Bielsa’s play-off agony with Leeds was a lesson in beautiful failure

www.theguardian.com/football/2019/may/18/marcelo-bielsa-play-off-leeds-championship



Fail again. Fail better. When Pep Guardiola was planning for his second life as a manager he went to meet various hand‑picked tactical super-brains. Among them was Marcelo Bielsa, recently resigned as manager of Argentina. Bielsa invited Pep to his home in Rosario. They had a barbecue. Then they sat and talked about football for 11 hours.



Yes, 11. It is just such a brilliantly macho interpretation of the basic idea of having a bit of a chat. Why not 12 hours? Why not 36? Why not five weeks glued to the garden loungers?



No transcript of this conversation exists but it seems fair to say it would reward being adapted into a difficult arthouse movie, perhaps with an extended dream sequence where they both spend an hour throwing away the paper plates and trying to find something to put the potato salad in, all the while arguing about counter‑press phases and whether you can use wire wool on a galvanised steel grill.





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“There are 36 different forms of communicating through a pass,” Bielsa has said, which is definitely a lot of forms. This is a manager who once drew the outline of a pair of feet on his shoes to illustrate some technical point or other and then wandered around absent-mindedly wearing the same feet-shoes for the next three weeks.



The Bielsa mythology is such fun, so full of these moments, that it can at times seem a little comical. Here he comes, the nerd-god pacing his touchline, occasionally barking out a line of machine code. Which is a shame as this is to miss the real joy of Bielsa’s maniacally vivid, almost entirely trophy-free European club football career.



This week Leeds United and Derby County produced the domestic game of the season, a Championship play‑off second leg so full of nuance you needed to watch it at least three times, preferably on grainy Bielsa-style VHS in some gloom-ridden basement. It was also a game that offered up the best of Bielsa. Specifically, the things he tells us about failure. For the last 10 days the season’s endgame has been pegged out around the opposite of failure, a gullet-fed feast of winners’ comebacks and duelling superlatives; complete with a counter-narrative of sickness and debauched methods among the losers.



There is a tendency to see sport, and indeed life itself, in such polarised terms. We live in an age of Goats and frauds, temperature set by the idiocy of social media, the idiocy of Big Sport hype, the idiocy of idiots.



Spare a thought in the middle of this for failure, the most underrated of sporting commodities. Not the kind of failure that you reject, or transform later into disdainful success. But proper failure – failure of substance, a way of losing that illuminates both your opponent and the experience itself.