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LEEDS, England – The location where the scene for “The Damned United” was filmed is now a wasteland, and has been for some time: a piece of land downwind of Elland Road, long set aside for one development or another. Before it was sealed behind a security fence, a couple of bulldozers standing like idle sentries, it was a parking lot, and before that, it was the Leeds United training center.
And it was there that, at the beginning of his vindictive, paranoid and ill-fated spell as Leeds United manager, Brian Clough – or rather Michael Sheen, as Clough – rallied the garland international squad that had long been his enemies, but now they were indeed his employees, and he made his speech.
“As far as I’m concerned, the first thing you can do for me is throw all your medals and all your caps and all your pots and all your pans in the biggest tipping garbage can you can find,” Clough said, as imagined David Peace, author of the book the movie is based on. “Because you’ve never won any fairly.”
That speech, in which, according to Peace, Clough attacked the famous liberal attitude of his new team towards violence in search of victory, a brutality that had earned him the nickname Dirty Leeds, in the film is interpreted as the beginning of decline. Forty-four days later, Clough had left the club.
In 1974, it was a scandal and sensation and source of bitter recriminations. Over time, some of the feud has waned, some of the story has softened, and little by little, it has been incorporated into the myth and tradition of not just Clough, but Leeds as well.
But while that may have been the moment that doomed Clough to failure at Leeds, and doomed Leeds to lose the man who still, 16 years after his death, embodies the cult of the English football coach, somewhere below the vitriol and provocation, Clough’s The Message contained a core of a larger truth.
Sport, as he said, is not just about what you earn. It’s also about how you play. This is not a belief that is traditionally given a lot of oxygen in the modern sports-industrial complex. Results are king. Stasis is a failure and failure is intolerable. Everything else, as José Mourinho keeps telling us, is sophistry.
How, then, to explain the esteem, bordering on idolatry, that so many of his teammates have for Marcelo Bielsa, a coach who frankly admits that he would soon list his honors, who until a few weeks ago had not won a single club trophy ? since 1998?
After all, Pep Guardiola made a pilgrimage to meet Bielsa before embarking on his own career as a coach. It was with Bielsa that he stayed awake for 12 hours, talking about soccer, over the embers of a barbecue deep in the Argentine countryside. It was Bielsa who, according to Guardiola to a friend, “knew more about football.”
Guardiola is an esthete, of course, but he is no less ruthless, ambitious or hungry for success than Mourinho. As it happens, he believes that attractive, frontal football is the best way to win. Over the years, he has amassed considerable supporting evidence: two Champions Leagues, a glut of league titles and national cups, an almost endless series of records.
And yet, it is Bielsa who he finds “inspiring”, who ranks as “the person I most admire in football.” “It’s unique,” Guardiola said, a couple of days before taking his Manchester City team to Elland Road on Saturday. “He is the most authentic coach in terms of how he leads his teams.”
It is worth dwelling on that word: authentic. Bielsa’s reputation as a dogmatic has given him a misleading impression. He is often portrayed as a purist, a theorist, a coach who values his ideas more than mere material possessions, a leader for whom success is a secondary consideration behind beauty.
However, as detailed in Bielsa’s biography “The quality of madness”, Bielsa has so much desire to win that on one occasion he told the young defender Fernando Gamboa that “he hadn’t understood a shit what it was about” because hesitated when asked. if he cut off a finger to ensure victory in a derby.
Bielsa does not want to win less than Mourinho. It’s just that he believes, like Guardiola, that adventure provides a more reliable route to that success than caution. And he knows, like Clough, that the way you play matters as much as what you win.
There was a telling moment, not long after the final whistle on Elland Road on Saturday night. Leeds and Manchester City had fought to a 1-1 draw. It had been precisely the kind of game that had been anticipated: breathless, absorbing and electric, full of all those flourishes, ideas and experiments that English football would once have seen as heresy, a kind of alien entryism, but now are. .. thanks. largely to Guardiola and Bielsa, considered avant-garde.
City played high, with a four-man front row. Leeds learned to outwit the city’s press. Rodrigo Moreno entered and fell too deep, confusing the City brand. City changed to three in the back; Leeds transformed again, closing the crackling fissures. At one point, both teams had defenses playing in the midfield.
Guardiola brought in Fernandinho, a defensive player, and made City more offensive. Bielsa, internally, applauded the play. “It was a very smart change,” Bielsa said. “It had a significant impact.” Sometimes as two great minds twirled, danced, blinked, and fought, it felt a bit like watching Jack Donaghy in “30 Rock” negotiate with himself.
At the end of it all, Bielsa stopped for a moment to think before greeting Guardiola. They exchanged a few words, a smile, a pat on the arm. Behind the City coach, a line was forming.
First, Lorenzo Buenaventura, City’s conditioning coach, was waiting; he had worked with Bielsa at the 2002 World Cup. They hugged. Aymeric Laporte, City’s French defender, had been lounging a few steps away, but now he too was beaming with joy as he greeted Bielsa, the coach who had given him his debut at Athletic Bilbao.
Then, from the bench, Benjamín Mendy touched Bielsa on the shoulder; they had worked together in Marseille. Mendy’s prolific use of social media offers an idea of how much affection remains.
None of them had gained anything at the side of Bielsa. Argentina lost in the group stage in 2002. Athletic reached two cup finals and lost them. Marseille appeared to be conquering a French title, only to finish fourth. And yet that didn’t seem to have tainted anyone’s Bielsa’s memories. He had given them something as valuable as medals: souvenirs.
Perhaps that is what Guardiola meant by authentic. Not once, even when he has been unable to satisfy his own demands, to quench his own thirst, has Bielsa strayed from his path. Your ideas remain intact, unadulterated, complete. Because sport is not just about what you earn. It’s also about how you play.
