Leeds United 0-4 Tottenham: Let down

My tether came close to snapping a few times in the Championship, and in February 2020, after our second annual defeat to Wigan, I opened a match report by asking Marcelo Bielsa, what the fuck was that?

Same question now, but directed at the players. Or more accurately, where the fuck are you?

We’ll come to the pitch. But look at your television and radio this week. Adam Forshaw before Liverpool. Adam Forshaw after. Adam Forshaw before Tottenham. Adam Forshaw after. The squad is small but it’s not that small. Doesn’t anyone else have anything to say for themselves?

Meanwhile, Marcelo Bielsa. I watched him being dragged from interview to interview to press conference after the 4-0 defeat to Spurs, while news reports that broke five minutes to full-time were predicting his sacking. His post-match duties took long enough for any writers in the audience to get all the colour they needed. Elland Road’s cruel old stands emptied. The wind blew harder, lifting litter and debris across the pitch, while he talked in front of the boards advertising multi-million pound sponsors. Somewhere on the far side, in the family stand, one child had stayed behind to sing. As Bielsa and Andres Clavijo did their best to explain, that young voice cried, ‘Marcelo Bielsa!’

Bielsa said on Friday that he’s alone, the only one who believes in him. I hope he heard that kid.

Bielsa has looked increasingly alone as this week has gone by, separated from the players who, when they speak, say they owe him everything. They do, but they haven’t been playing like it. Even after this match, Bielsa said that if the players are losing faith in his methods, that’s his fault. “Clearly I can’t ignore that those who make an effort and get nothing in return, they start to doubt what they do.” He was defending them to the last, as he defended them from the very start. Few would have blamed Bielsa if, when he arrived in 2018, his first act had been to sell every last player at the club and start again.

It’s wrong to say the players are getting nothing in return for the effort they give to implementing Marcelo Bielsa’s ideas. What they have got from that is who they are. Stuart Dallas was not on the path to becoming a Premier League footballer after leaving ambitious Brentford for Massimo Cellino and Uwe Rosler’s Leeds and failing to impress for Steve Evans, Garry Monk, Thomas Christiansen or Paul Heckingbottom. Jack Harrison wasn’t being talked about for England caps when he was sitting on the bench with Tony Pulis at Middlesbrough. You’d have laughed at the idea of Luke Ayling playing for England before Bielsa came to Leeds, but only a queue of quality right-backs kept him away from the European Championships. That idea has become a joke again now, but I can’t see how that’s Marcelo Bielsa’s fault.

Bielsa’s system, the system, has come in for a battering this week but he was right, on Friday, to say that nobody is pointing out any flaws he isn’t aware of, or that he hasn’t fixed before. He’s fixed them by getting the players to do their jobs properly and make the system work. This time last season, when Leeds were embarking on eleven games with one defeat, conceding just eight goals, Bielsa was asked what he had changed to improve the defending. Nothing, he said. “No, we’ve always tried to play in the same way,” he said. The players were simply getting used to playing in the Premier League, his way. “They’ve learned to avoid errors that are avoidable. I have the feeling that there has been a growth in the maturity and experience to manage these games.” It has been forgotten how often the same systems made Leeds virtually impenetrable in the Championship. For most of two seasons we didn’t measure Leeds’ defending by the goals conceded, but by the long passage of time before their opponents got the first of a handful of touches in United’s penalty area. When it did come to goals, Leeds conceded fewer than all but two clubs in Bielsa’s first season, fewer than all in his second.

Have the players forgotten? In the defeat to Spurs, the defending that angered me most did not lead to a goal. Leeds were already 3-0 down anyway. But Spurs had a free-kick in their own half. Dallas, moved to midfield where he was player of the season last year, and asked to mark Ryan Sessegnon, let the Spurs player drift behind him and take a ten yard start on the pass Spurs lofted into space before Dallas even noticed he had moved. This isn’t a system failure. There isn’t much less you can ask of a footballer than to watch another footballer on the halfway line at a free-kick. This is players not doing their jobs properly.

It’s hugely disappointing because we have come to expect so much more. Luke Ayling’s grit and goals carried the club to promotion. He’s become the place where promising attacks go to die. Mateusz Klich keeps trying but is consistently two yards the wrong side of every pass, and short of punch in every shot. Harrison crosses to Pat Bamford knowing he isn’t there, instead of thinking up something else to do. Fans say we’ve never replaced Pablo Hernandez; Raphinha is better than Hernandez ever was at his best, but he doesn’t dominate a game the way Hernandez did, until maybe the final ten minutes when his frustration makes him interested. If Junior Firpo and Diego Llorente are more than reputations, they should stop a second goal from Spurs that Barry Douglas and Gaetano Berardi could have dealt with, not step politely, inexplicably aside.

To say none of Bielsa’s ideas can ever work is to forget last season, and the two before. But if the only concession Bielsa will make is the truth — that the lack of results is making the players lose faith in everything that has taken them to where they are now — then that’s the biggest drop in performance of them all, and the most disappointing. It’s Saturday night as I write this, and I wonder how the players are feeling, in houses they’ve bought with Premier League money they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t believed in Bielsa. They might lose faith. They get to keep the house.

None of them will ever be made to explain this week, which never had to be as bad as it has been. If Bielsa is sacked they’ll still be here next week, talking about how grateful they are to the old gaffer but it’s time to look forward now. And if they win the games they should between now and the end of the season, nobody will ask them about the last seven days ever again. But it will stay on Bielsa’s CV forever, as a full stop.

Not even the most optimistically deranged Leeds fan predicted much more than nothing from playing Manchester United, Liverpool and Spurs in seven days. Leeds just had to get through those games, survey the damage, and get on with things against Norwich, Watford, Brentford in particular; also Aston Villa, Wolves, Southampton, Palace, Brighton. Nine wins exactly have kept Brighton in the Premier League for the last four seasons. Four more wins should not be beyond Bielsa’s Leeds this season. But being outplayed by Everton made this week more important. And giving up at Anfield made this weekend’s game with Spurs more significant than it should ever have been. If the performances had been there this week, defeats could have been forgiven, the rest of the season faced down defiantly. But the players didn’t show up.

The only one who has shown up, consistently, is Marcelo Bielsa, trying everything to recover the team of ten months ago, then being hauled into press conferences and interviews six times in seven days to answer for players to whom he gave life and who you imagine he would die defending. If all this season’s problems really are Bielsa’s fault, and if he is going, then there are no more excuses. Nobody will be able to blame the system, or the training, or the diet. It’s easy to imagine that, five years from now, Bielsa will telephone Stuart Dallas because an evening of deep thought will have made him realise that, somehow, asking him to mark Sessegnon at that free-kick was the wrong thing to do. It’s also easy to imagine, five years from now, today’s players realising they should be calling Bielsa to say sorry.

Back in February 2020, when I started that report by wanting to smash down Bielsa’s door and scream at him until he explained why the fuck Wigan were destroying our promotion campaign again, I ended it by writing:

This was my one, my one howl, my single j’accuse Bielsa. Although I know damn well Leeds can lose to Wigan without him, I want to lay this one at his door, where he expects it and accepts it. “It’s clear the responsibility is on me,” he said on Saturday. Leeds are, “a team that is aligned with what I ask of them, my ideas. That makes me more responsible because it’s my fault.”
…
Even if it’s fatal, Leeds and Bielsa seem fated, and it’s too late to change. Right now, El Loco and Leeds maybe shouldn’t be together. We’ll find that out in May. But it would be madness for us to be apart.

Circumstances meant we didn’t get the answer until July, but by then El Loco seemed like the one sane thing the world had left. We didn’t give up on Bielsa after the Derby County play-off semi-final, and in the end we got what he promised us. We didn’t give up on Bielsa after only winning two games in eleven during winter of 2019/20, and in the end we got what he promised us. We didn’t give up on Bielsa last season, when the team didn’t win more than two games in a row until March, and in the end we got a Premier League season better than we’d dared to ask for. Marcelo Bielsa, of course, will never give up, and that’s why they say he’s going to lose his job. ⬢