You just had to do it didn’t you Marcelo?
You just had to go and make me disappointed with you again. I genuinely do like you and think you’re a fantastic manager. The job you did last year in taking Leeds up from 13th to 3rd was amazing, and ‘Bielsaball’ is incredibly fun to watch, but sometimes you don’t make it easy for me.
In his press conference yesterday, Bielsa spoke not only about tomorrow’s opponents Nottingham Forest, but also have an overview to how Leeds have operated over the summer in the transfer market.
There was one part of it though that got me slightly worried, and not for the first time, about how about Leeds went about their business:
“If Roofe was here we wouldn’t have signed a third striker, we cannot forget that Roofe only played half a season last year and he scored 15 goals. If he continued making the same goals in the games he missed he would have been one of the most important in the league. I don’t want to hand the responsibility to other players but of course, when you are a striker you are linked with the number of goals you score and every striker in the team will be instructed to score goals.”
Now that first sentence is what should get the alarm bells going. To me that says, if Kemar Roofe was still here, he wouldn’t have gone into the market for another forward. So he didn’t plan on signing Eddie Nketiah until after the Roofe deal was completed. That to me says that Nketiah was a panic buy, and once again, this all comes down to Leeds not getting things in order.
Do you remember when Leeds fans wanted you to buy another striker? They were doing it all summer, before all the Kemar Roofe news came through, they clearly had some level of foreshadowing, so why didn’t you? This is exactly why you needed to get everything sorted as early as possible, so you wouldn’t find yourself in a panic and rushing around trying to find an alternative.
As I said yesterday some of this falls on the board for not tying down Roofe’s contract earlier, but at the same time Bielsa has to take some blame for not demanding moves were done sooner. At the end of the day, if results go the wrong way, it’s never the board that gets the sack.