Stan Collymore believes Leeds United head coach Jesse Marsch should leave the club at the end of the season regardless of whether he keeps them in the division. The former Liverpool forward claims Leeds supporters have not shown enough respect to Marsch for the job he has done so far in difficult circumstances.
Since replacing Marcelo Bielsa at the helm, Marsch has won three, drawn two and lost four of his nine matches in charge. The Whites’ five-match unbeaten run between late March and early April, though, has not stopped them sliding into the relegation zone ahead of the final three matches.
Marsch has attempted to make Leeds a more difficult side to beat during his time at the club, though that has impacted some of their attacking threat, particularly in recent weeks. Some supporters have raised question marks against the style of play, which Collymore cannot get his head around.
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Writing in his latest Daily Mirror column, Collymore claimed that the reaction of some Leeds fans is unjustified given the circumstances in which Marsch arrived.
He said: “If I was Jesse Marsch, I’d pack my bags at the end of the season and get myself back to the Bundesliga or a big job in the MLS. Because the narrative I’m hearing from Leeds fans right now tells me so many of them have disappeared down the rabbit hole of the cult of personality that I find it, frankly, astonishing.
“There seems to be absolutely no dissection of the job Marcelo Bielsa did and the state he left their club in. Instead, it’s all, ‘This is really bad from Marsch and we sacked a legend, an icon, for it. Why?’ Why? The answer is simple.
“You did it because with Bielsa still at the helm you were definitely going down and at least Marsch has come in and given your club a fighting chance of staying up, even if ultimately he fails. The idea that, ‘This isn’t for us, this is rubbish’, is laughable because it was properly rubbish when Leeds were losing by threes and fours under Bielsa and had the worst goal difference in the league.
“He did 95 per cent of the damage in that time by not going into games with a system of play which could give his side a chance to get enough points on the board and keep goal difference at a level that, in the squeaky bum time of the season, would mean they could still be competitive.
“He just kept trying to thrill and saying ‘This is the way I play’. But that makes Bielsa fundamentally a very poor manager in this day and age, and as a result the man brought in to sort out his mess has been left with a woefully green squad which only knows how to play one way.”
