Leeds United, 2019-20 articles, Blog, Blog 2019-20, Free, The Square Ball Week

The Square Ball Week: The Striker’s Art

Pat Bamford Leeds United Lee Brown The Square Ball

Marcelo Bielsa needs a striker. He likes Che Adams best of all, and Leeds United would so like to please Bielsa that they’re willing to spend £20m to get him the striker he likes the best.

If Marcelo liked me as much as he likes Che, I’d be there for him for a packet of biscuits, never mind £20m. Likewise, I wouldn’t need a £20m striker giftwrapped and given me to make me feel wanted. I’d welcome devotion in the form of, well, a packet of biscuits.

Things are different in professional football, though, and Bielsa, waiting for a striker, is yet to receive so much as a single cookie. Leeds, who don’t have cash burning any holes in their pockets, but are willing to set their bank account on fire for Marcelo, are flipping the pages of their scouting research like an anxious parent with an Argos catalogue on Christmas Eve, while Marcelo points stubbornly at the one toy their money can’t buy.

Bielsa has a reputation for being stubborn, although he vigorously denied it when the Yorkshire Evening Post’s Graham Smyth asked if he was “demanding” to work with during a transfer window. Bielsa countered by listing all the players Victor Orta brought to the club who are now in a team near the top of the league, as if to say, a stubborn manager would have demanded the purchase of a top-class midfielder, whereas Bielsa simply sighed and turned Mateusz Klich into one instead. It doesn’t exactly help Bielsa’s argument: whether he demanded it from the transfer market or from Klich’s exhausted body, he still got the top-class midfielder he wanted. But he insists he’s willing to make do.

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If there’s one position where Bielsa might be flexible, it’s centre-forward. The unsuitability of Eddie Nketiah, followed by the rejection of Ryan Edmondson and the fixation on Che Adams, has created a perception that wearing the number nine for Bielsa is a job very few are qualified to do. I’m not sure that’s the case.

As he has with most things in football, Bielsa has quantified the ways it’s possible to score a goal. But unlike most things in football, he hasn’t found a method to guarantee that any of them will happen in a match. He seems to accept that what a striker does in the eighteen yard box is at least as emotional as it is technical; his key test for a penalty taker is how confident they feel. In a confined space, filled with hurtling bodies, and one ball bouncing unpredictably between them, technique you might spend years perfecting carries no more advantages over the ability to force the ball over the line with a buttock. There are aspects of football about which Bielsa is shockingly Warnockian, only he confines the mixer to a much smaller space, and pays much more detailed attention to how the ball is, eventually, gerrin’ in there.

Bielsa’s laissez-faire shrugs about finishing chances are balanced by his obsession with creating them; he often uses the word ‘building’ when the talks about attacking, and that is Bielsaball in a nutshell: building structures that build attacks. The scaffolders are more important than the swimmers in the rooftop pool, and that focus upends the way we understand the distribution of players on a football pitch, where we traditionally expect the skilful players — Thierry Henry, Lionel Messi — in attack, leaving the cloggers at the back.

Not for Bielsa. The game is about how to move the ball forward from the back, so that’s where the players with skill and vision need to be: at the back, so they can look up the pitch and pass intelligently and precisely, whether short or long. The space you have to scan, study and pass forwards into reduces the further you move up the pitch, so the task should become easier, and need less skill. From the byline, Jackie Harrison has one question to answer: how do I get the ball to Bamford? But the goalkeeper faces a much more complex situation: which one of their ten teammates should receive the ball to start a move to get the ball forward and eventually get it to Bamford? Should I give it to Ben here, Liam on that side, or can I fulfil the coach’s demand for fast attacking, and pass it from here all the way to Jackie?

When it comes to attributes, save the close control, range of vision and passing technique for the goalkeeper, because that’s where everything begins. Our glimpse of Ilan Meslier at Arsenal was like a visitation from Gary McAllister. Some dream of Messi and Bielsa being united at their old club Newell’s Old Boys, and fear Messi being used as a playmaker from right-back. From Marcelo’s point of view, he might as well be a goalkeeper. It doesn’t matter that he couldn’t catch a corner; neither can Kiko Casilla.

The striker’s life, under Bielsa, is spent without the ball. He plays with nobody forward of him, and only a few yards of pitch, so a lack of finesse can be absolved if he’s got a butt that scores goals. He needs to be able to understand space, and how to run one way to create it, then run another way to fill it again and score. He doesn’t need to be able to pass if he can spend ninety minutes creating space for Liam Cooper to pass into.

Bielsa referred to this once when discussing Nketiah’s running stats: he covered the kilometres, but he was always running towards the ball near the goal, trying to score. He wasn’t doing the important part: running away from the ball and the goal, because space scores goals. I’m sure Nketiah wasn’t expected to get himself into the sort of physical battles Pat Bamford does, but he was expected to learn how to run out of position, so his markers would be out of position, too. He never quite seemed to grasp it.

Bamford has grasped it, and his body allows him to add aggression, too. But not always. The mystery with Bamford, tall, strong, sarcastic, unshaven, is how he turns timid in the penalty box. If he was a worse footballer, he might be a better striker, but he gets sucked into emulating the soft-footed skills of Jackie and Pablo and loses the ball under his kitten heels, when he should be yanking off a stiletto and swinging wild and strong.

Luciano Becchio used to be derided for his touch, criticised as a ‘limited’ footballer who couldn’t make or control a pass. But that ignored that all players have ‘limits’, and for a centre-forward, those limits were perfectly acceptable. What Becchio had, that others hadn’t, was the power and skill to head a ball into the goal from the edge of the penalty area, while Bamford can hardly summon the strength to kick it the same distance into the keeper’s hands. Becchio, like Mark Viduka and Lee Chapman before him, wasn’t only a master of the physical side of the game, but of the physics, of understanding the interactions of objects, forces and velocity, so that if a ball was travelling at a certain speed in a certain direction, he knew how hard to kick or head or bum it in another direction so it went into the net.

Luciano Becchio has just turned 36. If Neil Warnock hadn’t sold him, and he’d kept going at his rough average of 40 games a season and 20 goals, he’d be closing in our top ten league appearances chart and have already beaten Peter Lorimer’s record of 168 league goals. That’s before I even try to think about his increased scoring rate with Harrison laying on the chances, instead of Luke Varney laying on the floor with his legs scrambled. If we don’t score the goals we need to go up this season, don’t blame Bamford, blame Warnock.

Viduka would be unstoppable in this team. Lee Chapman too. Go find a video of Chapman twisting his body in mid air at high speed so his forehead crashes into a ball moving even faster and sends it in the direction he wants. Then find a fourteen stone ballet dancer who can do anything like it. He could make any cross into a good cross by heading it into the net; outside the box might have been a different story, but that’s where Chapman had Gordon Strachan, who could turn any misshapen hoof in his general direction into a good pass. If we signed my other fave, Mathieu Smith, he’d have Pablo Hernandez to do the same. He’ll be in Leeds on Tuesday: Victor, I say it every year, get that deal done.

Or get any deal done. Che Adams would meet the criteria, and Marcelo Bielsa might have eyes only for him, but the criteria for a number nine are loose. The more important factor is that we’re trying to seduce with biscuits rather than millions. It should be enough. We’re looking for someone who can run and score, because centre-forward is a simple game, even when, especially when, playing for Bielsa. ◉

(Read Moscowhite’s new book: 100 Years of Leeds United, 1919-2019.)

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(photo by Lee Brown)

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