Leeds United 0-0 Middlesbrough: Faith & Knowledge

"The more games we play like this one, we will be more ready to find solutions," said Marcelo Bielsa after his Leeds United team faced the Middlesbrough team of his nemesis-elect, Tony Pulis.

Of course, Bielsa has already found the solutions; he found them in a dark room in the early 1990s, searching first the abyss and then his soul for the way to bring glory to Newell's Old Boys. When your philosophy's origin story is as dramatic as Bielsa's, you don't change it in a hurry. Each new rival is not a test of whether you should change; it's a test of whether you can train your players to prove you right.

Bielsa once said he'd prefer a team of robots to humans, but Tony Pulis has them; ten ginormous figures of steel, looming over the pitch like the towers of the Tees Transporter Bridge; and Jonny Howson. At corners Gaetano Berardi would disappear between Daniel Ayala and Aden Flint as if he was being chewed up by their grinding cogs; it was a relief to see him emerging unscathed at the other side. Then winning the header.

Bielsa's ideal robots would probably be eleven souped-up Roombas, zooming around a carpet pitch, hoovering up the game, and he stuck to his determination to stick to his philosophy by refusing to employ Pontus Jansson's height at the back. That decision was the main tube in which the Bielsa vs Pulis experiment would be tested, and the results were mixed.

Berardi, the full-back of average height, was counter intuitively United's best defender against Middlesbrough's aerial strength; strength is strength, and however tall he is or isn't, Berardi is strong. Up against Ayala, who roamed the penalty area like a hideous glitching hologram of Jimmy Stewart, drunk and bemused in It's A Wonderful Life, he didn't win the aerial contest but did win the physical one, and that was enough. In open play Berardi was composed and intense, concentrating hard, occasionally mistaken in possession but occasionally also playing accurate long passes to the wings like a furious Baresi.

Liam Cooper was less successful. Another of Bielsa's post-match observations was that, "We have to improve the resolution of the aerial game of the opponent," and he will have observed Pontus Jansson flinging himself at a corner moments after replacing the injured Berardi, an excellent way of resolving things. Cooper hadn't done that, instead chasing various red shirts around the area more out of hope than strategy. Often that was while defending a set-piece given away by Cooper himself in a dangerous area, or conceded from a situation caused by his wayward leadership; communication seemed to be lacking, as when he piled through the back of Barry Douglas to win a header, or slide tackled Samu Saiz on halfway.

The tension inside Elland Road increased whenever Middlesbrough won one of those set-pieces, and I suspect there would have been fewer, and those better defended, had Cooper's place been taken by the newly unveiled brooding maturity of Jansson. Fortunately, one factor left out of the debates about defensive height rose to the occasion; Bailey Peacock-Farrell, taking advantage of a goalkeeper's protection to evade the chaotic pushing and, with all his attention on the ball, bring it safely to his gloves. Another time, he reacted superbly to tip a near post header over the bar; arguably Middlesbrough's best chance, it came backwards off Luke Ayling's head. Ayling also had Leeds' best chance, also a header, cleared off the line by Adam Clayton; we almost had the best irony of United winning the game from a better set-piece than Middlesbrough managed, a brilliant corner by Douglas.