There’s a long way to go before I’ll be ready to accept Jesse Marsch as my new dad, but it’s good to know we can break the ice with our shared interest in enemies.

Like a lot of Leeds fans this week, one of the first things I learned about Marsch was that he once started a fight after kicking David Beckham while playing for Chivas against LA Galaxy. He only really kicked him in the hand (admittedly at stomach height), but Posh Spice’s husband was feeling precious, sprinting to square up to a not-arsed Marsch, quickly backing away when he only met a smirk. He should have been angrier with Chivas midfielder Alex Zontrico, who was sent off for headbutting a Galaxy player in the tear up started by Beckham’s tantrum.

Marsch was only giving as good as he got, anyway. “[Beckham] kind of got a piece of me in the play before that, so it was somewhat of a retaliation, somewhat of a tactical foul because he was on the break,” he said. “It was harder than I would have liked it to have been. I apologised to him and I told him I respect what he’s about. He was kind of done with me though.”

In Grant Wahl’s book The Beckham Experiment, LA Galaxy’s Landon Donavon accused Beckham of lacking commitment to the club, treating it as “a joke” and taking the team for granted. Other unnamed players criticised his lack of leadership. Marsch’s tackle at the end of a goalless first half not only seemed to inspire his Chivas teammates, but must have earned a few admirers among the Galaxy squad, who rather than backing Becks rolled over to lose 3-0 after the break.

It was a valuable lesson in the virtues of anti-Scum bias for Marsch, who after retiring from playing joined Bob Bradley’s coaching team with the USA ahead of the 2010 World Cup. Rob Green’s biscuit wrists helped the States top their group ahead of England, and their success was also aided by leaving former Scum defender Jonathan Spector as the only outfield player in the squad not to get on the pitch.

(Marsch was interviewed by Bradley for a podcast during lockdown, and they discuss using a helicopter pilot who was the inspiration for the film Black Hawk Down as a motivational speaker for the players. I couldn’t think of anything more like a Red Bull equivalent of Marcelo Bielsa teaching his Leeds squad about humility by asking them to pick up litter around Thorp Arch, and then started feeling very sad again.)

It doesn’t exactly take much, but since becoming a manager in his own right Marsch has also had an endearing habit of upsetting Frank Lampard. He was the manager responsible for New York Red Bulls’ 7-0 demolition of New York City in the Hudson River Derby of franchises, a day now known as The Red Wedding. Mike Grella created the second goal after leaving City’s right-back face down on the floor. NYC manager Patrick Vieira preferred to give a young winger called Jack Harrison his debut off the bench first before eventually bringing Lampard on with his team already losing 5-0. He was called “Super Frank Lampard” by the stadium announcer, and booed onto the pitch by his own supporters. The result equalled MLS’ record defeat, and NYRB would have bettered it if Lloyd Sam hadn’t missed a couple of sitters.

“If I’m getting booed for being injured, then there’s not much I can do about that,” Lampard said afterwards. An NYC blog responded with an article titled, ‘Frank Lampard doesn’t get it. He should just shut up and play.’ Lampard was being paid a $6m salary, more than the entire NYRB squad combined. After he was paraded around New York as one of the new club’s marquee signings ahead of their inaugural 2015 campaign, the 20,000 season ticket holders paid to watch Lampard miss most of their season and play for Manchester City instead. He was absent at the start of the 2016 season due to a calf injury, and fans were bemused when Lampard agreed to join BBC’s coverage of Euro 2016 while the MLS campaign was still ongoing. As if they couldn’t be more dubious of him, he also admitted he likes Phil Collins. ‘If you still choose to ignore what this whole saga entails after all this time — it is a choice — then you haven’t done your homework,’ Sam Dunn wrote.

Marsch and NYRB were less sympathetic. When Lampard retired the following year, they were accused of being ‘classless’ after the club’s official Twitter account posted a gif of him being nutmegged by Grella, accompanied by the straightforward caption: “Bye.”

????????bye???????? #NYisRED pic.twitter.com/VGkNewQ8Nn

— New York Red Bulls (@NewYorkRedBulls) February 2, 2017

Lampard was again being irritated by Marsch towards the end of his time as Chelsea manager. They had met in a pre-season friendly at Marsch’s Red Bull Salzburg in the summer of 2019, when Christian Pulisic scored twice in a 5-3 win for Chelsea. Marsch later recounted a conversation with Lampard that had given him the impression Frank had some preconceived ideas about Pulisic. Marsch told Extratime Radio in 2020:

“The perception in Europe, mostly, is that the American player is willing to run, willing to fight, has good mentality, but technically they’re not very gifted and tactically they’re not very aware and their experiences aren’t very big. But we’re seeing that change. We’re seeing more and more of these players develop themselves.

“Even Frank Lampard, when I spoke to him in preseason a year ago now, I was talking to him about having Christian Pulisic, and he was kind of like: ‘Yeah, he’s got a lot to learn, so we’ll see how he does.’ I said to him: ‘Listen, he was at Dortmund, and they had a high level of tactical thinking, of playing, and he was very successful.’

“He was considered one of the best young players in Germany, and that’s in a group of players with Timo Werner, Kai Havertz, Joshua Kimmich, these kinds of players. He was in a group with those players, and it’s not just because he was talented but it was because he understood the tactics and understood how to fit in the game and he was developing a real astute way of how to play.

“I could see right away that Frank Lampard’s idea of Christian Pulisic was shaped a lot by the fact that he was American and not that his football education came a lot from what has happened in Germany. Since then, I think Lampard has learned that Pulisic is a lot better than he gave him credit for.

“Christian had to fight for that, which is the American quality, but he’s a damn good player. Same with Gio Reyna, same with Tyler Adams, same with Weston McKennie.”

Given Marsch saw how Lampard couldn’t handle Mike Grella, no wonder he was worried what he might do with Pulisic. But Lampard, surprising nobody, bit:

“I did read the comments and was surprised Jesse had managed to read my mind as well as he thought he did. He’s recounted the conversation wrong. It was a game against Salzburg where we played and Christian scored two goals in pre-season. Jesse came up to me and said ‘what a talented player’, which I knew, and I agreed with, and I spoke about how it is exciting for us to see how he can develop. That was the conversation. Jesse managed to put it across slightly differently.

“I’m not jumping on Jesse but as a manager I never doubted Christian and it’s important for me to put that straight. I played in America for eighteen months and I would never underestimate the desire American soccer players have, to learn and improve and take on information and understand the technical side of the game. So when you have that, which Christian has along with incredible talent, it was never in doubt for me.”

Yet again it was a case of other people getting poor ol’ Frank Lampard wrong. Just like those nasty New York City fans who saw him for about five minutes of the eighteen months he spent taking their money. If what he says is true, it’s interesting that a conversation between Marsch and Lampard resulted in such a miscommunication. You don’t have to read many interviews with Marsch to understand he pays a lot of attention to how he is communicating, and how he is coming across. In comparison, when Lampard was sacked by Chelsea, numerous outlets reported he hadn’t spoken to certain members of the squad for months, with The Guardian describing the atmosphere at training as ‘cold and distant’.

If Marsch wants to use clear communication to start building a bond with Leeds United fans, he could do a lot worse than beginning his first press conference with a nice straightforward question: ‘Has Frank Lampard stopped crying yet?’ ⬢