It wasn’t sung, but it was a chorus. This weekend was the first recorded coincidence in the Leeds careers of Kalvin Phillips and Tomas Brolin. Two big Leeds United matches, the Coca Cola Cup final of 1996 and the opening Premier League game of 2021/22. Two European Championship superstars. Two apparently stubborn coaches, Howard Wilkinson then and Marcelo Bielsa now. Two heavy, embarrassing, televised defeats. But only one thought. Why was our best player on the bench?

Howard Wilkinson got sacked soon after that and Tomas Brolin became a laughing stock, not fates I foresee for Marcelo Bielsa and Kalvin Phillips. But the mystery invites thought. Phillips bullied Bruno Fernandes out of the game at Elland Road, helping restore pride after a 6-2 defeat with a 0-0 draw. We all know what happened without him this time. If he was fit for the bench, wasn’t he fit to at least keep the score down a bit?

Phillips’ late return from Euro 2020*1 is the obvious explanation, but Paul Pogba, Bruno Fernandes, Harry Maguire and even Dan bloody James had more than a passing interest in the tournament, and they all played. And won. Taking a look at Manchester City, whose Pep Guardiola left a bunch of his best from the Euros on the bench at Spurs, suggests there’s something Bielsist-adjacent about protecting players from their busy summer. But looking at them, they lost.

I think the answer is Bielsist, and we can find clues about it last season against Chelsea at Elland Road. Rodrigo replaced Pat Bamford after 35 minutes, then Mateusz Klich replaced Rodrigo with eleven minutes left. Silly old Bielsa, everyone thought. But Rodrigo was playing his way back from injury, and when you checked the match timings — ten first half minutes plus one of stoppage time, then 34 minutes in the second half — they came as near to exactly 45 minutes as a coach who was photographed with a set square on his first day at Leeds could get them. Rodrigo’s fitness was at a level, we could assume, for playing one half of one match. And that is exactly what Rodrigo played, manners about subbing the sub be damned.

It gets forgotten sometimes, while people pick through his tactical runes, but Bielsa’s first post-playing studies were of physical education, and his coaching career unfurled from there. That’s how forty years later Leeds United players can emerge from the infamy of murderball stronger than anyone else in the league, rather than broken down hollowed out wrecks. Bielsa’s playing style requires extreme fitness, and the physical training is as carefully planned and constructed as anything about the ball, marking or space. Remember all those charts from last season, showing United’s players sprinting in a different dimension from the rest of the Premier League. You can’t just tell ’em to get up a hill, like Kevin Blackwell. Bielsa’s football is different so he’s got to build the players different.

The wonder of it all is that Leeds United’s players aren’t injured constantly at all times, but that’s where the precision of Rodrigo’s minutes comes in, and Kalvin’s bench bum. Technology has at last caught up with Bielsa’s methods — how he must have loved the gigabytes of output from his squad’s pre-season day at Carnegie Centre for Sport — meaning his fitness coaches can monitor the physical load upon individual players as Bielsa takes them to their physical limits, and keeps them there. Or if the numbers show them falling short, or risking injury, he can take them out.

This hour of interview with Leeds’ first team fitness coach Benoit Delaval, from near the end of last season, is a fascinating lesson in the granular scrutiny our players are subjected to. Delaval is also a PhD student of ‘recovery kinetics’, and is using up to date studies and methods to keep the players in condition to perform as Bielsa wants game after game. There’s even a bit in this chat about pre-season, although Benoit mostly seems amused by the idea of a ‘normal’ pre-season after three completely different summers at Leeds (inheriting from previous coaches, Australia tour, pandemic). Then it depends on context: for example, how many weeks of holiday did the players have? How many games in the season ahead? How much fitness work have they done with Delaval before? But ideally, he says, perhaps there would be five weeks of training before the week of the first game, and a player should have completed at least three times ninety minutes before their first game. Eight of Saturday’s starting eleven had passed that target, with Rodrigo and Bamford just below it; Liam Cooper was halfway there but Llorente was injured; and way off it was Kalvin Phillips, after a short holiday and late return, with only two 45 minute halves against his name.

Why even have Phillips on the bench, then? For dire emergencies, I guess, and you can name nine substitutes this season so there’s plenty of room. And I imagine his warm-up and warm-down will have been tailored with overall fitness in mind. He was around if Bielsa needed him, and perhaps also as a temptation to be resisted by a coach who once nearly drove himself mad in a convent. There’s no better example of Bielsa’s trust in the advice of his fitness and medical staff than denying himself the luxury of the one player with the capabilities of stopping Fernandes when they say he isn’t seaworthy.

And here’s another realisation. This carefully programmed fitness monitoring isn’t only good for keeping our best player on the bench against all ordinary sense and every fan’s wishes. It enables that other bête noire of transfer lovers, the tiny squad. Because what’s the use of buying extra reserves if Bielsa’s forty years of physical study, the best monitoring technologies money can buy, and Delaval and his team’s careful work means none of our superfit players will ever be injured? (Delaval, for the record, is quite open about the near-impossibility of preventing injuries, but happy about the big season by season reductions in lost playing time since he’s been at Leeds.)

Such strict observation of physical — and mental — burdens is what helps Bielsa’s team perform with so much intensity in so many games, so bewildering so many other clubs. And we want that. We love that.

The downside is that our players just might not always be able to play when we want them to, that’s all. And we might not be able to get out of Old Trafford with our faces on, that’s also all. And that’s all!? That’s a big deal in the days after a defeat like this one. But it’s a long season. If Phillips’ post-Euros recovery is the reason he was kept back from this match, let’s watch how the months go by, and whether the points Solskjaer won on opening day are any good to him while one by one his rushed-back players are stricken by fatigue, whether the title race turns into Guardiola versus Bielsa as their meticulously calibrated players attain and maintain perfect health once the Euros have been run out of their weary legs.

Marcelo Bielsa does things very differently from other football managers, and that doesn’t just mean attacking all the time for ninety minutes or sitting on a bucket (ha! he does do that!). It means doing everything different, and it means leaving Kalvin Phillips out when everyone else and every one of us would play him. But if we want those running stats for bragging rights, and those outlying scatter graphs redrawn to include our style of play, we have to hold on tight while our belief systems are subverted. ◉