Graham Smyth: What makes Marcelo Bielsa's mix of youth and experience just the right blend for Leeds United

If Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds side was a player, he would be approaching the sweet spot of age and experience.

The 19 players fielded this season have an average age of 26.5 – five months older than the Championship’s average.

Barnsley, who sit at the very foot of the table, are the youngest team by some distance and, as evidenced by their performance against the Whites, are a good example of a side lacking the nous that only experience can bring.

Yet for all the ‘old heads’ in the Leeds side, players with hundreds of senior appearances, players like Kiko Casilla, Pablo Hernandez, Luke Ayling and Stuart Dallas, there are 20-year-olds like Jamie Shackleton and Tyler Roberts and teenagers like Leif Davis keeping the average age down.

Bielsa is reknowned for giving youth its chance and developing talent – it was one of the key reasons Lille made him their head coach in 2017 and that trust he places in youngsters has yielded 10 senior debuts for academy and Under 23 players at Leeds.

A mix of youth and experience is held up as an ideal at clubs everywhere. Yet it does not always work, which proves it is not an easy blend to get exactly right.

Lower league clubs often look to the loan market to bring youth into their side, relying on kids from clubs higher up the food chain, kids who might not understand what it takes to make it in the men’s game.

Liam Cooper’s former centre-half partner at Chesterfield Ian Evatt admitted during the Spireites’ slide from League One to the National League that he would like to put a few young players up against the wall, in the way he was when he didn’t do his job as an apprentice, lamenting that those on lucrative youth contracts did not know the importance of winning.

Louis Dodds, who played alongside then West Brom loanee Roberts at Shrewsbury, called the Welsh attacker a ‘breath of fresh air’ compared with many of the those who came in from big clubs, who simply didn’t get it, didn’t try to fit in like Roberts did.

There is no point producing talent if they aren’t adequately prepared for the men’s game.

At Leeds, the culture is set in stone long before players reach the first team – age group sides play like the first team and the rigorous physical demands of Bielsa ball are engrained in everyone at Thorp Arch.

When a young man does enough to warrant inclusion in the first-team squad, it is not only the input of the head coach and his staff that sets him up for life in the ‘real world’ of competitive football, senior players are playing an unselfish role in educating and encouraging the generation who will eventually replace them, a generation already pushing the revolving door by which the seniors will depart.

Given how strongly Bielsa values ‘good humans’ it is no surprise that the quartet of veterans recently rewarded with new contracts have all shown magnanimity towards fledgling Whites.

Cooper has been a huge help to Championship rookie Ben White, Dallas has taken fellow Northern Ireland player Alfie McCalmont under his wing in the international set-up, Ayling has been cited as a positive influence by Davis and Klich is the big brother figure for teen compatriot Mateusz Bogus.

In each of those cases, the more senior man has had plenty of positive things to say about the more junior player, yet they are all straight-talking characters who will undoubtedly put a stern word where a kind one won’t do.

“If anyone is dropping below those standards they’ll be told and put straight back on track,” said Cooper last week, assuring a room full of Leeds fans that the standards set at Elland Road will be maintained.

Examples of the required standard are not hard to find.

Hernandez, 34, sprinting after the ball with the pep of a man half his age and running round the lake at Roundhay on his week off, leads by deed.

The attitude of Gaetano Berardi, who bides his time patiently on the bench and throws himself, all of himself, into the fray at any given opportunity, should speak loudly to Robbie Gotts, whose days as an unused sub must by now feel never-ending.

And then there’s Thorp Arch poster boy himself, Kalvin Phillips, the living, breathing, tackling, passing proof of a pathway to the first team.

He’s Leeds, Phillips, by birth, by nature and by nurture. He’s 23, he’s played 159 games, he gets it.

Until cloning becomes the next big thing in football, the next best thing is churning out young players who have been baptised into the culture, steeped in it and can, like Phillips, embody both the youth and the experience Leeds need. Bielsa gets that.