

Jesse Marsch is going to test the patience of Leeds United fans this season and their consistency, too.

By Graham Smyth

Patience was in abundance last season, to such a degree in fact that Marsch's predecessor felt the need to point out how unwarranted it felt.

During the club's tour of Australia, Liam Cooper told a Brisbane bar of the importance, to the players, of that kind of support, although his assertion that the fans didn't take any opportunities to turn on the team was not strictly accurate - there were boos on the day Leeds capitulated to Spurs in a game that was, for Andrea Radrizzani and the board, the straw that broke the camel's back.

Cooper's point was a sound one though - that it took until late February in such a season to bring frustration to the boil said so much about what Leeds fans could tolerate and how defiant they could be in the face of disappointment.

Part of that was undoubtedly the credit Marcelo Bielsa had built up in a remarkably successful spell that left everyone involved with far more happy memories than the alternative, part of it was down to the trust he earned from always finding answers to problems and part of it was perhaps that innate stubbornness that fuels Leeds fans to defy expectation or the norm.

It was only when it started to look like solutions might be evading Bielsa that Elland Road patience dissipated and, through no fault of Marsch's, the new man walked into an emotionally fraught environment in which patience could scarcely exist.

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With so many supporters not even sure they wanted a new man at all, let alone this one, the 'psychological job' Marsch undertook was as much about managing a club's emotional state as it was managing a football team.

He had to lift a team whose confidence, in Cooper's wording, was 'shot' in order to scramble results while tiptoeing around the sore spot and sensitivities of Bielsa's sacking. Putting a foot or two in the wrong place could surely be forgiven if he got the right result - and he did that.

Whether keeping Leeds in the Premier League on the final day of last season will be enough in terms of a track record to enjoy patience if this season's journey gets off to a bumpy start remains to be seen.

Time and the addition of new players should have evened the club's emotional state and restored supplies of patience to a more reasonable level and, although fans still need to see a striker and a left-back through the door, that's not on Marsch. If the squad doesn't look like enough then it likely won't take but a few negative results to turn concern into panic but it is what Marsch does with the resources handed to him by Victor Orta that will steer his standing in public opinion.

He will go into this season with a full pre-season, a group of players clearly enjoying themselves in his care and a big say in recruitment but it's still far from an easy job because building anything is difficult and, as he freely admitted at the end of the tour Down Under, Leeds are not quite there yet. They won't be the finished article on August 6 either, that cannot be the expectation or the demand, and so fans are going to require some signs that their head coach is leading them in the right direction. It will be a test of their patience.

Marsch has been in the professional game for 26 years and a decade of that has been spent managing, so he knows better than anyone that, even in the infancy of a new season, his results, style of play, tactics and the team's performances will be fair game for scrutiny and criticism.

What is not fair game is his nationality and herein lies the test of Leeds' fans consistency.

When anyone outside the club came for Bielsa for the crime of using a translator in press conferences or anything deemed a little different to how things are done 'round these parts' the defences went up and the ranks closed around him.

Thinly veiled xenophobia was a red rag to a fanbase who hate that colour and it was called out, consistently. Will the same be true if Marsch is the target of criticism for something he says or does that reminds everyone he isn't from here?

He felt that last season, telling Sirius XM that his accent was the problem for sections of the English media, not what he was saying.

"I'm okay with it, I can handle it," he insisted, but there's no question it stung.

No-one wants to be criticised but every manager wants to be judged on what he does, not where he comes from or what he sounds like. He got out in front of the Ted Lasso thing from the outset because he knew it would come up, which in itself is a little depressing.

His positivity, the fist pumping and throwing out the salute, like anything, will chime with some and not others, but Marsch loves it. You cannot fake the enthusiasm he has shown any time he has come into contact with a display of support. He feeds off it and cannot help but show it. Leeds fans are passionate and he wants to be part of it. What came across in Australia was just how much he wants ‘to be Leeds’.

How he gets there is the test for him.