Marcelo Bielsa: a method actor in the theater of the absurd football | Soccer

It happened. Mateusz Klich plays a delicious back heel to Pablo Hernndez. It definitely happens. Hernndez plays a first pass in the space that will soon be occupied by Jack Harrison. It is not an exercise. Harrison takes a look, dislikes what he sees, takes a touch, takes another look, crosses. The cross is deep, sailing on a sea of ​​dangling heads to the distant post where Luke Ayling, after sprinting 60 meters from the right back, calmly strikes a volley into the roof of the net. You know, as you do. It happened. At this point, the only valid person at Elland Road who is not standing is Marcelo Bielsa. As his replacements and coaching staff storm the field, while the adult men shout WHAT A GOAL! WHAT A GOAL !, Bielsa remains perched on his bucket, takes a slow and measured sip of his coffee, as empty and expressionless as if it were a film he had seen before.

In a way, he did it. Hours after Leeds beat Huddersfield 2-0 on Saturday, club social media released a video of a recent workout at Thorp Arch in which Ayling scores an almost perfect replica of that stolen goal . It may be the curse of the obsessive: once you've seen all the tapes, recorded each data point, mapped every possible occurrence, the reality itself should look like a replay of something thing that everyone is watching for the first time.

This may be how it will feel the first time Bielsa takes his place in the shelter as a Premier League manager. Yes, Bielsa in the Premier League: as these strange words look at the page, it's a probability that actually hardens with each passing week. Gather your loved ones.

Avoid non-essential travel. Stock up on toilet paper, hand sanitizer and non-perishable items. Either way, it's going to be emotional.

Assuming Leeds does it and with a seven point cushion at the time of writing, this is a safe bet, then it's hard to imagine many other teams who will reach the top on a such wave of goodwill. It's hard to imagine another manager held unanimously by his rivals, who seem genuinely honored to have shared a technical field with him. If you are going to be offside, be offside by a genius, said Huddersfields manager Danny Cowley after their loss over the weekend. I will be really interested, when Leeds goes up, to see how the Premier League will fare.

It was not like that it had to happen. Certainly not when Bielsa arrived in Leeds in 2018: the team that had crossed 12 managers in five years, hired a coach who had never spent a third season in the same club. Cowley had it right: it is not so much about how Bielsa manages the Premier League as it is about how the Premier League manages Bielsa.

What exactly will happen when a leftist, common sense and common sense ideologue collides with the least materialistic and least materialistic league in the world? What happens, in short, when you throw this most human manager into the absurd machine? Naturally, there is an element of false opposition to the question. After all, the Premier League is a multiplex, and there are little more box office directors in the world than Bielsa: a method player in football, theater of the absurd. Whether it's frequent sightings of him in the Wetherby branch of Costa, hour-long press conferences where he pours his tortured soul in front of a sponsored backdrop, or his latest wacky addition to the training ground A bobsled track! A hydroponic farm! Real ghosts! you feel that Bielsa will indeed go down very well in a league always eager for new stories and new characters, new themes and new memes.

Above all, he has the rarest of gifts in this saturated and permanently connected game: a real mystic. Pep Guardiola still had some before settling in England. In the 1990s, Arsne Wenger and Ruud Gullit certainly did. But in the current climate of over-sharing and overexposure, it is more difficult to find. Bielsa has preserved it by not speaking in sound bites or platitudes massed on Twitter, but the opposite: the kind of humble and brutal honesty that English football, with its layers encrusted with jokes, swaggering and bullshit, has a hard time dealing with.

Likewise, part of you almost fears what the Premier League could do in Bielsa, fears how it could end, fears the ease with which this essentially complex man could be reduced to a quick punchline. We've already had a whiff of it in last season's spy scandal, but the Premier League will undoubtedly take it to a new level. The stupid press conference questions. Fans mistreat him in stations. Ex-pros of Talksport debating the need to win a trophy to be taken seriously and complaining about not speaking English. Then, of course, football: exciting and iconoclastic at its best, but vulnerable to a few scrapings funded by billionaires at worst.

In any case, maybe it will never happen. Maybe Leeds will collapse and fail again. Maybe Bielsa will quarrel with the board over transfers and leave four days before the start of the season. Maybe hell is just bored of trying to grab 13th place in a wildly unfair league and hanker for a fresh start. Or maybe, after finally bringing Leeds back to the Promised Land, hell face the Premier League like a man on fire. But my God, you want to find out anyway.