In the Press

[johnh]

Hockaday was a Cellino problem not a Hockaday problem. No one could expect Hockaday to turn down the opportunity, however, he never had a hope of making it a success. Hope things work out for him in the future though.

[Deleted User 728]

The kid he got to join Bristol City looks very good.
I think it would be perfect if he found us a young talent so the whole story could come full circle.

[Nic]

The stats behind Leeds United’s transformation under Marcelo Bielsa https://www.planetfootball.com/quick-re ... lo-bielsa/

Mainly says we are playing the best we have in the second division. The Bielsa Burnout is discussed, which many before Friday may have thought was underway but shows that the team still have the energy to finish the season stong.

[SCOTTISH LEEDS]

From the YEP:-

Leeds United defender Pontus Jansson has issued a rallying call to fans ahead of this weekend's Championship showdown with Sheffield United at Elland Road.

The Whites entertain Chris Wilder's side on Saturday lunchtime in LS11 with two points separating the Yorkshire rivals at the top of the table.

Leeds sit at the summit of the league ahead of Norwich City's clash with Hull City on Wednesday evening while the Blades remain third a point behind the Canaries.

Both Leeds and United won on Tuesday evening with Marcelo Bielsa's men defeating Reading 3-0 at the Madejski Stadium with Wilder's team toppling Brentford 2-0 at Bramall Lane.

Jansson, who tweeted out the request after the victory over the Royals, wants United fans to play their part at Elland Road this weekend by turning up early.

"On Saturday a lot of us will play the biggest game of our lives and we need you more than ever," he posted.

"So we ask you to come to Elland Road one hour before the game and be with us already from the warm-up. And (to) create an atmosphere that (we) haven't seen on Elland Road before!

"So everyone with a ticket on Saturday, spread this and see you on the warm-up!

"Together we will do this!"

[SCOTTISH LEEDS]

Jon Howe's offering from leeds live:-

As a football purist you might expect Marcelo Bielsa to bemoan the craft of defending as ruining the beautiful aesthetic of football.

But then, where is the art in scoring a goal if you haven’t had to overcome a battle in order to do it? Certainly, Bielsa’s teams are set up with as little attention paid to the concept of defending as is possible, without being accused of negligence, but if Leeds have largely carried the notion that attack is the best form of defence this season, then Saturday’s 1-0 win at Bristol City was when the backline finally had their day in the sun.

In a season where a lamentable run of cheaply conceded goals has hampered United’s outright domination of the division, the last week has represented a coming of age for Bielsa’s back four and a clear sign that, with a fair wind behind them, Leeds might just have what it takes to complete this task.

Seven days on from Kiko Casilla enjoying his first clean sheet in a Leeds shirt in the comprehensive battering of West Brom, there was little mention of him achieving a second at Ashton Gate. Pontus Jansson declared it a ‘statement victory’. Many had hailed the Baggies win similarly, but perhaps the talismanic Swede was more on the money, as Leeds returned back-to-back wins and added weight to the argument that they are beginning to mean business at the business end.

We should remember that the foundation for any good team is laid at the back, and folkloric jesting aside, Bielsa will be acutely aware of that, and while he took the opportunity post-game to talk up the influence Kalvin Phillips has on the side, Saturday felt like some form of redemption for Liam Cooper.

He and Jansson adeptly repelled Bristol City’s advances in a second half which fell short of an onslaught purely through their understated competence. City manager Lee Johnson bemoaned his side’s lack of quality in a game where they enjoyed more possession than most teams do against Bielsa’s sides. After conceding 53% possession to his own side’s 47%, Johnson’s playful quip that he would like to face Leeds in the play-offs felt like his version of calling for a second Brexit referendum, his argument presumably being that much can change between now and then.

But on Saturday Leeds were focused, disciplined and unwavering, with the pivotal axis of Phillips, Cooper and Jansson central to that. On his 100th appearance as captain Liam Cooper joined an elite club, something that nobody would have predicted a couple of years ago. Cooper has quietly grown in stature and has come to properly represent what being Leeds United captain really means, both on and off the pitch, bringing a sense of prestige and honour back to a role too often cheapened by lesser players and lesser figureheads. It should be remembered that Cooper was an organic choice as captain amongst the players, and in a side of big characters, that is quite an achievement.

Cooper’s improvement manifests itself in his consistency. Where once you were waiting for a stumble or a misplaced pass or a hare-brained moment (see: Cardiff away last season) you now see a model of professionalism and leadership. In the build-up to Derby County arriving at Elland Road in January, it was fitness concern Pablo Hernandez being named on the team sheet that allowed most Leeds fans to breathe a sigh of relief, but Cooper returning to the starting line-up after a six-game absence made the most telling difference on the night.

His instant setting of the tone against West Brom with the header that set Jack Harrison away, was another example of quiet authority, and in a season where several players have enjoyed an unfathomable renaissance, Cooper’s is perhaps the most heart-warming. Had he been bought in the summer for, say, £3million, as a player we had no prior knowledge of, we would be talking of him now in the £10-12million bracket based on this season’s performances, which seems inconceivable but is perfectly fair.

In terms of a defensive unit, it is only now you can say that Leeds have a settled and agreeable formation. Jansson only played one of the first six games of the season, and had Berardi not suffered two unfortunate injuries, could we imagine Jansson spending the whole season sat quietly on the bench? It seems implausible that he would not play a huge part in this most compelling of stories, but then Berardi started the season majestically.

Phillips covered admirably after Cooper’s injury at Sheffield United but the team missed his effective smothering of the opposition in midfield, and in the full back positions, Luke Ayling and Barry Douglas have battled questionable form and Gianni Alioski appears to have finally found his calling in a white shirt as an attacking left back.

However, could it be in goal that Leeds have felt the most benefit from this season’s trials of circumstance? Just as at centre half, most Leeds fans spent the summer nervously surveying our options between the sticks and sat uncomfortably with what the club chose to start the season with. Had Jamal Blackman not suffered an unfortunate season-ending injury in the Under-23s would Kiko Casilla still be putting out the cones at Real Madrid? Quite possibly.

Casilla has brought some blossoming authority to the defence and Bristol City was as convincing as he has been. His gung-ho approach to coming for crosses, free-kicks and corners naturally brings the odd blemish with it, but ask any centre half if they would rather know for certain their keeper was coming for it, and thereby accepting the odd lapse, or take the chance not knowing if he was coming or not, and it is obvious how Casilla has benefited this defence.

On the rare occasions Bristol City saw a shaft of light on Saturday, Casilla was there to shut it down, and while it is perhaps fortunate that Bailey Peacock-Farrell was withdrawn from the side before a critical error was made, it is not hard to see how Casilla has brought assurance and confidence and has successfully completed the unit. Where Bielsa had to be ruthless, he was.

With Kalvin Phillips as effective and unblemished as ever, Leeds won this game from the back and if the West Brom win was dashing and cavalier, this was dogged and professional. Which shows how this team has evolved, and shows how, at a very timely juncture, it may just have found it contains every asset a successful team needs.

[SCOTTISH LEEDS]

Jon Howe's take on saturday's events:-

https://www.leeds-live.co.uk/sport/leed ... p-15991803

[SiMamu]

http://sportwitness.co.uk/bielsas-broth ... d-manager/

Bielsa's brother's (Rafael, former Argentinian minster of foreign relations) take on Spygate.

[Sniffer]

http://sportwitness.co.uk/bielsas-broth ... d-manager/

Bielsa's brother's (Rafael, former Argentinian minster of foreign relations) take on Spygate.

“Think of the fight of a human being against chance. That’s what’s wonderful, magic, quixotic and what turns him into a literary character. He knows that he lost that fight, but he has the extraordinary courage to go for it."

This is it. He is a Boy's Own hero, a maverick, a genius, a one off.

[SCOTTISH LEEDS]

Taken from the Dundee Evening Telegraph:-

For comedian Phil Differ there was no player better than the legendary Billy Bremner.

And for anyone who disagrees, the comic is set to try to sway audiences when he performs his new show Billy Bremner and Me at the Dundee Rep this month.

Phil, the man behind the annual Hogmanay television programme Only an Excuse?, tells the tale of his childhood dream to follow in the footsteps of the former Leeds United and Scotland captain.

However, his dreams soon fade as he realises there is one thing standing in his way – his own mediocrity.

Phil said: “I think lots of people expect to see me in a ginger wig pretending to be Billy Bremner, but it’s not a play.

“It’s an illustrated lecture of his life.

“I use music, slides and stand-up to tell his story.”

Like Bremner, Phil attended Stirling’s St Modan’s High School.

It’s this that Phil thinks made his admiration of the footballer so strong.

He said: “He had been through the school about eight years before me.

“I looked up to him so much because he was the captain of Scotland.

“Beforehand, I thought footballers came from another planet.

“For a footballer who had such a successful career to come from the same area as me was hugely impactful.”

Phil said Bremner’s archetypal Scottish charm also helped make him endearing.

He said: “You didn’t get a lot of games on television back in those days. I remember watching him on TV in the late ’60s. He looked like a real Scotsman. He had ginger hair and wanted to fight everyone.”

When asked how he came to realise that his professional football dreams wouldn’t come to fruition, Phil didn’t give too much away but did say he knew his life would take a different direction when he was about 17.

He said: “I think part of me thought that reading lots of books about football and playing Subbuteo would convert into the pitch and I would turn into a footballer. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case.”

Phil insisted that although he never got the chance to play football professionally, his love for the game hasn’t waned and in some ways he enjoys it better.

He said: “Although the show is a homage to Billy Bremner, it’s also about the joy of football.

“When you realise you’re not too good at the game but enjoy it for what it is, it becomes amazing. I still play 11-a-side at the age of 62.”

Although Bremner – who died in 1997 – is no longer here to witness the tribute to his life and career, Phil insisted he still has an idea of what he would say to his hero.

He said: “I think I would tell him I wished he picked the school team. I don’t think the gym teacher liked me.

“I would like to ask him who the best player he ever played against was. George Best said that Billy was the only player he never got the better of.

“I would be worried my mouth would dry up and I would hardly be able to speak.”

Billy Bremner and Me is at the Dundee Rep on Friday March 29 at 7.30pm.

[SCOTTISH LEEDS]

From the YEP a good piece about Carlos Corberan:-

Very few people on the coaching staff at Leeds United have covered more road miles than Carlos Corberan this season. Monday night, when the club’s Under-23s won their league title away at Colchester United, was typical: home in the early hours of the morning, back in Thorp Arch at 8.30am. Between the first team and the development squad, he has prepared for or overseen 75 games, epitomising a boot room which never sleeps.

Travel is part of life in his industry but a willingness to go wherever, whenever has given Corberan an education. He holds an eclectic CV: six years with Villarreal and three as assistant manager, a stint in Saudi Arabia as number two to Raul Caneda – a confidant of Pep Guardiola’s – a brief crossing of paths with Fabio Cannavaro, a head coach’s job in Cyprus and now, in England, a place in Marcelo Bielsa’s iron circle. “I wasn’t scared about which country I moved to for work,” Corberan says. “My only focus was developing my footballing ideas and trying to be a better coach.”

Corberan is 35 but has been fashioning a career in coaching for 12 years. He grew up in Valencia and joined their academy as a goalkeeper but never played higher than Spain’s third division and was never delusional about his ability. “I finished my career pretty fast,” he says, “and I was 23 when I started to feel like my future would be more in coaching than as a player.” So he took a degree in sports science and began applying for coaching badges. He and Marcos Abad, Leeds’ goalkeeping coach, are from the same breed: no major playing careers to speak of but UEFA Pro qualified and employed at a high level. Bielsa, a defender who retired in his 20s, could relate to that.

Villarreal, when Corberan was first given a contract there in 2006, were embracing the monumental shift in Spanish and European football caused by Guardiola; in and out of the Champions League and the UEFA Cup with Manuel Pellegrini on the touchline. “In one period in Spain, Guardiola started a revolution,” Corberan says. “The Spanish national team started to change their model of play because Spain came from a long period where they didn’t try to control games.

“From this moment there was a link between Guardiola and the Spanish national team and the style of Villarreal was in the same direction. It gave me new ideas about how you can train teams and what the best methodology is to have one style of play. It’s something that goes inside of you. It changes your mind and changes your feelings towards football.”

Guardiola’s football in certain respects was an extension or a hybrid of Biesla’s, much as Bielsa dislikes the idea that he had any influence on Guardiola’s genius. Corberan says Villarreal gave him the bug for “trying to control games with the ball, trying to keep the ball all the time, trying to dominate” and Bielsa’s philosophy at a very basic level is exactly that. Corberan was new to England but not to the ethos which now dominates Thorp Arch.

It was different when Leeds contacted him in 2017 to ask if he would be interested in managing their Under-23s. The club were in between managers after losing Garry Monk and their development squad was down on numbers, to the point of having 11 young professionals and no spine. Earlier this week, the Under-23s won their Professional Development League with two games to spare. In the season before Corberan’s appointment, they finished seven points adrift at the bottom of it. Corberan was not a silver bullet but he – and Leeds – has revived that squad in the space of two years.

He was recommended to Leeds by a colleague who had worked with him at Villarreal but relocated to Aspire, the ultra-expensive academy in Qatar which United formed a partnership with last season but speak less about these days. “I didn’t have any doubt about (the job) because I knew the project,” Corberan says. “I knew which people would come here.

“I knew Ivan Bravo (the Leeds board member who ran Aspire) and he’s someone with high experience. Victor Orta was the same. We didn’t work together before I arrived here but I knew about the experience he had in Spain. And when you’re young, when you love football, England is special. To have the possibility to come to England but at the same time work with people who you think have high value, especially at Leeds United, all the conditions were perfect.”

Orta, United’s director of football, recruited busily in Corberan’s first summer, building up the head-count at Under-23 level with academy signings, the vast majority from continental Europe. Corberan and the academy took the decision that, in order to develop the players with most potential, they would use some out of position, take risks with their line-ups and suck up some poor results. In the first half of Corberan’s first season, they won three games.

“When I arrived, the important thing was to create a model of how we wanted to play,” Corberan says. “The first part wasn’t about putting players in just because you needed players to play.

“For example, we made decisions to play without a clear left-back or without clear centre-backs. The idea was about which players had the potential to continue in this club and grow. Our priority was not results because, if our objective was results, maybe we would take bad decisions. You’d play players without futures here just because you need to get results. The idea was to know which players deserved to be here. Sometimes you have to stop your ego because of course, as coaches, we want to win games. But I understand that my project here is more medium-term.”

Leeds’ academy has always been a collective mission. These days it has almost 30 full-time staff and more than 100 in total. Orta’s better signings made a difference, Corberan’s coaching has worked (in the past eight months, Leeds’ Under-23s have lost all of eight matches) but some who have come through the academy – Jamie Shackleton, Jack Clarke, Robbie Gotts, Bailey Peacock-Farrell – were here long before either of them. The Under-23s were lacking any impetus when Corberan came in but the academy was not in disarray. “This club have always developed their academy and put players in the first team,” Corberan says. “It’s not true if I tell you that I came to a club which wasn’t working.”

Last summer, Leeds opened themselves up to a bigger revolution. Bielsa flew in from Argentina and laid out, in the finest of detail, how Thorp Arch would operate on his watch. Corberan knew of Bielsa – “when you’re a coach you try to know what the key coaches in the world are doing” – but did not know him personally and the appointment was followed by the recruitment a backroom team of regular Bielsa lieutenants. Before long, Corberan was invited into it: a go-between who would contribute with the first team but continue to manage the Under-23s, alongside a second academy coach, Danny Schofield.

Bielsa wanted the Under-23s to train as his senior squad did and play as his senior squad did, with many of the better prospects working with him directly. Corberan was tasked with facilitating the crossover, to very good effect. The development side, in Bielsa’s image, have run their division ragged. Bielsa has felt confident enough in them to give first-team debuts to no fewer than seven graduates.

“In the Under-23s we work like one part of the first team,” Corberan says. “One of my functions is to lead the process of the training with the Under-23s and to lead their games. This connection is key because both teams are working with the same idea, the same philosophy and with as close a methodology as we can.

“When I was at Villarreal, we played versus Marcelo when he was at Athletic Bilbao. I remember when he came to Spain, it was the same – a surprise and everyone wanted to know how he was working. But I think you can’t really know until you are working with him. Then all your ideas change.

“Until I started working with him, I only knew the opinion of the other coaches but I couldn’t feel it. Now I think that all the coaches who talk about Marcelo being one of the best coaches in the world, I totally agree with them.

“He’s someone who likes to control all the details. To be a coach, it’s one profession which is never going to stop, which is never finished. He tries to control the game and this is brilliant because I have the same idea, the same passion.”

Leeds have never spoken publicly about a succession plan for Bielsa, and no-one would seek to second-guess his longevity or his intentions, but Corberan is the one coach who will be left behind when Bielsa leaves. The others come and go with the Argentinian, a package around him, and Bielsa does not tend to stick in one place for too long. It might be that Corberan, on the strength of his impact with the academy and his education under Bielsa, presents an option for continuity when the time comes.

“My ambition when I arrived here was to help in the role I had,” Corberan says. “Last year, I was only focused on the Under-23s, to create a base and develop a style of play. This year, they moved me to be part of Marcelo’s staff and my only focus is to be helping him with the things he delegates to me.

“My only focus is to go year by year or step by step. This is enough ambition right now, not to think about other things which might be.”