Why it's time to talk about Leeds United's Mateusz Klich and his ever-present Marcelo Bielsa record - Daniel Chapman

Suddenly it’s time to talk about Mateusz Klich, because he’s gradually played 82 consecutive league games for Leeds United, and the occasion needs more than the usual, ‘Klich played well again’.

That run of games beats Gordon Strachan’s, nudging Klich into conversation with the Peacocks’ iconic midfields: Strachan, Batty, McAllister, Speed; Billy Bremner and Johnny Giles; Jermaine Wright and Matthew Spring. Somewhere in there.

Marcelo Bielsa’s midfield won’t be remembered the same way as our greatest, but then, Bielsa is forcing us to remember things we’ve never had to think about before.

United’s formations are such kaleidoscopes that, as Kalvin Phillips drops into defence, Pablo Hernandez roams across the front lines, and Jackie Harrison and Helder Costa toe the touchlines, the idea of an iconic midfield fades away as Mateusz Klich stands in the middle alone. Glasses and a backpack and a CD wallet full of Polish hip-hop, game after game after game.

The weariness we feel watching Bielsa’s often-frustrating attacking often disguises the hard work done to defend it: our head is still in our hands after another fluffed chance, so we don’t see the closing down, the battle and the tackle and the turn, until Leeds are already threatening goal again.

Against Reading, Klich caught a ball crossing the line before it bounced and threw it back into play before the referee had signalled; could you still call it a ‘stoppage’?

With one solitary midfielder by name and trade on the teamsheet, Leeds do an incredible job of containing their opponents. Don Revie’s Leeds used to do it by playing so high that crossing halfway meant encountering Norman Hunter, and it was wiser not to try.

David O’Leary could put David Batty, Lee Bowyer and Olivier Dacourt into the middle of the pitch, like one of those fun-runs where people line up to throw paint at you from all sides.

But Klich? He’s alone out there, with fleeting, vital company.

The misfiring final balls get a lot of attention at Leeds, but the contribution of the same players to the division’s second-best defence can’t be ignored. Two of Bielsa’s tenets, of man-marking and immediately regaining possession, mean the centre of the pitch is as steady as a Valentine’s Fair waltzer.

Criss-crossing Klich’s domain come Costa and Harrison, Luke Ayling and Stuart Dallas, Phillips and Ben White, Pat Bamford and Hernandez and even Kiko Casilla, if the mood takes him.

They pursue and confront, and what position they’re playing depends on how you define it: where they start, where they finish, or where they journey along the way?

Klich’s part in all this is less to roam than to facilitate the roaming. He’s like a hard-working roadie for Pablo & The Wingers, instinctively available to change a string to keep them in tune, produce a spare snare for the rhythm section.

Only United’s coaches have his running stats, but that you always see him when he’s needed suggests how hard he’s running to stay out of the limelight.

Klich won’t leave the impact on our memories of a Strachan or a Giles although, given the online persistence of the Graphics Interchange Format, the gif of him shushing Hull City’s bench guarantees him a sort of immortality.

If West Yorkshire ever sends a capsule into deep space in search of life more intelligent than we find over our borders, I vote we put that clip on a floppy disk and shoot it to the stars.

Klich is Trevor Cherry or Brian Flynn, a consistent sideman, well regarded and fondly remembered; he’s Ian Snodin; or he’s Alfie Haaland, in which case, United need to offer contracts to all his babies.

And if he is ever not in the starting XI this season, Bielsa will have to answer a question he’s avoided so far: how to replace him?

It’s not a problem we anticipated. After Thomas Christiansen forced his exile to the Netherlands, Klich could only make the maybe squad in Bielsa’s first summer.

This story could have been about the Polish Yosuke Ideguchi, but became a tale of midfield ever-presence.

Lynchpin, stalwart, professional; some of English football’s best praise sounds backhanded when applied to someone so effervescent.

‘Midfielder’ hardly seems to encompass all Klich is and does, either. But, whatever he’s been doing for the last 82 games in a row, Leeds United now wouldn’t be the same without him.