Marcelo Bielsa is an eccentric curiosity the English game should treasure not pillory

Slice through the sheer acreage of Marcelo Bielsa’s peeping Tom fixation and you are left marveling at his commitment to futility. Beyond providing a question for consideration on a GCSE ethics paper about the morality of eavesdropping you wonder what possible value putting 20 blokes to work for 340 hours on the tactical system and set-piece strategy of Rotherham United et al might yield.

For the most part Bielsa conveys an impression of a man in need of help, a slightly shambling, bespectacled, harmless old boy negotiating some kind of complex. He almost admits this himself. Witness the confessional elements during his extraordinary press conference of Wednesday evening at Leeds’ training base, where he coughed up his sins for our delectation.

Read more: Marcelo Bielsa has taught Frank Lampard and all of English football a lesson

Why do we do this, he asked himself: “Because we feel guilty if we don’t work enough. Because it allows us not to have too much anxiety. And we think that by gathering information we feel we get closer to a win. In my case, it’s because I’m stupid enough to allow myself this kind of behaviour.”

Eccentricity

Bielsa’s eccentricities are slowly passing into English football legend. We don’t know whether to be outraged or moved. What new information might be gleaned watching a team train that cannot be divined by watching them play every week? Bielsa anticipates the question by acknowledging a sense of shame at sharing the results of his deep dive into Derby’s tactical variations around the No 8 shirt.

“They played 31 games. In 49 per cent they used a 4-3-3 system with a No 8 on the right. In 22 per cent a 4-3-3 but with the No 8 on the left. Same for the 4-2-1-3, with the No 8 on the right and left. They also used structures, three per cent, two per cent, but they’re not significant. Before the game we knew perfectly that they would use these kind of systems.”

This is surely evidence of a kind of football madness, a curse Bielsa cannot escape. It is clear that the principal benefits conferred by Bielsa relate to the way Leeds perform, which is conditioned not by the particular threat offered by the opposition but what Leeds do with the ball. His contribution has been transformational. No matter who they play, Leeds seek to dominate the ball, and press the living daylights out of the opponents to retrieve possession on the odd occasion they lose it.

Fundamentals

The suspicion must be that the four-point advantage at the top of the Championship would have accrued to Leeds had Bielsa not seen one second of opposition footage. It is enough that the players have absorbed the Bielsa message, that they understand and are able to apply the fundamentals of Bielsa-ball, which is probably onerous enough.

Read more: ‘Spygate’: Did Marcelo Bielsa cross a line or was spying on Derby training fair game?

We are not talking research graduates here. I recall football’s great engineering graduate Iain Dowie relating the rudiments of his craft during a successful coaching spell at Oldham. Footballers, he argued, are not as a rule the brightest. They don’t want to be thinking too much for themselves. They need to be told what their jobs are and how to do them. Dowie would support his pre-match lectures with pithy aphorisms on post-it notes dotted about the Boundary Park premises in the hope the message would stick.

On 1 June last year Leeds sacked Paul Heckingbottom, their 10th manager in five years. The same group of players were already unrecognisable when they opened the season with a 3-1 win at home to Stoke before dousing Frank Lampard’s Derby project 4-1 at Pride Park. Bielsa became the first manager in the history of the club to open with four straight wins.

To focus on his odd fixations with the opposition detracts from his more meaningful contribution to the English game, the detailing achieved with his own players. That is surely where the difference is made. Perhaps at his next seminar he might divulge the secrets of his success. You never know, Lampard might want to pop along.