Imagine being the first person to greet him after his retreat. They might have thought this madman would never stop talking. 'So what you're saying is, Marcelo,' they might interrupt in a breath-long pause after a night's talk has run on into breakfast, 'Maradona was a good player?'
Dealing with last weekend first, Bielsa went to great detailed lengths to say it was all his fault, then said he was going to great detailed lengths to say it was all his fault to make sure everybody is clear that it was all his fault.
If we want those running stats for bragging rights, and those outlying scatter graphs redrawn to include our style of play, we have to hold on tight while our belief systems are subverted.
Bielsa has been working at Thorp Arch all the summer long, and when he wasn't working he was domiciled a matter of steps away, and the one time he ventured beyond Yorkshire, to Scotland, he was quickly located and photographed by fans.
Speaking from one fans' point of view, after using the Socios app, I can not see how involving fans will be helped, or made easier, or made more fun, or more engaging, or produce a better decision, by first requiring me to put money into an app to buy cryptocurrency to buy a fan token to vote.
Only for Kalvin Phillips' sake, I reckoned, should we be trying to remember anything about the otherwise numb blank of the Cardiff game, not letting a happy moment be buried by the bitterness all surrounding it. But it has only worked out that way now thanks to the Yorkshire Pirlo himself.
Haaland's serenity is frightening in certain lights, like the bloke sitting placid in his pub corner for years, who one day starts smashing pint glasses over his own head.
One of the summer's big questions, about the defence post-Pontus Jansson, has been answered in the first weeks of the season by the PFA-award winning form of young loanee Ben White. But it's Liam Cooper who has truly replaced Jansson, and is playing better than he did.
The reminiscences of Bates in Steve Dale's actions shouldn't make Leeds fans glad to see it happening to someone else, even if that's our first instinct. Instead we should be furious that, in more than ten years, nobody in charge of football has come up with a way to stop this happening.
Salford City is a cosplay football club; Ferguson, the Nevilles, Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt watching players pretending to be Manchester United, acting out a live-action roleplay rivalry against a team they've never played before, but with whom the script dictates they have history.