This article is part of Football FanCast’s The Chalkboard series, which provides a tactical insight into teams, players, managers, potential signings and more…
We’re pretty much a third of the way through the Championship season, and Leeds United are going well at the moment.
Indeed, the Whites currently sit third in the table, and they’re within touching distance of the automatic promotion spots.
However, it seems as if Leeds United haven’t addressed one of their key issues from the previous campaign, and that may be down to Marcelo Bielsa’s unwillingness to change one thing.
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Last season
Of course, we’re talking about injuries.
Leeds were massively hampered by fitness issues to key men in the latter part of the 2018/19 campaign, so much so that they had to lineup with four youth players on the bench for their playoff semi-final against Derby County alongside another man who played just two games all season as well as an unfit Pontus Jansson.
It wasn’t just in the post-season that Leeds were affected by these problems either as their full injury list from August to February shows just how common these issues were for a number of key players.
This may partly have been down to the intense training sessions put on by Marcelo Bielsa throughout the campaign, as Jansson’s description of ‘murderball’ sounds like a recipe for disaster as well as a recipe for injuries.
Making the same mistakes
You can understand Bielsa putting his players through their paces during his first season at the club as he needed them to get to grips with his system and the physical demands of playing under him.
But to continue with such intense schedules 15 months on from his appointment is borderline idiotic, especially when the squad is largely the same group of players that were in the team last year.
Mateusz Klich said recently: “It’s 11 v 11 with no stopping. Constantly running, sprinting & with the coaches on the pitch screaming all the time. Basically you can’t stop running.”
For a team that regularly picks up injuries, this seems incredibly foolish from Bielsa to be running his players into the ground.
There’s seemingly no need to be continuing with this incredibly tough way of operating at this stage, and with Leeds’ injury list once again building up you have to wonder if Bielsa will be changing his ways in the near future.
If not, it could come back to haunt the Whites.
