As the world's madness rages around him Marcelo Bielsa will play a tune Leeds United fans all know - Graham Smyth

No matter how revered he is by fans of previous clubs or national teams, Bielsa may never have given people what he is giving Leeds fans as we enter a second lockdown.

During the first one, he and the position Leeds had carved out in the Championship gave a city and thousands of Whites worldwide hope, but there was little else he could contribute because football itself stopped.

We didn’t hear from the Argentine until games recommenced and his press conferences started up again.

This time, as daily life that still hadn’t yet returned to anything like normal for the vast majority of us is so rudely interrupted yet again by a virus we haven’t killed off, football goes on and Bielsa can give his people familiarity.

Experiencing again and again something to which you have long become accustomed can breed contempt, but 2020 is the year that has us longing for things we know and love and things we took for granted for years, like visiting grandparents, having dinner with friends or standing in a crowd as a band plays live music.

Lockdown, for the second time this year, makes the prospect of normal life and the chance to wrap ourselves in sweet familiarity feel further away than ever.

So while football is not as important as embracing loved ones, or as significant as matters of health or job security, when a host of other sources of happiness, joy and beauty have been stripped away, football is something.

It’s not the same as it was when Elland Road was packed and you could see, feel and hear so vividly the emotions of other human beings experiencing Bielsa’s football that the hairs on the back of your neck stood up, but it’s something.

Even when Leeds lose, like they did on Monday night, it was a two-hour period in which the heaviness of our current reality was suspended, as football has always had the power to do. In the hours and days after, it’s something to talk, think, debate and disagree about. It provokes human interaction with almost zero real-life consequence. You can’t even get into a pub, never mind get into a fight in a pub over expected goals, right now.

Give me an hour-long argument with no satisfactory conclusion or agreement about why Pablo Hernandez should not have been replaced by Tyler Roberts, over another second of pro- or anti-lockdown rhetoric.

Appreciation and analysis of the way Bielsa’s Leeds press, the way they attack and their mesmeric one-touch passing is the good stuff. But even suggestions from those who clearly haven’t been watching or listening closely enough for two years that Bielsa needs to change his ways to get results, are preferable to the grim subject that has forced football behind closed doors.

Bielsa once said: “I love football and I love people who love football and from the people who love football the ones who interest me the most are those who find a satisfaction in football that they couldn’t get anywhere else. That is, the poorest people.

“All the rest we have different alternatives to recreate ourselves. But people who live in poverty only have football.”

So many of us are fortunate to enjoy lives free of the crushing oppression of poverty, but all of our lives have been made poorer in some way by the pandemic and those who love football can thank their lucky stars that they can still cling to the sport, at least at the elite level Leeds play at, during this lockdown.

Whites can cling to the comforting knowledge that, from the first whistle to the last, their football team will exhaust themselves not only to win but to entertain.

Results and performances will fluctate and cannot be guaranteed, but a syle of football they have fallen in love with will not change, not while Bielsa remains in charge.

There is so much to be said for that, at a time when everything you have ever known is being disrupted or challenged or withheld.

And unlike Zoom quizzes or Joe Wicks’ PE videos, Bielsaball will not become tiresome, not even if Leeds go to Crystal Palace and find the frustration that traditionally characterise visits to the capital.

This week, a video of a bespectacled man in Barcelona calmly playing Eternal Flame on a piano as curfew madness raged behind him went viral.

For Leeds United, Bielsa is that man.

As the world goes mad around us, he will continue to play a tune we all know.