Marcelo Bielsa speaking in Uruguay: enthusiasm, running, and everything else
Before his Uruguay team took on Peru, Marcelo Bielsa went deep on what's important, what's important to analyse, and how one crack player can solve it all.
Tag
Essays
A collection of 152 posts
Jack Harrison is just a footballer
He's a football player and that's very different to being a football supporter and, refreshingly if you want it to be, Harrison doesn't try to blur the lines.
Close to the sun with Patrick Bamford
It's our shared bruises from our Icarus natures that I hope, eventually, will unite Bamford and Leeds in feeling less raw and more joy, pride and super-happiness.
Sitting on the dock of the Bay window
This is what you get for buying a football club in the 2020s. Your key performance indicator is now the most rotten of metrics, social media vibes, and you owe your livelihood to Fabrizio Romano tweeting something positive.
How Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Leeds United just might work
An experienced Premier League striker who has scored two consecutive seasons in double figures and played and scored for England, who just needs to stay fit and recover the form he showed under Carlo Ancelotti for the next few years to become the prime of his career — and he's free?
Not ignoring Igor
Still and always footballers will yawn through the presentation, listen to a coach babbling down the phone, and then do what they want anyway.
Getting the Carl Shutt blues
At some point in the intervening years I stopped associating this shirt with club legends like Danny Mills, Teddy Lucic and Paul Okon.
Transfers, guesses and data panic
English football seems to be shifting its emphasis towards NFL style front-office departments as a means, I suspect, of making investors feel better about their gambles.
Sentimental stitching
The game has been so successful in selling loyalty back to fans that the thing loyal fans hate most is the idea that a marketing campaign might work and attract new fans — ugh!
Marcelo Bielsa among the critics, Uruguay 2025 edition
Uruguay's poor form has been, one reporter wrote, 'not a surprise, but the chronicle of a disaster foretold'. Marcelo Bielsa, of course, has heard the arguments. He doesn't agree with them.