Leeds United 0-4 Tottenham: Let down

My tether came close to snapping a few times in the Championship, and in February 2020, after our second annual defeat to Wigan, I opened a match report by asking Marcelo Bielsa, what the fuck was that?

Same question now, but directed at the players. Or more accurately, where the fuck are you?

We’ll come to the pitch. But look at your television and radio this week. Adam Forshaw before Liverpool. Adam Forshaw after. Adam Forshaw before Tottenham. Adam Forshaw after. The squad is small but it’s not that small. Doesn’t anyone else have anything to say for themselves?

Meanwhile, Marcelo Bielsa. I watched him being dragged from interview to interview to press conference after the 4-0 defeat to Spurs, while news reports that broke five minutes to full-time were predicting his sacking. His post-match duties took long enough for any writers in the audience to get all the colour they needed. Elland Road's cruel old stands emptied. The wind blew harder, lifting litter and debris across the pitch, while he talked in front of the boards advertising multi-million pound sponsors. Somewhere on the far side, in the family stand, one child had stayed behind to sing. As Bielsa and Andres Clavijo did their best to explain, that young voice cried, 'Marcelo Bielsa!'

Bielsa said on Friday that he's alone, the only one who believes in him. I hope he heard that kid.

Bielsa has looked increasingly alone as this week has gone by, separated from the players who, when they speak, say they owe him everything. They do, but they haven't been playing like it. Even after this match, Bielsa said that if the players are losing faith in his methods, that's his fault. "Clearly I can't ignore that those who make an effort and get nothing in return, they start to doubt what they do." He was defending them to the last, as he defended them from the very start. Few would have blamed Bielsa if, when he arrived in 2018, his first act had been to sell every last player at the club and start again.

It's wrong to say the players are getting nothing in return for the effort they give to implementing Marcelo Bielsa's ideas. What they have got from that is who they are. Stuart Dallas was not on the path to becoming a Premier League footballer after leaving ambitious Brentford for Massimo Cellino and Uwe Rosler's Leeds and failing to impress for Steve Evans, Garry Monk, Thomas Christiansen or Paul Heckingbottom. Jack Harrison wasn't being talked about for England caps when he was sitting on the bench with Tony Pulis at Middlesbrough. You'd have laughed at the idea of Luke Ayling playing for England before Bielsa came to Leeds, but only a queue of quality right-backs kept him away from the European Championships. That idea has become a joke again now, but I can't see how that's Marcelo Bielsa's fault.

Bielsa's system, the system, has come in for a battering this week but he was right, on Friday, to say that nobody is pointing out any flaws he isn't aware of, or that he hasn't fixed before. He's fixed them by getting the players to do their jobs properly and make the system work. This time last season, when Leeds were embarking on eleven games with one defeat, conceding just eight goals, Bielsa was asked what he had changed to improve the defending. Nothing, he said. "No, we've always tried to play in the same way," he said. The players were simply getting used to playing in the Premier League, his way. "They’ve learned to avoid errors that are avoidable. I have the feeling that there has been a growth in the maturity and experience to manage these games." It has been forgotten how often the same systems made Leeds virtually impenetrable in the Championship. For most of two seasons we didn't measure Leeds' defending by the goals conceded, but by the long passage of time before their opponents got the first of a handful of touches in United's penalty area. When it did come to goals, Leeds conceded fewer than all but two clubs in Bielsa's first season, fewer than all in his second.