Manchester City 1-2 Leeds United: A Madman Has A Team
I know Bielsa will always love Newell's the most, and one football fan to another I respect that he'll never change. But dear me Leeds must run them close.
I know Bielsa will always love Newell's the most, and one football fan to another I respect that he'll never change. But dear me Leeds must run them close.
This weekend Leeds United did not beat Chelsea, or play very beautifully, but Leeds fans are happy anyway. Why? The answer could be complex but simply it's Bielsa. And to Bielsa, always resisting the cult of his personality, that was never the point.
As Bielsa crouched in the rain beneath the annihilating silence and the contrasting floods of light and dark, cut off from the spontaneous response of supporters who always supply immediate answers to doubts, was he wondering, who made this game?
It turns out that where the rest of us see problems at Leeds United, Marcelo Bielsa sees solutions. And the solutions he sees are among the reasons why people call him El Loco; to anyone else they'd be mad.
After his exasperated explanation of the implications of the FA's ruling, I expected Marcelo Bielsa to pull up tape of Leeds against Bayern Munich in 1975 and get stuck into UEFA too, and I fully suspect Bielsa is now too far gone with Leeds United for this to be his only season at Elland Road.
A gap opens up, then someone appears, a player or member of staff, I'm not sure; they open their arms wide and hug Marcelo, and Bielsa's arms are like a flytrap closing around him, hugging him back.
At the airport back in Argentina, a group of Newell's fans handed Bielsa a letter of praise.
Only football can do this. Humans have done a lot of damage to this planet over millennia. But over the last 150 years some humans have kicked a football into a net at just the right moment and made it all feel like a price worth paying.
Fernando Gamboa is an interesting case study in what Newell's Old Boys means to Bielsa, and what Bielsa and his team mean to Newell's Old Boys' fans. Imagine Vinnie Jones but taller, with shoulder length black hair.
The goal was either a vision sent from The Almighty of how our consistent prayers will be answered, or very similar to the goal against Sheffield Wednesday, depending on how deep you want to look.