Fear & excitement
Why, after watching so many hours of Liam Cooper kicking a football, does he not shudder like we do when it happens? When he lies awake in bed, in his office, thinking about Kalvin Phillips, what do his thoughts reveal to him, that our eyes, after watching Phillips for two seasons, have not?
Most of Leeds United's recent managers have spoken about the size of the club, and of the job. "Wow," said Brian McDermott, after Massimo Cellino finally asked someone to sack him. "What a club. The fans are everything."
Thomas Christiansen was another in awe. The fans, he said, "Are the most precious treasure of this wonderful club ... Your passion and requirement for success just symbolises your strength."
Christiansen's replacement didn't quite hit that tone; first there was the whole Barnsley — mam's field — hate Leeds thing; now there's his description of Marcelo Bielsa. "Leeds have gone for a different manager and I just hope they back him," said Paul Heckingbottom, disguising a coal mine of resentment in that word, 'different'; "He should be saying the same things I was saying, and hopefully he gets the backing and support to make changes and give the fans there what they're crying out for."
Marcelo Bielsa, Heckingbottom thinks, 'should be saying the same things I was saying'; for brass, I'm putting that up with David Hockaday's first interview as Leeds manager: "My journey has not just involved Forest Green," he insisted, when people insisted he should be surprised to be Leeds United manager, and he insisted he wasn't. "I’ve been at other clubs," he added, "and I’m sure you’ll do your homework." Hockaday seemed to think his ascension to the Leeds job was foretold in ancient scripture; at the end of his first day of training, he told the Yorkshire Evening Post, "The king is dead, long live the king."
And so to Bielsa. Bielsa is big. Big in reputation, big in status, big of voice. He's big enough to be king of Leeds, but I suspect that would go against his politics. He could enforce his name upon us, making us Marcelo Bielsa's Leeds United for when we play Frank Lampard's Derby this season, but as he said on Friday, "If we compare Leeds United's history with my own history, we will find out that the media attention regarding myself is not very important." False modesty? Perhaps, although he said in his first press conference that there is nothing he hates more. "When I speak I try not to please people," he reiterated on Friday. "When I speak I try not to lie, I try to tell the truth."
Working at Leeds? "I think that I am in a place that is bigger than what I deserve," he said. Perhaps Heckingbottom and Hockaday heard that and thought, too right you are. Most Leeds fans heard it, and thought, hell yeah.
It was a strange pre-season, with Bielsa taking the opportunity not to say anything to the press he didn't have to, smiling enigmatically for selfies and hovering at North Yorkshire McDonald's. And the Great Yorkshire Show, apparently; going to that "allowed me to get to know the region," he said. While we tried to make sense of his startling tactic of not defending corners against non-league teams, Bielsa was familiarising himself with entirely the wrong parts of Yorkshire if he wants to get to know Beeston. The Evening Post's Phil Hay spotted a dvd of Kes among his notebooks; I wonder if he asked anyone, as an American once asked me, if it was a modern documentary.