Leeds United 0-0 Middlesbrough: Faith & Knowledge
The lingering impression from seeing Bielsa take on Pulis was not that one style of football works better than another; neither is going to suddenly change their minds now, anyway.
"The more games we play like this one, we will be more ready to find solutions," said Marcelo Bielsa after his Leeds United team faced the Middlesbrough team of his nemesis-elect, Tony Pulis.
Of course, Bielsa has already found the solutions; he found them in a dark room in the early 1990s, searching first the abyss and then his soul for the way to bring glory to Newell's Old Boys. When your philosophy's origin story is as dramatic as Bielsa's, you don't change it in a hurry. Each new rival is not a test of whether you should change; it's a test of whether you can train your players to prove you right.
Bielsa once said he'd prefer a team of robots to humans, but Tony Pulis has them; ten ginormous figures of steel, looming over the pitch like the towers of the Tees Transporter Bridge; and Jonny Howson. At corners Gaetano Berardi would disappear between Daniel Ayala and Aden Flint as if he was being chewed up by their grinding cogs; it was a relief to see him emerging unscathed at the other side. Then winning the header.
Bielsa's ideal robots would probably be eleven souped-up Roombas, zooming around a carpet pitch, hoovering up the game, and he stuck to his determination to stick to his philosophy by refusing to employ Pontus Jansson's height at the back. That decision was the main tube in which the Bielsa vs Pulis experiment would be tested, and the results were mixed.
Berardi, the full-back of average height, was counter intuitively United's best defender against Middlesbrough's aerial strength; strength is strength, and however tall he is or isn't, Berardi is strong. Up against Ayala, who roamed the penalty area like a hideous glitching hologram of Jimmy Stewart, drunk and bemused in It's A Wonderful Life, he didn't win the aerial contest but did win the physical one, and that was enough. In open play Berardi was composed and intense, concentrating hard, occasionally mistaken in possession but occasionally also playing accurate long passes to the wings like a furious Baresi.