Acting to imagine: Thomas Christiansen takes on Marcelo Bielsa

Before his first friendly in charge of Leeds United, Marcelo Bielsa asked Forest Green Rovers manager Mark Cooper — son of Terry — for permission to film and analyse Rovers' other friendly games in the build up. When Nathan Jones took over at Stoke City, at short notice, Bielsa took on double-quick analysis of the Luton team Jones had been managing until then. It's possibly a myth that, years ago, Bielsa taught himself to watch two match videos at once, but it's the sort of myth we can allow, like a well-behaved cat, into bed with the truth.

This is part of what made Uruguay's Copa America opener against Panama so beguiling. Former Leeds manager Marcelo Bielsa, in charge of Uruguay, against former Leeds manager Thomas Christiansen, in charge of Panama. They not only shared the job, but were separated by just a few short, brutal months of Paul Heckingbottom. Famously, as part of his process when considering the Leeds job in summer 2018, Bielsa carried out video analysis of every game from the preceding season, comprising the highs when Christiansen's first nine games in charge took Leeds top of the Championship, and the lows when he could barely keep nine players on the field. Panama's manager? Bielsa's completed him, mate.

I like to think this analysis brought them closer. Pep Guardiola has spoken about the camaraderie between coaches, because they're the only other people who know what it's like. This, of course, makes Jesse Marsch's unwillingness to watch Leeds' win over Manchester City from the season before him even more obnoxious. And it means that when Bielsa placed his hands on Christiansen's shoulders before this game began the moment passing between them contained multitudes, from Vurnon Anita to Jay-Roy Grot, from Caleb Ekuban to Gjanni Alioski. Marcelo's eyes could tell Thomas, I know what you went through. And Thomas's could reply, I know what you went there and did. Thomas, of course, had tweeted his congratulations when Leeds won promotion, the manager who tried using Kalvin Phillips as an attacking no.10 watching from a distance, and thinking oh, of course.

One day Thomas Christiansen's time in charge of Leeds might be due for a reappraisal, but for now most people remember him quite fondly anyway so it's fine. I liked him from the off, as a much more genial character than Garry Monk, and if his track record as a player coming through the ranks at Barcelona wasn't a true barometer of his managerial potential, at least it meant there were loads of photos of him in magnificent early 1990s Kappa Barca kits, playing with Hristo Stoichkov for Johan Cruyff. His first nine games at Leeds, exhilarated by the individualism of Samu Saiz, were seven wins and two draws in league and cup, and from 1st place a BBC article asked, 'Are Leeds United finally set for Premier League return?' If only they'd never asked.

The lurch out of form was bewildering, and reckless when Saiz started spitting and red cards started flying. Even weirder, in the midst of it all, were five wins and a draw when Leeds were almost getting it back together. It felt inevitable, when Neil Warnock came and thumped Leeds 4-1 with Cardiff, that Christiansen would go, but he left no bitterness behind. "If it's their (the board's) decision that they want to find somebody better, I can not do anything about that," he said. "This is their decision. And I will then go away, with my head high that I have done my best for the team." 

That emphasis on the team was a theme with Christiansen, who stuck up for his players even as they looked to be letting him down. He railed against refs who booked them for every foul, bigged up Matthew Pennington after one good half at right-back, said of Pierre-Michel Lassoga that, "Everyone says we need a striker — there, you have a striker, two goals", argued with a journalist about whether Eunan O'Kane deserved a red card. Right at the start, when Chris Wood left before a game at Sunderland to sign for Burnley, Christiansen said of the players who remained, "These are my players, and for them I will die." He didn't quite do that, but he stuck to the principle. 

The reappraisal will be perhaps less of Christiansen and more of what he was given to work with. Andrea Radrizzani and Victor Orta's grand scheme for Leeds only truly became clear once they went back to it after Bielsa. Thomas Christiansen, like Jesse Marsch, had little experience of coaching at Leeds' level. Many of the players they signed would need work to succeed at the level they were coming to. The idea was that everybody would develop together, coach and players. What Bielsa proved, as a bare minimum summary of his work, was that players need to be coached by someone who already knows what they're doing. It can work the other way — good players can help a coach improve — but there was not much about Felix Wiedwald or Pawel Cibicki that made them seem like the tactical future of Leeds United. Perhaps, looking at what he was working with, Christiansen did as well as he could. Leeds needed Bielsa to make sense of what Radrizzani and Orta were trying to do.

Christiansen did go away, and had a season in charge of Union Saint-Gilloise in Belgium before taking the Panama national team job. This seemed like a good fit for him. The intensity of modern club coaching doesn't suit someone as determined as Thomas to be having a nice time. At Leeds, there was an online argument when he posted photos with his son from Old Trafford, where they'd gone to watch the Manchester derby. "My son wanted to see Man City play, I used to play at Barça with Pep and we very much enjoyed the result! However, I'm Leeds!" he tweeted. After being sacked in February, Christiansen and son tweeted about a day in April spent watching Leeds vs Sunderland in the afternoon then going to see Barcelona play Leganes in the evening. His Instagram was always about family dinners, visits with friends, football and golf trips, and an adorable cat that has its own account. He clearly took football seriously. But boy was he healthy about it. And what better way to combine a love of coaching with a love of the good life than by managing the national team in Panama? He gets to work in a beautiful country. And he can still square up to players from Martinique if he feels the fight within him.

From watching Panama play in their Copa opener against Uruguay, the arrangement looks to be mutually beneficial. I had expected to be writing about Marcelo Bielsa today. Most days, I expect to be writing about Marcelo Bielsa. And Bielsa's Uruguay were what you want from them. Three goals were the least they should have scored, and the expected goals version of 1.5 feels conservative for a team that had twenty shots. Perhaps this particular xG model is adjusting for Darwin Nunez, the Bamford of Artigas. "We missed five goals in the period that we scored only one," said Bielsa, "and in the second half we missed another five goals and we scored two."

But I've ended up with more to say about Thomas Christiansen and Panama. His players didn't help themselves in the first half. The problem looked like a lack of quality — cross-field switches sailing out of play, simpler passes over halfway getting picked off, the goalie passing into trouble under Uruguay's high press. It said something for Christiansen that, for much of the second half, these were no longer problems. Bielsa was annoyed that, "Today (we) allowed a rival, I say it with respect, that is clearly inferior to Uruguay to dominate fifteen minutes of a match that until that moment presented a different procedure." And it took until five minutes from the end for Uruguay to add a second goal — Nunez at last — before grabbing a third in stoppage time. "Until Uruguay's second goal, we were very good, generating chances, stealing the opposite field, making good pressures," said Christiansen. "But that's football, that's why Uruguay is Uruguay."

Even then, Panama had something to add before the final whistle, and it was a goal Bielsa would have enjoyed from his own players. Reacting first to a second ball on the left, Freddy Góndola played a sharp one-two to move centrally and, catching Uruguay upfield, watched space developing to his right. Amir Murillo ran into that space to take his pass, cut inside and stick a curling shot into the far top corner, right reward for Panama's second half and an important goal for the difference in a tournament group stage. Afterwards, Bielsa wanted to assert his team's credentials, remind everyone of Uruguay's status, to deny that Panama might have deserved a draw. He seems to be trying to convince the Uruguayan public that their small nation can again achieve the big victories associated with its football history. "It's one thing to think that Panama played on an equal footing with Uruguay. It's not like that ... What we did was grant (them) fifteen minutes, but that does not mean that Panama has acted to imagine that its performance allows it to live up to tonight's rival."

What Christiansen had seen in his team were several players in the biggest game of their careers, who had "too much respect for a great team that has to have respect, but not fear." Half-time was about, "Removing that fear they had in the first half, to give them confidence,

to show them that they are capable of what they did in the second half." Something Christiansen now has on tape, in front of the world, to show his players again, "That we can, with the ball in our power, we can generate chances."

We'll see much more of Bielsa and Uruguay during this Copa — they're one of the big stories. But perhaps we'll see more of Panama, too. From the first half it looks like, as at Leeds with Orta, Thomas Christansen hasn't got the best tools to work with. From the second half it looks like, as at Leeds, he isn't doing a bad job with them anyway. ★彡