07/20/2020 - 7:26
- Clarín.com
- sports
It is played to beat an opponent. That premise comes to us from the dark areas of history. There are different kinds of games, varied motivations, different passions. It's always about winning. When a game like soccer appears, which requires physical skill to do things basically with the lower two limbs, which are not the most skillful, the game has a beauty component.
It is played to win, but also to hypnotize with the virtuosity of the tricks. There is some ballet, some conjuring with the feet, some choreography, exuberance, tactics and strategies -that is, intelligence outside and inside the field-, there is luck or bad luck, there is theater and there is an odyssey.
Marcelo technically led Leeds for two consecutive seasons, until now. As a compulsive fan of the games he played, I saw them all, from the most impossible places imaginable. From this perspective, I notice some differences between the team that scratched the promotion during the previous championship and the one that got it this year.
A game with so many variations requires a director who knows all of them and is capable of managing them with collective results. Marcelo, like Robinson Crusoe, writes the personal biography of his teams in solitude , although it is intended for large crowds.
Leeds lost some important players from the previous season: Samu Saiz, a vertical attacking midfielder; Kemar Roofe, tireless center-forward; Pontus Jansson, a 1 meter 94 Sub 30 defender, serious and solid. To this we must add Adam Forshaw, wounded in combat since February 2020.
It was not a small decrease. Marcelo and the club replaced them: Jansson with Ben White, Roofe with Patrick Bamford and Samu with some tactical variants, including a new position not fixed for a great player, Pablo Hernández, who was not always left inside and who in the Leeds today is at times.
Brothers Rafael and Marcelo Bielsa, in Santa Fe. Photo: José Almeida
However, the new players and the experience of the previous tournament made Marcelo think of an ornate Leeds. The DT did not change genres, because an adventure writer does that: he tells adventures. I once heard an English journalist say, "If you like drama, don't forget that Leeds is playing tonight." But in the new installment he modified the length of the chapters, the density of the style, the characterization of the characters.
Without departing from his narrative line, he subdivided the times into specific circumstances of each game. That Luke Ayling went from end to end of the field against Swansea, as a prologue to the dying goal that ended in Leeds' victory, is not only a prodigy of athletic condition, but a correct reading of the moment of the rival and the set.
That the last attack, on the shutdown, against Barnsley, has shown six players thrown in unison, the same. Arguably, the author altered the rhythm of his work. The style was also fundamentally the same, although it must be said that it incorporated expressive resources that it had in less quantity. For example, there is pressure from the front and also that exerted by the striker who chases the ball carrier from behind, without committing an offense. The number of plays interrupted to the opponent by that route was much higher than last season. You have to work hard, because the art is not to lose sight of the ball, but at the same time find the place to put your leg to touch it, at a precise moment.
With few exceptions, in which the team fractured (the second half against Barnsley), the swells with which Leeds advanced and fell, grade 3 on the Douglas scale, were more homogeneous and constant. That is why I never heard the rapporteur say so much with enthusiasm: "A massive, solid, consistent moment" from Leeds ( "A massive moment for Leeds" ).
As for the characterization and complexity of the interpreters of this latest installment of the soccer narrator in motion, Marcelo Bielsa, White's newly incorporated quantitative and qualitative growth is undeniable; Phillips' - ubiquitous, exact in the covers, plumb -; Hélder Costa (a left-handed player on the right, who did not use his right leg and incorporated that record); Bamford, who added a notorious tactical generosity to his technical conditions; and Harrison, whose mastery of the ball in one move that solves three unknowns (control, possession, and passing alternative) is rewarding for those who admire bodily contortions and for those who want Leeds to score a goal.
Hernández was the great player he is, although his role was slightly different from the previous one: he went through the court sometimes laterally, looking for gaps to enable the gap, stepping more on the area.
The team gained in authority without abuse of power : it was more respectable for rivals without arrogance or tyranny, with the power of the highest speed, more resistance, better interpretation of the game, endless variations, such as offensive triangulations in the two corners of the area contrary and cunning.
Intelligence, according to Robinson Crusoe (which incidentally, like Leeds, was from York), is the ability to adapt to new situations. The end of the tournament still left us a surprise: chance, a rival that Marcelo tries to neutralize, for once felt a certain infatuation for the coach and gave him respite.
The win in extremis against Swansea, the goal against Barnsley and the defeats of Albion and Brentford supernaturally opened the doors of heaven and Leeds celebrated. Ecclesiastes says: "There is a time to cry and a time to laugh." This is for laughing; the one of having laughed will arrive. It will be when we have the new adventure novel by Marcelo Bielsa before our eyes. Our Robinson Crusoe.
Special for the Télam Agency.
Rafael Bielsa is Argentina's ambassador to Chile and brother of the technical director of Leeds United.