Following the Netherlands' 3-1 win over the USA to reach the World Cup quarterfinals, there have been plenty of pludits for Dutch boss Louis van Gaal. The veteran boss has a host of admirers in the game, including former Leeds United head coach Marcelo Bielsa, who paid tribute to van Gaal during his time at Elland Road.
The former Manchester United manager had bowed out from coaching back in 2019, but came out of retirement in 2021 to take up the Dutch national team job for the third time in his career.
However, back in 2019, when van Gaal did choose to originally retire, Bielsa was eager to praise his contemporary, as he managed to turn a question about former Whites winger Jack Clarke into a tribute to the Dutchman.
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The Argentine was and still is a beloved figure at Elland Road after he helped the Whites jump back to the top flight after years in the wilderness of the Football League.
And while at the time it did seem like a rather weird turn of events, Bielsa was nothing if not unpredictable during his spell as Leeds boss.
"Imagining the future never showed you are smart. In something like football it is very typical at the end something happened totally different than people sometimes think," said Bielsa back in 2019 when asked about Jack Clarke's future at Leeds.
"Who tries to anticipate what is going to happen is doing because he knows about these things.
"In football you cannot predict the things. They know Leeds doesn’t have the link to know about what is going to happen.
"For me, it’s important to know Leeds. No-one is going to talk about what is going to happen. At the same time I would like to take advantage of this moment to say thank you to [Louis] van Gaal because he has finished his career as a coach.
"All the people that have learned from me because I was watching his work. My desire is only to say thank you in public to van Gaal for what I learned from him.
"For all of the things he showed to us that deserve to be learned. It doesn’t mean we learned these things, but we tried to do it."
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