Harmony vs the seaside
Imagine Marcelo Bielsa and Tony Yeboah of an evening, sitting together in Frankfurt over a beer, talking about how the Leeds fans still love them.
It now looks like a near miss. For just over one agonising week, reports insisted that Marcelo Bielsa was on a shortlist of one for the job of managing Bournemouth, and was giving the offer his typical deep consideration. When a contrary update came, even from one of the least reliable clickbait sites, it was a huge relief from the grime of the World Cup’s opening weekend to read that the deal had collapsed. Fingers crossed it was true.
It was hard to reasonably protest against the idea of Bielsa coming back to the Premier League. It’s his life, and after giving us so much from it, he doesn’t owe Leeds fans another minute. It can be tempting, too, to imagine Bielsa taking over another team in this league and showing what he could do with the proper backing, to teach the Leeds board who sacked him a proper lesson, but there’s an obvious drawback to that: the board are impervious, and only the fans would suffer from watching Bournemouth playing peak Bielsaball and thriving.
In the end any urge to protest against Bielsa going to Bournemouth has to be unreasonable, because it is a bad thing to want him not to go there. It comes from jealousy, envy, selfishness. It’s human, then. It’s simply too hard for me to feel glad to share the joy Bielsa can bring to fans with fans in the same league — for now — or maybe even the same country. It’s a poor reflection of my character, but I don’t want the fraternity we’ve found with fans of Newell’s Old Boys, Chile, Marseille and Athletic Bilbao to start involving fans of Bournemouth. Admittedly their AFC thing is good and their badge makes me want to drink shampoo, in a good way, but there’s the whole May 1990 problem, and the fact their last hero was Eddie Howe. Technically, I understand their fans could change and improve by their time with Bielsa, and it might make me a better person to find some common cause with new comrades from Dorset. But maybe we could bond over Lewis Cook or something, if we’re going to? Not Bielsa.
Why not Bielsa? I can’t pretend it’s fair. And Bielsa can’t pretend not to be aware of the way fans jealously guard his significance to themselves. It was recently reported that he turned down the job of managing River Plate, out of hand, because he could not coach as an opponent in Newell’s Estadio Marcelo Bielsa. He took Vélez Sársfield to that stadium in 1997/98, winning 1-0, but that was before the honour of its naming made it sacrosanct. Effectively he can’t coach in his home country again, unless it’s Newell’s.