Anybody off to Arse tonight?
How are things going in the various Rocher domains?
I recently finished a book i got for my b-day: "Le football selon Marcelo
Bielsa" by Salim Lamrani. It was a very strange book; it's a blow-by-blow
account of Bielsa's first season, when you may recall that Lamrani was his
translator, but it's written in French. It is only therefore going to
appeal to serious Leeds fans who speak French, which I do not think is a
very large group (me & Damian + my mate Mike Thomson and.............er.)
It was also irredeemably dull..........mostly consisting of plodding
through the season match-by-match but saying little more than "Hernandez
scored in the x minute and Roofe scored in the y minute after a pass by
Alioski.........after the match Bielsa said blah blah and the oppos coach
said bleuh bleuh.......as a result Leeds were second in the table."
Apparently, Lamrani's main job was as team psychologist. When I read that
at the beginning I thought ooh there'll be some good insights here, but
really there were hardly any.
Anyway, for those who don't speak French or haven't read it, these were a
few little points of interest I did glean:
1. He was very impressed by the character and leadership of a few
players...........Ayling, Cooper, Dallas but most of all Berardi.
2. Sais's departure seems to have genuinely been b/c he wanted to go back
to Spain for personal reasons (no juicy details though.) {I always thought
that the real reason was that he couldn't buy into Bielsa's work ethic.}
3. This was a nice thing..............after about 3 weeks of the intense
new Bielsa regime, it was MB's birthday. After training, the players
gathered in the team room and sent Lamrani to summon MB as the players
wanted to meet him urgently. When he arrived, Hernandez told him in Spanish
that the players had had a meeting about the new training regime and they
wanted some changes. They had come up with a list of demands which Cooper
had on a piece of paper.........so Cooper came up and handed him the folded
sheet...........he opened it up and it said Happy Birthday in Spanish. {I
think this was a bit near the bone though b/c I have the impression that he
was fired or resigned from his previous job at Lille precisely b/c the
players refused to buy into his training methods and demands.}
4. It was Lamrani (or so he claimed) who had the idea of getting the
players to pick up litter around Thorp Arch.
5. When MB announced his press conference after the spying brouhaha, even
the players feared that he was going to quit. Pontus Jansson (remember
him?) even rang Lamrani to ask him if he knew what MB was going to say.
6. All the players were very much affected when that reserve keeper who we
had on loan, Jamal Blackman, broke his leg just before he was about to
replace Bailey Biscuit-Barrel (remember him?)
7. There was absolutely no new insight into the spying nonsense, but he did
make the point strongly (which I had forgotten) that Lampard was up on his
high moral horse about it but Mourinho has since admitted that he did the
same thing when he was at Chelsea (when Lampard was his captain.)
8. Errrrrrr............that's about it.
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Rest in Peace Guy, and wear your hat!
