Jesse Marsch insisted on great respect for Marcelo Bielsa and did not want to question his methods.
What did Jesse Marsch say?
The American coach admitted that his comments about Leeds being retrained under Bielsa were careless. The Argentine’s reign at Elland Road ended in February when he was sacked after a 4-0 loss to Tottenham Hotspur and Jesse was quickly called up as a replacement. Jesse Marsch led Leeds away from the relegation zone and had previously suggested that the squad had been mismanaged prior to his arrival.
Leeds finished ninth in the PL last season, but have been unable to maintain that form in the first half of the current campaign as a number of key players have suffered serious injuries. Jesse appears to have claimed that Marcelo was at fault during an interview earlier this month, as he said of the team’s struggles, which he could see just by watching games from afar and talking to people at the club, that the stress levels were incredibly high.
According to Jesse Marsch, the problem of trauma, for him, had a lot to do with teaching methods. These players were overtrained and this put them in a difficult place physically, mentally, emotionally and psychologically to recover from week to week, game to game.
It wasn’t intentional
The American coach has now come out to clear up his remarks, insisting that he never intended to aim for Marcelo’s snatch. Ahead of PL’s next outing against Crystal Palace, Jesse Marsch said listen, he wants to say that it was not intentional to attack Bielsa in any way. According to Jesse, it was a little sloppy.
Marsch sees it interpreted in a way, but it was more about the state of the player pool and what he observed. The American thought they would be hard-pressed to find any incoming coach who spoke more positively about the man he replaced than the way Jesse talked about Bielsa. Jesse Marsch says it’s because he has a lot of respect for him.