Jon Ribas, a journalist who wrote a book about Loco’s two years of management at the club, reveals what his day-to-day life was like and the demands, eccentricities and gestures that bear his stamp

By

Sergio Levinsky

Marcelo Bielsa managed Espanyol, Athletic Bilbao, Olympique Marseille and Lille (Getty) in Europe

Jon Ribas is a very prestigious Basque journalist who writes for the newspaper “ El País”, from Bilbao, and is a specialist in cycling and in Athletic, and spoke with him Infobae in the cafeteria of the Hotel Embarcadero, located in the noble area of ​​the city, where the highest fortunes in Spain live.

-In this place, in the Embarcadero Hotel, Marcelo Bielsa lived the entire period in which he worked as technical director of Athletic.

-When the first year ended, and It was not known if Bielsa was going to renew the contract, one of the signs was that a colleague of mine, who worked in Advertising in the newspaper, tells me that he thinks he is going to continue because they told him that he renewed the card of the video store where he used to go. , a few meters from the hotel. Then the newspaper “El Correo” published a photo walking with his assistants along a street that is the one where the police station where the residence permit must be renewed. Because if not, everything was very closed, inaccessible. One day Javier Irureta, a renowned former player and coach, who lives in the area, crossed paths with him on his walks. He was going to say something to him, but he saw that Marcelo was walking concentrated looking down, and he preferred to leave him alone.

-His usual assistants worked with him…

-Yes, as a physical trainer, Luis Bonini –now deceased-, who was a wonderful person- and Claudio Vivas. There was a funny anecdote about when they arrived, and they began to negotiate where they were each going to live with their family, and Bonini became infatuated with an apartment that he liked, and he told the general secretary of the club so that they would try to get it, and the secretary told him “yes, don’t worry. I talk about it with Marcelo…” and Bonini immediately interrupted him and said “no, no, no… then no, forget it”, because surely Bielsa would have given a series of parameters on where each member of the coaching staff had to live and it looks that those pretensions did not fit with the intended humility (laughs).

-It seems that Bielsa left a mark on Athletic, right?

-Yes, for many things: for the team’s play, for some personal reasons. One of them was his fight with the lawn mower at Lezama, the team’s training ground. That was amazing.

-he came very far, it seems…

– It was in a preseason and he came to give a press conference to blame himself for having hit a club employee. I wasn’t in Bilbao because I was covering cycling, but I didn’t go to dinner because I wanted to see it online and I saw it twice because I couldn’t believe it, because it was already rumored that I had hit this person and the turnout was huge, and they started timidly asking him questions about how the preseason was going, until an intern from my newspaper got excited and asked him about that rumor, and Bielsa changed his tone and said “that question requires a fairly long answer,” and he had brought a folder with a piece of paper with the complaint that he had made against himself so that the victim could use it against him because he felt that he had abused him for occupying a position of power, although he said that person was undesirable.

-And this person finally made the complaint?

-He was in charge of the work. Bielsa had asked the club for a play and they told him yes, they would do it, but when he returned from vacation, the play hadn’t been even a quarter done and with that he had a terrible anger because he prepared the preseason in Lezama thinking of that there would be the works, but he got there and they were all holes. He went crazy with the board of directors and publicly denounced the company in charge of the works (the club later came out to defend the company) and from then on the schism was total, although there was a meeting with the club and it was decided that he should continue. Three days after this decision, Athletic was playing a match in Grenoble, and since I was covering the Tour de France, I left that competition to cover the match and the atmosphere between him and the board was cut with a knife.

Bielsa in Athletic Bilbao with Fernando Llorente

-Later he left because he did not want to renew?

-They didn’t offer him a renewal because of all that wear and tear and that’s when Ernesto Valverde came.

-There was also the football brand, like that remarkable campaign in Europe…

– Yes, that was terrible, but the team was broke because the same players were in sixty games. Oscar de Marcos, who is still at Athletic today, I think he played 63 games, Susaeta, as many. He played all the league, Copa del Rey and Europa League matches, because that year Athletic reached the final of both cups, against “Pep” Guardiola’s Barcelona in the Copa del Rey and against Atlético Madrid in the ” Cholo” Simeone in the Europa League, and lost both. Although Barcelona was very complicated, Simeone had just started at Atlético and in the League, Athletic beat him 3-0 so it was said that the favorite was the Basque team, but in that final in Bucharest they all came out with their legs trembling, and that there were forty thousand people to see them from Bilbao. It was a squad with an average age of 23, and instead at Atlético there were seasoned players.

-Many remember that dance that Athletic gave Manchester United at Old Trafford…

-That was the best match that I have seen in my life live. I was at Old Trafford and next to me was a colleague from the newspaper “El Correo”, and I asked him if he had seen something fantastic as I thought and he confirmed it, because sometimes it happens that you think you see something that seems exaggerated, so I wanted to corroborate it, because it was fantastic. And the second leg in San Mamés was another fantastic match. In Bilbao it was always said that the best game that had been seen was Athletic-Manchester United in 1958, before the plane crash in which many players of the English team died, and that it ended 5-3 for the European Cup, and that it was played with snow. But for me, the two games with Bielsa against Manchester United were the two best in history. And then he played against Schalke 04 and it was also a great game, which Athletic won as a visitor 2-4, generating counterattacks in the 95th minute, as if the game had just started.

Bielsa in his characteristic crouching pose at Leeds United

– And what was said about Bielsa at the time? What was the explanation for that performance?

-Like he had given the players a terrible ambition. And there were players who after Bielsa have not done anything, for example the left back (Jon) Aurtenetxe, who later played two more years and disappeared.

-Con Fernando Llorente there were problems…

-Yes, he was in conflict with the club because he wanted to leave, but once he had a fight with Bielsa in training and he was kicked out, and you can see that on the Internet for something very special and rare , because Bielsa always trained behind closed doors, and in San Mamés, absolutely all the training sessions were open doors.

-And why is that?

-Because from the first day he realized that here it was different. In the first training session there were three thousand people and he realized the respect there was, because people have the habit of going to Athletic training sessions, but in silence, and so he decided not to close the doors.

-But then there were no tactical secrets….

– No, no… You saw that he used three fields at the same time, full of dolls and things, tapes…. Once José Luis Mendilíbar (a coach) said that now they put the fields that look like airports (laughs), They were rubber dolls similar to those in the movie “And where is the pilot”, who were called “the Germans ”, because they were wearing a white shirt and black pants. And you could see all the training, absolutely everything. And no one has ever done this again. There are trainers that always open once a week or two, because they know how people are. It was only five or six years ago that I saw a security agent for the first time in Lezama, because there never was one. It’s a very special club.

– And what about any football action you’ve taken that you thought was crazy?

-It’s just that everything has been crazy from the beginning (laughs). He once got angry with the players in a Europa League qualifier against Turkish side Trabzonspor. In San Mamés they tied 0-0 and in the second leg they had to play in Istanbul but an hour before starting, it was suspended because UEFA eliminated another Turkish team, Besiktas, from the Champions League and then that place went to Trabzospor, and for that reason, Athletic was given that place without playing. And then the players had a party in the locker room and Bielsa told them everything: “If we don’t even play, what are you celebrating?”.

Currently Bielsa is technically in charge of Leeds, a team that achieved permanence in the Premier League

– And how was it generated? such an improved relationship later?

-The cycle started more or less. The starting point was the fifth game of the League, at Anoeta, when Athletic won the classic against Real Sociedad 2-1 with two goals from Fernando Llorente and Real’s goal was scored by Iñigo Martínez, who today plays for Athletic. The first season ended up being fantastic but the second season was bad, but more than anything because of the wear and tear that there was. There is another crazy thing that I remember.

-Tell me.

-In the second season you have to play against Eibar, which was in Second B (Third), in the Copa del Rey. In Aizpurúa they tied in the first leg, and in San Mamés Eibar won 0-1. In other words, a Second B team eliminated Athletic. A few days later, Bielsa appeared in Aizpurúa, wanting to speak with the Eibar coach, Asier Garitano, and with his coaching staff. They didn’t understand why, they were surprised, but they made it happen. Bielsa brought a cardboard box full of papers and explained to them that it was so that they would not believe that he had been disrespected by not preparing the match, and told them that those papers were all the notes on how he had prepared that match, and that they should not believe that they had lost by disrespecting them because he prepared the game just like everyone else. Those papers were kept as a souvenir. Also in the box were videos etc.

-Amazing…

-When he had not yet taken office at Athletic, because Urrutia, who was the president who brought him, had not yet won the elections, they presented him with a videoconference in which he appeared from Argentina. He had been talking for 15 seconds and said that he apologized but that he had to go to the bathroom (laughs), and with all the journalists there looking, he got up, went to the bathroom, came back a few minutes later and said again “excuse me” and gave an exhaustive talk in which he showed that he knew all the players, all the youth players, he broke down all the videos of the matches that Athletic had played the previous season, he showed graphics, a total obsessive thing. That’s how it was in life here too.

-In what sense?

-In this hotel where he lived, he got up at five in the morning and asked for the newspapers to be brought to him, but they explained to him that in Bilbao, at five in the morning, there are no newspapers, so he resigned himself and walked out to the end of the walk, about two kilometers. There I had a coffee in a bar and then went downstairs to talk to some former sailors, who are usually there fixing boats to sail and my sister, who works in that bar, thinks that the sailors didn’t even know who that man was who talked to them all the days (laughs). In fact, Athletic offered him a car to get around to go to training, and they had an agreement with a brand, but he wanted the smallest utility. He also sometimes went up to a very small town, with about a thousand inhabitants, and there he ate the red beans, which with chorizo ​​and black pudding make up a stew that is a delicacy here, and he always went to the same bar. Sometimes he would park and children would come with their figures so that the players could sign their album. One day he asked the children to give him all the albums and two days later he came back with all the albums signed and two tickets for each child for the next game. Of those stories, he has many.

Marcelo Bielsa in a chat with the Athletic Bilbao squad

-And with the local press, did you have any anger?

-He had a constant anger with one of the TV, who asked him twisted questions. Once, before a match against Sporting Lisboa, he asked him about the expropriation of YPF from Repsol by the Argentine State and although Bielsa said he did not want to get involved in that, he answered in favor of the Argentine government, so I asked him a political question. time later and he told me “after the mess that was armed with that time, I prefer not to answer” (laughs). The press conferences were fascinating and you had to prepare the question well because if not, it would expose you. He never gave a single exclusive interview.

-Just like when he was coach of the Argentine national team.

-Another anecdote is when he put up some posters on the bench.

-How was that?

-Some posters that said “Poor Clares”. People realized that he put them on because the fourth official ordered them to be removed. And that was because he had gone to a convent of Poor Clare nuns with his wife, in Guernika, and had asked them to pray for him, that he was going to remember them in some way, and the poster was made by the prop man, José Ramón Gallego, member of Athletic champion in 1984.

-What a character…

-I had a colleague from the newspaper who worked in Layout, not in Sports, who was very bielsista and one day, his children left him a book as a gift at the club, and after a few days, the clerk who works in a store from below his house, told him that they had left something for him and that it belonged to Marcelo Bielsa, that he had gone to his house but since he could not find it, he left it in that store and that he insisted to the employee that he He would make sure that he was going to give her that gift. She left, and after a while she came back and asked him again if she would surely give him that gift. And once he realized it was true, he also left her some tickets for the Athletic match.

– You have a book about Bielsa,

-Yes, yes, “The Follies of Bielsa”, from the editorial “Al Poste”, about the two years he was in Bilbao, the story of those two years, which were frantic.

-Was there someone comparable to Bielsa in the history of Athletic? Maybe Javier Clemente?

-No, neither, because he took on a home team, which was great, and made it champion, but it’s not the same . Here the one they say was most similar was Ferdinand Daucik, a guy who coached Athletic for two years and won a league, who was eccentric. He was kicked out for putting the number nine goalkeeper in a match (laughs). But Bielsa is incomparable. Also for this reason, great technicians went to visit him to talk with him.

– Like Guardiola.

-And like Zinedine Zidane, who when he was studying to be a coach and Bielsa directed Olympique de Marseille went to see him and although it seems unusual today, at that time, Bielsa received him as if he were an intern, which is almost what he was then . And Guardiola went with David Trueba, the film director, a friend of his.

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