T
he Succession actor Jeremy
Strong was the subject of a
fascinating profile in The
New Yorker two weeks ago.
The reporter, Michael
Schulman, lasered in on some
scintillating details about the
extraordinary lengths that Strong
goes to embody his characters: joining
weapons exercises at a military base;
fracturing his foot by running in dress
shoes; weeping loudly during the
filming of a funeral scene, even
though he wasn’t needed on set that
day.
But the piece was not a celebration
of Strong’s commitment. Instead it
read as a rather thinly veiled, and
occasionally downright catty,
criticism of his almost monastic
devotion to the craft. “He’s not
playing it like it’s a comedy. He’s
playing it like it’s Hamlet,” the
programme’s executive producer
Adam McKay, was quoted as saying.
The piece said something
interesting about our modern attitude
to work. These days it is considered
unbecoming to treat your job with
this kind of intense seriousness. The
ideal job is no longer a vocation; it is
Stop frowning on deeply devoted Arteta
the times | Saturday December 18 2021 1GS 9
Sport
now a cool and aspirational adjunct
to one’s personality. It is supposed be
a passion in the modern sense, not
the classical one of something you
suffer for.
Of course there are always some
people, in all walks of life, who swim
against the tide. Football is essentially
an unserious business, and most
managers are attuned, at least to
some degree, to the game’s innate
levity: most obviously Jürgen Klopp,
Emma Hayes and Brendan Rodgers,
but even the likes of Pep Guardiola
and Thomas Tuchel break character
occasionally.
But there are two coaches in
particular who, like Strong, just can’t
turn it off; who stand for immersion,
discipline, and above all the sanctity
of work; who amid the knockabout
soap opera of the Premier League act
at all times as if delivering a soliloquy
to a skull. And on Saturday they come
face to face.
Marcelo Bielsa has already
overachieved wildly at Leeds United.
His Yorkshire years have been rich
not only in success and significance,
but also in the compelling details of
his legendary obsessiveness.
Devouring books on psychology in his
ascetic apartment. Ordering the
removal of the hillocks between two
training pitches. One of his first acts
was to get his squad to spend three
hours picking up litter, to replicate
how hard the average supporter
would have to toil to afford a ticket.The work is everything. Strong has
said he takes his role “as seriously as I
take my own life”. Bielsa admits that
“when we win, I come alive, when we
lose, I die inside”.
With Bielsa, the method is the
madness, and the madness is the
method. There is nowhere else to go.
This is by far his toughest spell as
Leeds head coach. The goals have
dried up: last season they averaged
1.63 a game, this season exactly one.
The reality of working with a small
squad is beginning to bite.
Yet just as Bielsa’s team know only
one way, to keep attacking even as the
scoreline deepens, so Bielsa himself
cannot change gears simply because
Leeds are involved in a relegation
fight. He will keep on working his
players from morning to night,
cogitating furiously in his office
in search of solutions, expressing
himself in the same severe and
pensive tones. It is not so much a
case of fighting fire with fire as
fighting gravity with gravity.
Mikel Arteta is a sort of
spiritual grandson of
Bielsa, as the protégé
of Bielsa’s protégé,
Guardiola. Since
Boxing Day last year,
only ManchesterCity have won more Premier League
games than Arsenal, and only City,
and Chelsea and Liverpool —
narrowly — have taken more points.
Arteta’s team win a lot of close games,
and take a few hammerings. But still,
that is a fine record, and yet it seems
as if there was more buzz around
Arteta when he was appointed than
there is now.
If there is a lack of excitement,
perhaps it is because the man himself
resolutely refuses to channel it. Arteta
does not convey an enormous sense
of fun. If his tenure has had a defining
note, it has been a fixation on culture,
discipline and rigour. Arteta talks a
lot about the hard yards, the need for
strict values, the importance of
the task. Most of the time he
appears on television it is with
the sombre mien of a
newsreader announcing an
important death. His latest act,
stripping the captaincy from
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, a
popular player who
exemplifies a smilier,
more exuberant,
laissez-faire approach
to the profession of
football, appears
defining.
The kind of
approach practised
by Arteta and Bielsa
is not supposed to be
compatible with the
rhythms and values ofa world populated by millennials and
denizens of generation Z. Modern
athletes need light and shade. They
need to switch off. Many Bundesliga
clubs, such as Hoffenheim,
incorporate video-game sessions into
their training. Graham Potter’s unique
but successful regimen at Ostersunds
famously included ballet lessons and
a book club.
Yet Arteta and Bielsa, at least for
now, have succeeded on their terms,
and retained the devotion of their
players. How? Partly because they
have got results — not always, but
often enough. You need capital to act
like this, and they have had it. But
also, I think, because their seriousness
bespeaks the deep care that they have
for their clubs and their craft. It is, on
some level, a manifestation of love.
When someone cares so intensely
about something that they dedicate
every cell of their being to it, it is hard
not to respect that.
So Bielsa and Arteta collide at
Elland Road at different points in
their trajectories, but representing the
same essential truth. Every art form,
whether it’s football or acting or
something else, needs people who
take it with the utmost, agonising
seriousness. The idea that any of this
— players on a pitch, characters on a
screen — matters greatly is an
illusion, but it’s one of the most
wonderful and enriching illusions of
our lives. We should admire those
who help to preserve it.James
Gheerbrant
Arteta’s intensity
simply reflects
his seriousness
about his craft