Gracia is a step forward from the Bielsa era – appointing Marsch invited trouble

With rare exceptions — Spygate, Queens Park Rangers away, the day Aston Villa had him punching Salim Lamrani’s arm — Marcelo Bielsa’s press conferences were there to inform, not excite. The headlines he generated were rarely premeditated and he could talk for an hour without creating any. It was always about the detail and never about soundbites because Bielsa was selling football, nothing else.

Naturally, like any coach, some of what he said and did became habitual: ‘bueno, mire’, players as ‘protagonists’, the insistence that every team Leeds United played were better than they might look on paper and the refusal to settle scores in public. Referees in England have had few bigger allies than Bielsa. In almost four years, it was impossible to draw him on dubious officiating. Credit deflected elsewhere, compliments met with a shrug; he had this way of influencing everything while implying that he was influencing nothing.

On Tuesday, at the end of Leeds’ 2-1 home win over Nottingham Forest, Javi Gracia was asked about his influence on the club, the injection of something that had turned no league victories since November into three of them in six so far under him, pushing Leeds up to 13th place. “I do my job,” Gracia said. “The protagonists are the players.” For a split-second, it took everyone back to those Bielsa briefings, minus an anxious-looking translator. The likeness was unmistakable, even if it was unintentional.

The 52-year-old talks like Bielsa insofar as he tries not to let press conferences compromise or expose him. They are different in their approach to detailing injuries — Bielsa only stopped naming his team publicly before games because he began to worry that rival coaches saw his openness as arrogance — but Gracia, during his month as head coach, has shown a similar reluctance to speak in a way that invites attention; avoiding projections, picking no fights, keeping contentious thoughts to himself.

Perhaps over time, he will be bolder, but you cannot drag him far beyond the game in front of him. The quiet tone without any bold predictions is what Leeds came to like in a previous life — coaching that talks for itself.

Bielsa’s poker face was phenomenal and never better than in response to being asked about the weekend when Leeds were as good as promoted. “The recovery of the players is the most important thing,” he said. You could only laugh.

Gracia is more open, more sociable in his manner, but there is a distance between him and those who ask questions of him, the same sense that you will never get to know him properly. He has the attitude of a coach who understands that whatever went on last weekend will not protect you from harm tomorrow. Gracia was an FA Cup finalist with Watford and then, four games into the following season, was sacked. Lesson learned.

This comparison between him and Bielsa only goes so far — there are sizeable, obvious differences in how they view the game. There is a cavernous gap between the adoration Bielsa reached at his peak with Leeds and the position Gracia is in now. The latter, over six league games, has shown himself to be a committed pragmatist, a student of tactics without devoting himself to one model or one brand. He bends far more than Bielsa, who craved possession and built Leeds to dominate it. Bielsa’s team sat on the front foot religiously, with a distinct way of playing out from the back, melodic and explosive and highly dependent on width. There was no mistaking his side because they could only have been his.

Gracia, on the evidence, is far more willing to cut his cloth, to give up the ball on certain days, to go after it on others like Tuesday night, to attack in moments, to retreat when he has to, to deal with what is in front of him. Leeds swung from 33 per cent possession at Arsenal to 63 per cent against Forest and not by chance. Overnight, they have become less predictable and the adaptability has gone down well with the players. One said the squad saw Gracia’s approach as “more realistic” than Jesse Marsch’s in accepting that a fixed style was not necessarily a virtue, particularly if it wasn’t working. Under Gracia, individuals have improved quickly. The performances show trust in his ideas. As starts go, it has gone well.

The irony of Marsch, in painting him as a suitable transition from Bielsa, is that he was as fixed on one specific style as the Argentinian. The pressing, the counter-pressing, the system without width, the high line: it was the shield Marsch came in on and the one he went out on.

But Gracia, the pragmatist, feels more like a natural step forward from the Bielsa era, by no means an identical coach and in no way certain to deliver the same things but a smoother gear change that rocks the boat less.

It is the type of safer bet that, on reflection, Leeds should have taken the first time around. Bielsa was a one-off, unique in a way few managers can mimic. It was tempting to think that one sensation could inspire another but really, an out-there appointment was hubris and inviting trouble. Gracia seems normal and effective and Elland Road, in its reaction to him, is appreciating the normality. Sometimes normality is no bad thing.

What was said by many people when Gracia first arrived was that Leeds, through the tangle of a messy appointment process, appeared to have landed on a rational choice, a focused coach whose attitude towards work-life balance — being able to cope with having next to none — was not unlike Bielsa’s.

How the club got there was a story in itself and where they go from here is not automatically a formality. Results and performances might turn against Gracia. A takeover of Leeds in the summer would mean new owners and some new owners like shiny new toys. But for now, they have found what they needed when they tried to fill Bielsa’s shadow: a transition that makes sense.

(Top photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)