Marcelo Bielsa would have made an awful politician. One of his more refreshingly idiosyncratic traits is his habit of never pointing the finger of blame at somebody else when he can point it at himself. There are times when this appetite for self-criticism takes on an almost monastic hue: a live Zoom flagellation, a reminder that no external judgment on Bielsa could ever be as scathing or searching as his own.
Injuries, individual errors, referees, fixture pile-ups, financial disparities: in the world of Bielsa none of this really seems to register. “The position of [Mateusz] Klich was an error on my part,” he said after last Saturday’s 3-0 crushing at Everton, after an appalling performance by the Pole in midfield.
