Enthralling encounter shows Leeds' qualities as Marcelo Bielsa's side compete admirably

At the end of it all, Marcelo Bielsa declared that ‘there were no tactical aspects which were significant’ and it certainly looked that way. This game evolved into a wild, free, beautiful kind of football, defying any strategic blueprint, with both sides simply running at each other, hell for leather.

But when the dust settles on 90 minutes which demonstrate once more how Leeds’ intensity scrambles the minds and pre-conceived plans of top sides, there is a strong case to say that the older of the managers left Elland Road with the strategic honours.

It hadn’t seemed likely to turn out that way. Bielsa had talked of his protege’s ‘imagination’ as a ‘creator of solutions’ and sure enough, the Spaniard arrived in Yorkshire with a bespoke strategy: strangling the life out of Kalvin Phillips, Leeds’ creative fulcrum at Anfield three weeks ago.  

Phillips was so busy trying to wrest himself free of Kevin de Bruyne, Phil Foden and Riyadh Mahrez and find the smallest square of turf for the first half hour that finding the pass to break Manchester City’s defensive lines was not even a part of the equation.

The Bielsa Anfield strategy of playing five players high and getting behind the opponent’s high defensive line high only works if you can locate that quintet. But when Phillips is being burgled by de Bruyne, allowing City to flood forward, it’s a long chase back. For 30 minutes, there was not a Leeds midfield to speak of. You feared for them.

Bielsa did not flinch. He did not change the strategy so much as demand that his players believe in it. The usual script when City score early – as they often do – is that Premier League opponents drop deep, reclaiming the midfield territory Leeds were sacrificing, and protect themselves against an avalanche of goals. Bielsa’s players headed in the opposite direction.

They started pressing City harder, establishing a foothold in the game and relinquished their initial sense of awe. They began to make Phil Foden, Rodri and Benjamin Mendy look very ordinary players. They created a physical contest and, until the last ten minutes, won it. 

As Bielsa put it in the aftermath: ‘There are a lot of ways to analyse football but there are two [fundamental] things: you shouldn’t give the ball to the opponent and they shouldn’t take it off you. The game represented this.’

But it was Bielsa’s half-time change of personnel – Ian Poveda for Ezgan Alioki – which provides the greatest food for thought around the Etihad today. Poveda, recruited by City from the Brentford talent machine four years ago, has not had a sniff of a senior start at the club, much like Jack Harrison, on loan from the Etihad and equally promising.

As the 20-year-old ran at Mendy and created a new attacking flank down the Leeds right after the break, you wondered where on earth Guardiola’s curiosity and powers of technical assessment had been, sanctioning the player’s release in the first place. Rodrigo, the goal-scorer an 55th-minute substitute, will take the headlines today but Poveda was the fulcrum of Leeds’ second half turn-around. It was he who initiated the move which brought a finger-tip save out of Ederson. 

Leeds attacked with abandon, allowing City room to mount their own counter-manoeuvres as the game swung back and forth. But amid the mayhem Guardiola made the strategic move which brought the game back under his own side’s aegis. Fernandinho’s arrival, for Riyad Mahrez on 77 minutes, allowed City to regain possession and control.

‘If you watch when Guardiola apparently makes a defensive change, bringing Fernandinho on – this is when they started to impose themselves on the game once more,’ Bielsa said in the aftermath. ‘It was a very intelligent substitution and had a big in influence on the game. A lot of the time you have to defend better so you can attack well.’ This was that heady Anfield opening fixture revisited, except with a Leeds defence that looked more robust than back then.

In another time, at another place, it might have seemed like two points dropped for City, though at the end of it all Guardiola embraced his old mentor and pumped the officials’ arms in a manner resembling a man who had just won the lottery. The season for him may be long and hard. His side does not look the finished article by any means. But he knew he had just witnessed something special.