Quarterback is considered one of the most important and highly pressured roles in world sport, but that responsibility is exactly what Jesse Marsch wants from Illan Meslier with Leeds United. The Whites have conceded eight goals in the six matches Marsch has overseen, but recorded their first clean sheet since late November on Saturday.
Meslier generates a lot of interest as one of the youngest stoppers playing regularly in Europe’s biggest five leagues and with his peak not expected for another 10 years, there is a frighteningly talented prospect on United’s hands. After an encouraging series of performances in his first Premier League season, Meslier has felt the pressure a little more at times in this campaign, underlined by statistics which suggest he perhaps should have stopped more goals than he has in 21/22.
Whatever your stance on Meslier, Marsch is keen to keep giving goalkeeping coach Marcos Abad the freedom to take the lead with a little input here and there from the American. The head coach wants Meslier setting the tempo and deciding the way his team attacks when he has the ball at the back.
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"First of all, Illan's talent is massive,” he said. “He is a young goalkeeper that is as good as any young goalkeeper I have ever seen.
“That's really exciting. Then he has a really good mentality, he wants to work, he wants to learn and he wants to improve.
“Marcos has done a very good job with him as a mentor and a teacher. So they have a good relationship and, for me, how I work, I can't go through technically and tactically every detail for a goalkeeper like goalkeeper coaches can.
“The way I work is I trust the goalkeeper coach a lot to help the player adapt to the things I want. Certainly, being the last defender is always really important because we like to play very aggressively with our backline.
“Then what I can do with my experiences is I can see how to help a goalkeeper with his mentality, his decision making. When he has the ball in his hands, he is the quarterback of that situation and he understands what type of rhythm of play we want from the match.
“I'll talk more about those types of things than I will, ‘did he move one step to the left, did he move one step to the right’, that I'm not as good at evaluating, but the work Marcos and I have done together with the staff has been quite good and then the work we've had with the goalkeeper group has also been very good.”
Kristoffer Klaesson has had an inconsistent first campaign in the UK, turning in up and down performances for the under-23s throughout this year, but he shone for all the right reasons in Marsch’s fourth match. When Meslier had to leave the field with injury, it was the Norwegian who came on to make his full debut in the 55th minute of the match before making more than one match-winning save.
“The last word I said to Kristoffer before he stepped up to the [Wolves] match is he's trained well, he's had that mentality to do whatever he can to be the best he can in training every day, now's the time to reward himself for that work,” he said. “I can only say when we needed him he came up massively in a massive game and we know now, if we ever need him, he's ready to go. I love that in young goalkeepers.”
