Marcelo Bielsa strays into bewildering territory as familiar problems vex Leeds United - Graham Smyth

After a Leeds United defeat, Marcelo Bielsa’s press conferences can be a little formulaic.

Questions that must be asked will be asked, but because the problems are always of a familiar nature, so too are the questions.

Did you consider making a change? Were you missing injured or suspended player X? Are your players suffering from a lack of confidence or nerves?

Our conditioning, years of reading and listening to punditry that makes the fixes to any footballing conundrum all sound oh so simple, has us reaching for the most obvious conclusions.

Patrick Bamford didn’t score again, shouldn’t he be dropped? Jean-Kevin Augustin looks good on YouTube, why wasn’t he on the bench or better still, on the pitch? Kiko Casilla is saving far fewer of the shots that come his way, isn’t it time for that young buck on the bench to come in? Helder Costa hit the first man with all those crosses, why didn’t Ian Poveda come on? Your team never scores from corners, why don’t you take some short ones? Why don’t your players shoot from distance more often? Why do they miss so many chances?

They’re all reasonable questions and often the ones that fans want to hear the answers to, but the unintended implication is almost always that there was an easy solution to Leeds United’s problems, one that Bielsa couldn’t see.

When you haven’t won a game that you completely dominated and lost to an avoidable goal, scored by a team the league table shows to be inferior in quality to your own, then you have to expect your methods to come under scrutiny.

Bielsa remains patient when faced with questions he must, by now, be tired of answering – for the most part anyway, there have been times in the past six months when he fixed a reporter, this one included, with a death stare that betrayed his true feelings about a query that had been thrown his way.

He can interpret criticism or a nefarious motivation that hadn’t even occurred to his interrogator. You get a feel for a manager after a while and begin to know the kind of questions he will bat straight back at you. If you ask about Bielsa’s lack of substitutions, he might explain that he didn’t feel anyone on the pitch deserved to come off.

If you ask if he was missing Kalvin Phillips, he’ll explain that whenever a player is not in the side people will always point at his absence when discussing a negative result.

If you ask if his players are suffering from burn-out, brace yourself.

Danny Mills went on Sky Sports News this week and suggested that Leeds looked tired and jaded towards the end of the Wigan game. I would respectfully disagree, but again it reinforces the point that we look for conclusions we can understand easily; something we think we know, something we think our eyes have told us and must be true, even if the data tells another story.

The answers to Leeds United’s problems are not quick fixes, there is no reset button for this magnificent, frustrating machine Bielsa has assembled, mostly from odd parts he found when he arrived.

If you take out one part, its replacement has to be able to function in exactly the same way or the machine will break.

The mistake we make is thinking we understand his machine better than he does.

When a team that can obliterate opponents with stunning passing and movement suddenly runs into a brick wall, confusion reigns.

How? Why?

Bielsa himself strayed into bewildering territory, almost shrugging his shoulders and accepting that Wigan had too many defenders in the box at Elland Road.

It was ‘impossible’ to cross to a Leeds player, he said, in tones that were almost defeatist.

The fault was not with the players, but with him he said, and the problem that has been there for 80 matches is still there.

Right now, it’s exacerbated by the team’s loss of defensive solidity. They are no longer getting away with wastefulness up top, heaping pressure on everyone.

It is clear Bielsa is burdened by the responsibility to fix it; what is not clear, perhaps even to the man himself, is exactly how he will do that.

As if that isn’t flummoxing enough, he might never fix it and Leeds could still go up as champions. And they call this a simple game.