Major Bielsa

If the reports are true, legendary coach Marcelo Bielsa has spent the past week studying videos of Leeds United, perhaps living up to his reputation by watching two games at a time, evaluating what it is that Victor Orta and Angus Kinnear want him to do, and how he might do it.

In Leeds, the research has been less detailed. There are pages of analysis we could read, hours of video we could watch, but that could all be a waste of time. Bielsa is trying to decide whether a situation that seems fantastic — coaching Leeds United — can be brought, fruitfully, into reality. Until he does, we're all living in our imaginations; imagining when Bielsa might be announced, how he might play, who he might sign, what he might be able to make Jay-Roy Grot do. The man is supposed to work miracles. When he watches the video of United's eleven Pritt Sticks avoiding the ball at Norwich in April, how can we second guess what he will see? Like a Bielsa team, we have to win possession of the coach first. Then it will be time to attack the Bielsa depths, charging 3-3-1-3 at the Bielsa goal.

Bielsa's football has often turned out too good to be true for long, as his teams burn out in the intensity of his training and play, but the idea of Bielsa coaching Leeds feels too good to be true at all. And yet here we are. Leeds United are talking to him, and he is interested enough to talk to them. The idea of hiring one of the world's best coaches has moved beyond the level of impossible, and that's significant for a club that amazed itself two summers ago by plucking Garry Monk from the Premier League scrapheap, then reverted to type with Thomas Christiansen and Paul Heckingbottom. Who was Thomas Christiansen, anyway? None of us knew. But TC definitely knew who Marcelo Bielsa was.

These kinds of hires, and their sackings, and the kind of football we've been playing over the last however many years, and the division we've been playing it in, have all damaged Leeds United's self-esteem, so that it's hard to believe the club is still worthy of the attention of a visionary. One of the responses to the chance of Bielsa that has most saddened my soul has been the claim that he can't come here because our players aren't good enough to handle his playing style, as if it's our lot in life forever that Eunan O'Kane will chase away anything good or bright that approaches the Lowfields. Bielsa is a visionary, though, who has trained himself not only to watch what's in front of him, but to see what is behind it. O'Kane could stand in front of the dugout and drop his shorts, but he won't disturb Bielsa's concentration the way he disturbed Stephen Bywater's entire life at Christmas.