Peter Risdale, Gaetano Berardi and a Leeds United story worth telling - Daniel Chapman

The most gripping words spoken in Marcelo Bielsa’s press conference before the Crystal Palace game were about a player who would not be playing.

Gaetano Berardi, he said, “is going to be returning to training on Monday with the team and, as he gains fitness, he will start being incorporated with the Under-23s”.

This isn’t quite Rodolph Austin coming back from a broken leg in two weeks.

But with plenty of games left in the Premier League season, and United’s expensive new defenders struggling with injuries of their own, the thought of Berardi wearing a Leeds shirt again stirs the soul.

Well, of most people. Some have folded their arms, declaring there’s no room for sentiment in football, that a 32-year-old Championship defender with a torn anterior cruciate ligament has no place in the Premier League, that even giving Berardi a post-injury contract was taking pity too far.

To exclude sentiment from football is to misunderstand it, though. Who, when Leeds were promoted in July, opted to take it stoically, rubbing their tear ducts with sand lest a drop of emotion betray feelings they definitely weren’t having inside?

Sentimentality makes everything better, especially football. The problem with Leeds before Bielsa was the lack of it.

Too few people cared enough about Leeds United Football Club.

What a great, rich, fun time we’ve had of celebrations, street art and, most of all, success, since the players and staff started getting emotional instead of ‘going through the motions’.

Besides, sentiment won’t get Berardi into the team. And once he’s there, sentiment won’t stop him from becoming all the ghosts of Jack Grealish’s trip-hazard nightmares made real.

Berardi will be in the team if and when the team needs him and, once there, he will answer for his quality on the pitch, the same as all the others.

Over the years at Leeds, Berardi has faced more questions about his quality than most. Sometimes that’s been his own fault.

When you two-foot someone in the chest on your debut, people will have questions.

But tough questions and hard answers have defined this Leeds team since the watershed of summer 2018.

Marcelo Bielsa had coached Batistuta, Ortega, Simeone, Tevez.

What was he going to do with Berardi, Ayling, Cooper, Dallas, except laugh and sell them all? Bielsa gets the credit for taking them all into the Premier League but, when he disputes that, it isn’t modesty, it’s philosophy.

He can’t magically grant a footballer new powers. His coaching is about identifying what a player is capable of, and finding ways of getting them to show it.

The challenge for players is that self-discovery with Bielsa takes more work than they’ve ever put into anything.

But that gives us clarity about their achievements.

Every player who has accomplished something with Bielsa deserves every reward. It’s important that Leeds United doesn’t lose those values as it becomes the club Andrea Radrizzani and the 49ers want it to be.

It’s not only to do with Bielsa, it’s ‘old-school’ Leeds. It’s Bobby Collins and John Giles dropping from the top of Division One to the bottom of Division Two where they met Jack Charlton, a 28-year-old who most thought had blown his chance of becoming anything more than a limited, headstrong, Second Division liability.

Leeds United was propelled upwards by the fumes of their anger and determination to get to the top, filling every room and every office until you couldn’t breathe at Elland Road without wanting to prove someone wrong.

Things go wrong at Leeds when they get too easy.

When he bought Robbie Fowler and Seth Johnson, Peter Ridsdale said it proved the club had “moved on from the Wetheralls and Molenaars of this world”.

How right he was. And how Leeds wished they had more players with the maturity and commitment of Wethers and Bob as greed and infighting took over.

The fans forced Ridsdale to apologise.

There is danger in the Premier League that wealth and status can corrupt a club. There is danger, working for Bielsa, that players can become tired of being exhausted, forgetting why it’s necessary.

And there is value in players like Berardi in the midst of it all.

The club’s longest-serving player, rebuilding his leg in the gym every day, working hard so he can help the Under-23s and the first team, every knee bend taking him further from the player who was sent off on his debut in 2014, nearer to the Premier League he as much as anyone helped bring to Leeds.

Watch him at work, and dare to slack off.

Leeds United’s story is about change, from the Cellino ’n’ Hockaday clown show of 2014, to the serious Premier League organisation of today.

It’s a story worth telling every day. That’s not sentiment, that’s success.