The Universe I want to be in, is the one where Bielsa is at Leeds

Why do I write? I mean, why do I write anything? Mostly, it’s because I want to, but sometimes it’s because I have to.  Because there’s something in me bursting to get out, which I have to say, which I CAN’T NOT SAY. And today, that thing that I CAN’T NOT SAY is about Leeds United.

Do you believe in parallel universes? Alternative realities? Well, this morning there are three I don’t want to be in.

Firstly, one where this season’s Championship was voided after 37 games, where this season would be all for nothing,

Secondly, another one where Leeds were promoted under Points per Game. And everyone would say that we didn’t really deserve it, and if the season had been finished we would have bottled it, done a Leeds etc, one where we’d have been watching reruns on a loop for all eternity of Ayling’s thunderblaster vs Huddersfield and Roberts goal against Hull, deciding which is the best., and bemoaning that that was as good as it got.

But the worst universe, the one I really don’t want to be in, is the one where Marcelo Bielsa didn’t come to Leeds.

Leaving aside those three realities, there is another one. It’s one I don’t believe in yet, even though I’m in it.  I’ve seen it with my own eyes over the last two weeks, but my brain can’t accept it yet.  One with Ben White channelling James Rodriguez, volleying in from the edge of the box and Illan Meslier tipping the ball over the bar like Gordon Banks. One where we cling on to beat Barnsley on a Thursday, get promoted on a Friday, win the League on Saturday, and beat Derby on Sunday. One where Alioski runs off to celebrate with the crowdies, while Fulham defenders are lying all over the floor. Where a 30 pass move against Stoke is finished with a Bamford stepover and Pablo slotting the ball into the corner, One in which Luke Ayling runs the length of the pitch in 11 seconds in the 89^th minute against Swansea and Pablo scores a goal that dug down into my very soul and pulled out a primal scream of joy and relief and release, which may have been heard 15 streets away, also setting off a distant echo of Gordon Strachan vs Leicester in 1990.

In this reality, I keep expecting to wake up in the shower like Bobby Ewing, to find that the whole of Project Restart has been a dream, and that we're still in limbo, stuck permanently on 71 points and 37 games.

I remember when Steve Redgrave won his 5th Gold Medal in a row at the Sydney 2000 Olympics, his first feeling was relief. The expectation and pressure had been so huge, it was relief that came first. I think that's true for me too. In this reality, it was other teams that fell apart, and buckled under the pressure. But Leeds did not. 

My first experience of watching Leeds United was a MASSIVE, MASSIVE DISAPPOINTMENT. A feeling of absolute desolation. It was 1975 and I was 7. The European Cup Final vs Bayern Munich. The first football match I ever watched.  If that experience taught me anything, it’s that losing something as trivial as a football match can rip the heart out of you. Jorge Valdano said ‘Of all the things which do not matter, football is the most important’. And I agree with him.

So, losing to Wigan at home last year, and losing to Derby in the playoffs all seemed quite normal. Nothing extraordinary. Just everyday Leeds United. 

There have been so many grim times at Leeds, which are well documented elsewhere, so much to forget, and so much I don’t need to forget because I wasn’t interested enough to pay attention to it in the first place.

But I have paid attention to Bielsa and to this team. Because they demanded it. They blasted me out of hibernation. My brother has had a season ticket for the last few years, and he came back from the first game of last season against Stoke not quite able to believe what he’d seen.

The following game, away to Derby, I went round to my partner’s parents house while they were away at their caravan, and stole their Sky TV box with their Sky Sports subscription and plugged it into our Sky dish, to see if I could believe it either. It came on just in time for Leeds to be 1-0 up. And even the beginnngs of this team was like nothing I’d ever seen.  Gone was a decade and a half of mediocrity, this was Bielsaball. I’ve watched football my whole damn life, and as far as tactics go, I don’t really know what I’m looking at, but for the last two seasons, watching Leeds play vs watching anyone else has been like the difference between being alive and being dead.

Maybe because results have been so important this season, and the Championship is such an attritional nightmare to get out of, we haven’t been able to enjoy it moment to moment.  It was a lot like that in 1989/90. Similarly, I once cycled  from Land’s End to John o’ Groats and I always say that I managed to cycle the entire length of Britain without seeing any of it, with my head down looking at the map, trying to reach my objective. The last two games of the season, with the title won, the anxiety fell away, and you could actually see with stress-free eyes how good we are.

Those fans who’ve stuck with Leeds unflinchingly through it all, the good times and the bad, and who I admire for their fortitude, sometimes ask ‘Where were you when we were shit?’. Well, a lot of the time I was just doing other things. I have a finite amount of time and money, and sometimes Leeds just wasn’t worth it.

But like when Howard Wilkinson and Gordon Strachan blasted me out of whatever else I was doing in 1989, and demanded I take notice, and I went and bought a season ticket, so it is with Bielsa. You cannot look away. When Leeds are playing, you have to see it. Sometimes it kills you, and you think you won’t get to the end of the 90 minutes, and you’re glad that that shop next door but one has a defibrillator. But you have to see it. Even though you can’t explain why.

I saw Patrick Bamford interviewed on the pitch after the Charlton game, someone who has had his doubters everywhere, except for in Bielsa’s brain, and he was saying that he didn’t know yet what they’ve achieved. Well, I’ll tell you.

I’m 52 years old now. I was 22 when Leeds won the Second Division in 1990. And yet I have never forgotten that team of Strachan, Speed, Batty, Vinnie Jones, Lee Chapman and the rest. And I’ve never forgotten what I went through with them, during the 1989/90 season.

In the same way, these last two seasons under Bielsa will never be forgotten. Anyone who saw them, will remember them for the rest of their lives.  And they won't remember just the winning. They will also remember How They Won. By outrunning, outpassing, out-everything-ing  all the other teams. By being relentlessly persistent, and never stopping. 

Marcelo Bielsa has the nickname 'El loco', but, as Phil Hay, said about him on his podcast yesterday, 'When you get up close to him, there isn't any madness, just obsession and devotion'.  He's a cuddly grandfather like figure, who endlessly and patiently poses for selfies with adoring fans, who has turned perennial Championship mid-table languishers  Leeds United into a ‘Total Machine’  And like 'The Terminator', who would never, ever stop, and who had to be lured into a steel mill and crushed, and shot and melted, and even then, there was enough left over to make 5 sequels, his 2019/20 Leeds United could not be stopped either. Not this time.

And this is my new reality.  I haven’t quite accepted that I'm here yet, but I know one thing for certain.  The Universe where Bielsa came to Leeds, is the one I want to be in.

Running every day in April: for no particular reason - Just like Forrest Gump.

What have we lost since Covid 19? And where did it go?

And how do we spend our days under Lockdown? How do I? 

If February was spent anticipating losses, March was when they actually happened. Maybe the things I was worried about when the virus first hit seem trivial now, when so many people are dying. But in late February, the football season, a summer holiday to Italy, Parkrun, going to the cinema or to a cafe for breakfast, and being able to go to the office to do my job, were all important things that I didn't want to lose, During the month of March all those previously available choices were shut down, most of them in the same week. 

So, what to do in April? What was left? Well, one thing is exercise. The freedom to go outside, to walk, or to run. Once a day. So I did.  A bit like Forrest Gump, without exactly knowing the reason why, I set off running. And during April I ran every day.  The only rules (which I made up as I went along) were that I had to run a minimum of 4 kilometres a day, and that the total had to add up to 100 miles (or 162 km).  I know there are a lot of exercise challenges circulating on Social Media at the moment but this wasn't one of those. It was entirely personal. And because a big part of running for me is recording the data, here is the data.

I take Methotrexate to manage my Arthritis, and I can get sore if I run too much. My joints don't respond well to excessive impact.  Because my symptoms are well controlled I sometimes wonder how much effect the medication has, but during April I found out. For the two or three days following the weekly dose, my knees and ankles hurt less than the rest of the week. Methotrexate has its drawbacks, it can suppress the immune response, and along with having asthma (and being male and getting older all the time) that puts me at higher risk from Covid. On the other hand, keeping fit is supposed to increase your survival chances if you get Covid, so there's a balance to be struck.

Running every day in April was not something that I consciously weighed up the pros and cons of. It was beyond logic. I didn't do it for one specific reason I'm aware of, but when so much of what was previously 'normal life' is out of our control, it was nice to do one thing that was completely up to me.  Also, it made sense because I have been doing a lot less incidental exercise each day, now I am not walking to and from the car morning and night and around the office etc, And, because I live with people who have started doing a lot more baking since lockdown, I am eating more cake than before. As it is, my weight was exactly the same at the beginning of April as it was at the end, so the running has kept me in some sort of equilibrium.

It's easy to concentrate only on losses during lockdown. To think about things that are not allowed, and freedoms taken away.  But it's also important to take account of the things that go right.  And I noticed while I was running how beautiful April is. A beautiful month to be outside. Almost every day has been sunny, with birdsong and blossom everywhere, and some newborn lambs to see along my route. And in 30 days I have never had to run in the rain once. I've also seen a lot of courtesy too. People have moved aside or crossed the road to let me pass, and to maintain social distancing,  Also, the time of day when I have been running (mostly around 8 am) is a time that I would normally be sat in traffic, or in an office. Although the 15 hours I ran for during April made me sore sometimes, their benefit can't be measured.

I was toying with the idea of following up 'Running every day in April' with 'Running every day in May', but I have been advised against it, by Joy, as she says I need a bit of rest, and although I am stubborn, and I don't always listen, I have decided not to be an idiot about it this time. 

Even Forrest Gump stopped eventually.

Bielsa and Leeds United - Playing like you're 3-0 down, whatever the score

My first awareness of being a Leeds United supporter was waking up from a general anaesthetic, after an operation aged 7, to be presented with a colour poster of the 1974/1975 squad.

Shortly after that, I watched them live on TV for the first time. Unfortunately, that was the 1975 European Cup Final (daylight robbery, disallowed goal, penalty not given, heartache, Paris, fans ripping out seats and throwing them onto the pitch etc).  In the 45 years since, my experience of watching Leeds has tended to go in 15 years cycles of boom and bust, or in my case, bust and boom.

My first 15 years of watching Leeds was spent mostly being told how good they used to be. Then under Howard Wilkinson in 1989 everything changed   Looking back, the first time I felt swept along by genuine hope of better days ahead was Gordon Strachan's debut in March 1989. That was the first day when I realised that as a Leeds fan I would be able to stop living in the past. The promotion year of  1989/90 was the one and only year I've ever been a season ticket holder, and a lot of the enjoyment of watching that 1989/90 team was watching them hound and pressurise teams at Elland Road, watching Batty and Vinnie Jones and Speed and Strachan chasing them all over the pitch and boxing them in.

Shortly after that season's promotion, I moved away from the area so I became only an occasional visitor to Elland Road.  For about another 15 years they continued to be a team to be proud of, with new stars like Viduka and Bowyer and Alan Smith, but then after the financial meltdown and relegation in 2004, things went very, very wrong, and stayed that way for almost another 15 years.  After watching teams assembled during that time by Peter Reid and Dennis Wise full of loan signings who didn't seem to care, or even to know who each other were, I stopped caring too, and Leeds once again became a team of past glories, not present ones.  For a lot of years from the mid 2000s onwards, I didn't know the names of any of the players, I'd even stopped checking the results. I would occasionally go with my brother if I found myself in Leeds, but that was it, the one highlight being in January 2010 when they beat Manchester United in the FA Cup.

I suppose I find it harder to care about football in the modern era anyway.  In these times of wall to wall Sky TV, with games on every day, and with billionaire clubs and their millionaire players dominating everything, I find football and footballers harder to relate to than in the 70s and 80s.

A lot of the games I've found most exciting over the years have been games when Leeds have been behind and chasing the game.  Letting in 2, 3 or 4 early goals changes your mindset, and sometimes the most fun games to watch have been those when they've got nothing to lose.  Leeds 2 Ipswich 4 1989, Leeds 4 Liverpool 5 1991 Leeds 4 Stuttgart 1 1992 Leeds 4 Derby 3 1997 Leeds 3 Norwich 3 2017. I mean, watching all those flicks and tricks when they were 7-0 up against Southampton in 1972 is all very well, but sometimes what I've admired most has been them giving it a go in adversity.

The most exciting game I've seen live was Leeds 3 Millwall 4 in 2018. Leeds 2-0 down at half time and down to 10 men. For 20 minutes at the start of the second half they threw absolutely everything at Millwall and had them on the backfoot, scoring 3 goals. But then fatigue set in, and they couldn't hold on.

The best thing about the last two years of watching Leeds under Bielsa, is that now they play every game, whatever the score, as if they're 3-0 down and they've got nothing to lose. And they've got the fitness and the coaching to be able to keep it up for 90 minutes, instead of just 20 minutes running on backs to the wall adrenaline and then running out of steam.

These days, after so long stuck in the Championship, it's understandable that people are fixated on promotion, but sometimes obsessing over getting promoted makes it seem that results are all that matter. There's a danger (and I found this to be true in 1989/90 too), that you don't appreciate what you're seeing, because you're only thinking about the final score, and where that leaves you in the league table.  Now we're all stuck in a Covid 19 no man's land, staring at the league table is all we've got. But for the time being at least, we're on top.

We're on top because of Bielsa, and because of his unswerving devotion, to a meticulously choreographed, running is everything, striving for perfection brand of football madness, And that madness has blasted me out of my apathetic 15 year hibernation. I've never found them more exciting to watch than I have over the last two seasons. And I've never cared more about the team and what happens to them than I do now.  It's very possible I'm what you would call a 'fair weather' supporter. Maybe I only come out of the woodwork when things are going well. But on the other hand, after so much financial mismanagement, and a magic roundabout of not very inspiring managers, maybe I'm just a skeptic. For me 'seeing is believing' and I need to be seeing something 'out of the ordinary' before I can devote my time and attention to it.

So, thank you Bielsa. And thank you also to the players. Who have bought into his methods, and who are prepared to run for every ball, and to give it everything, from the first minute to the last. The current squad is now just as memorable to me, as the team of Bremner and Lorimer that I mostly only learned about in hindsight, and the one of Strachan and Batty and Speed from 1989/90 that I saw with my own eyes.

What I don't know, is how this season will end, or even if it will end. I don't know if we'll ever get promoted. But whatever the record books say, in the end that's just statistics, and statistics don't tell the whole story. Supporting a team is about having something to hope for and to look forward to; a way of playing that you can be proud of and that gets you out of year seat and inspires you, and gives you something to believe in. For a long time with Leeds that had got lost. Thank you Marcelo and the players, for bringing it back.