‘As hard as it is, I miss it’: Bielsa drill that makes Championship look gentle — The Athletic 10/6/20
By Phil Hay
At Marseille, they called it “opposition”. At Athletic
Bilbao, it was “champions” — players there learned to eat well the night
before. Newell’s Old Boys had no specific name for it but the concept was born
in Rosario, back in the 1990s. “Non-stop football,” Ricardo Lunari says with a
nod. Marcelo Bielsa’s trademark.
Over 30 years that trademark has evolved into what Leeds
United know as “murderball”: the midweek training session which marks Bielsa
out from most of the coaches his players have dealt with. It is a source of
fascination in Leeds and an exercise Bielsa values above all others. His squad
love it, hate it and brace themselves for it. In the experience of some of his
players past and present, competitive football is rarely as brutal.
Murderball has long been an abstract event at Thorp Arch, a
drill which is spoken about regularly but never opened up to the public eye.
What is it, exactly, and why do hardened footballers speak about it with a
combination of amusement and dread? There was a constant refrain from Elland
Road during lockdown. Leeds’ players were so sick of life at home that even the
prospect of the exercise appealed. “As hard as it is, I’m missing it,” Tyler
Roberts admitted last month. “As much as you don’t like it when you’re in it,
you miss it when you’re away.”
For Bielsa, the session is a riot of physical effort. It is
a game of 11 versus 11, broken into segments, but the tactical aspects of it
bother him less than the yards his players cover and the ferocity of their
sprints. Staff and balls are scattered around the pitch, all of them there to
make sure the contest doesn’t stop. As one ball goes out of play, another
appears in an instant and sustains the tempo. Murderball is a big part of
Bielsa’s working week, building up legs and stamina. Leeds find that the Championship
can be gentle in comparison. “It’s not even close,” a player once told me.
Despite the different names it has acquired, anyone who has
played under Bielsa does not need any clues to know what you are talking about.
It has its origins at Newell’s, where Bielsa came at coaching with a very
personal perspective and an uncompromising approach to fitness. Lunari, one of
his trusted midfielders, experienced the same drills in Argentina. They were
hard and exhausting but designed to acclimatise Newell’s squad to Bielsa’s
hyperactive tactics. And there was a method behind the madness. If Newell’s
couldn’t run to an excessive degree, Bielsa’s system wouldn’t work. The
exercise coached the body to keep going and the mind to stay switched on. The
essence of transitional football.
“At the time, we didn’t call it murderball but we worked a
lot on what we called non-stop football,” Lunari told The Athletic. “The ball
couldn’t leave the pitch. If it did, someone threw in a new one immediately.
“There were no corners and no throw-ins. It was very hard,
non-stop exercise that Marcelo wanted us to do to avoid our heart-rates
dropping and to keep the intensity up, so we became accustomed to his
high-pressure system. Every exercise was longer than the one before it, to
build the intensity.”
At Leeds, Bielsa breaks the drill into several segments of
five-minute battles. It takes place each Wednesday in the weeks when the club
have no midweek fixture. The whole routine is shorter than a standard
Championship game but it is played at a pace which exceeds the flow of the
average match. Bielsa and his coaching team spread out and watch closely,
barking orders as they go, but they are not there to act as referees. Fouls
don’t exist and players go at each other, accepting that tackles and collisions
are part of the drill. From time to time, Bielsa will call the squad in for a
quick discussion before setting them loose again. Nobody wants to lose or to
give any quarter. Everyone knows that his preferred line-up is predicated on
what happens in these sessions.
Bielsa’s old Athletic Bilbao squad can all relate to the
model. In Spain, he would tweak the structure of it slightly but as a whole,
the routine was very similar. For Andoni Iraola, the former Athletic right-back
and Spain international, murderball rings an immediate bell. “I know what
you’re talking about,” he says. “We called them the ‘champions’ games.
“Sometimes they were for players who were playing fewer
minutes than others but not always. They were a little bit shorter than a
normal game but more demanding. He uses them as a test to see if you’re ready
to play or to find your limits. He’s especially vocal and demanding in these
games and he doesn’t care about the tactical side. The games are just for the
physical side.
“We all knew we had to eat a big bowl of rice the night
before because he made sure you empty the tank.” What did the players think of
it privately? “They would say they hated it more than they loved it.”
Bielsa sometimes raised the ante in the sessions by pitting
his first team against Bilbao Athletic (Athletic’s B team) and forcing them to
play 10 versus 11. Against Basconia, a feeder club for Athletic and effectively
their third team, it was often nine versus 11 — “to make things even more
difficult,” Iraola says.
There is a video online, from the 2014-15 season, of
Marseille embarking on their first “opposition” drill, six weeks after the club
appointed Bielsa as head coach. The football is loose and frenetic, with
players divided by yellow and green bibs and competing from end to end. Bielsa
gathers them together intermittently. When he does, the players are breathing
hard. His assistant, Jan Van Winckel, is seated at the side of the pitch with a
laptop in front of him for real-time analysis. At one stage, Nicolas N’Koulou
runs over for treatment on a sore hip. A member of Bielsa’s backroom team gives
him a quick blast of freeze spray and sends him back on. It is evident from the
full-blooded nature of the tackles that they have all been told to pull no
punches.
What is obvious from the footage is the importance of
transition. Bielsa usually mixes up the shape when Leeds take on the drill but
the physicality of it seems to matter far more than precision, as Iraola and
Lunari recall. “Marcelo wanted a quick transition between defence and attack,
without any delay or rest,” Lunari says. “The exercise (at Leeds) is probably
very similar to what we experienced at Newell’s and these kinds of drills are
what make Marcelo’s teams different from the rest.”
Leeds were permitted to begin contact training by the EFL
last week and Bielsa instantly scheduled two murderball sessions, one for
Thursday and one for Saturday. It is his best gauge of how fit his players are
and how likely they are to pick up where they left off in March (when Leeds
were on a streak of five straight wins). In a masochistic way, his players have
grown to appreciate the drill. The exercise itself is exhausting but they
constantly feel the benefits of it. Bielsa’s coaching is like that in a lot of
respects: liable to take a pound of flesh but usually worth the effort.
Both Lunari and Iraola went into management after their
playing careers ended. They took some of Bielsa’s ideas with them but neither
of them tried to replicate murderball. It is too specific to Bielsa, too unique
to his style. It works for Bielsa because he is Bielsa. Everything with him
pushes the boundaries. “I use some of his drills but not these games,” says
Iraola, who coaches Spanish second-division club Mirandes.
I tell Iraola that I can’t imagine anyone other than Bielsa
using them or anyone other than his players tolerating them. “No,” Iraola says.
“Neither can I.”