Marcelo Bielsa during a Leeds game last season. Rui Vieira / POOL (EFE)
This very week Jon Rivas told that the first response offered by Marcelo Bielsa to Iñaki Arechabaleta, the Athletic presidential candidate who has managed to convince the Argentine coach to return to Bilbao, was a terse "let me study it".
Rosario's life is full of phrases like this: short in origin, but that ultimately become a daunting task, often obsessive, which on this occasion led him to review the 45 games played by the first team last season.
Also the 38 contested by Bilbao Athletic and many others from Basconia, the youth team and, of course, future rivals.
Almost four hundred games in total to end up offering a diagnosis that demonstrates the spirit and honesty of a unique character in the history of football: “The team plays well, I like it.
Months ago, before being dismissed as coach of Leeds United, Bielsa himself told his DAZN colleagues in an interview about the origin of his famous nickname and its relationship with excess.
Or, at least where he thinks it came from, because not even in that is this Argentinian with a
Shakespearean character completely exhaustive
.
When he started working in the lower divisions of Newell's he coincided, in the structure set up by Jorge Griffa, with Carlos Picerni.
"He trained three ages and I was only one, but my team's training sessions lasted longer than all three of his combined... And then he began to tell me that I was crazy," he explains, looking at the ground, the interlocutor to whom Bielsa dedicates the most part of the time.
As in so many other stories that make up his biography, it seems that not even he himself is capable of distinguishing between reality and legend.
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From his character, his demonstrated capacity for work and his firm commitment to young talent, it can be deduced that Bielsa is, above all and above all, a creator, almost a craftsman who has molded with his beliefs a huge number of great football players.
The last of them, current object of desire on the part of some great clubs in the Premier, Kalvin Phillips, speaks of him in terms almost of authorship, as if he were somehow willing to cede his trademark rights to him.
“The day my call-up to the national team was announced, he called me, he told me how proud he was of me and gave me a shirt from his time as a player,” explains a visibly moved Phillips.
“That's why I gave him my debut shirt with the
pross”
.
His critics, who never give up trying to discredit him —especially in Argentina and in a tone similar to that used against Messi, who knows if against all Rosario in general—, emphasize over and over again the impact of literature on everything that surrounds Bielsa.
And they say it as something derogatory, unable to decipher the football heritage that the character always leaves behind.
It won't be a problem if Arechabaleta wins: in Bilbao they know he's sane and that's why they love him like crazy.
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