Why Leeds United's Kalvin Phillips problem will never be easy to solve for Marcelo Bielsa - Daniel Chapman

What happens to Leeds United when they play without Kalvin Phillips.

They lose to Arsenal, that’s what, although recently and historically that’s not unusual. So perhaps it wasn’t only to do with Phillips’ absence.

And perhaps it’s dishonest to ask the question that way, when what we really want to know is, are Leeds United a one-man team?

We don’t like to ask so impolitely, though, because it’s not fair on Phillips, the other players or Pascal Struijk.

The Peacocks were renamed in one player’s honour in the 1950s – John Charles United – and it always made good, gentle King John uncomfortable.

One thing Kalvin has in common with the King is genial warmth, so I expect he’d share Charles’ embarrassment about one being made more than 11.

Leeds win as a team and lose as a team.

But the latter does seem to be more likely when Phillips isn’t one of them.

As a result, we can slip too easily into picking on Pascal Struijk, the way Neil Warnock used Tom Lees as his reliable blame-bag.

Struijk looks as comfortable in the Premier League as any of United’s defenders, and can look forward to a happy career at the top level the way Gary Cahill, for example, can no longer.

But when Phillips is missing, Struijk looks lost in his shadow. It’s not entirely his fault. It’s not like he picks himself to play there. It’s Marcelo Bielsa’s decision.

And Bielsa says that Mateusz Klich or Stuart Dallas, better midfielders than Struijk, would have a harder time than him in defensive midfield. It’s fairly faint praise for Pascal – to imagine how much worse he could play – but it illustrates that the position is a challenge even for experienced players.

Struijk is giving it a good go and, as Bielsa also points out, who else could do better?

Robin Koch has played in midfield for Germany and was bought with that versatility in mind, but his bad knee is preventing him. Alfie McCalmont was in the frame but is now on loan at Oldham.

Jack Jenkins has done the job for the Under-23s but, with Struijk, Jamie Shackleton, Tyler Roberts and Niall Huggins at the Emirates, United were already young enough.

Leeds don’t have a like-for-like understudy for Phillips and, while some might portray that as poor squad management, we might also ask, how else could it be?

Kalvin Phillips is an England international approaching his peak years, who has made himself a specialist in one of Bielsa’s key positions and would fetch more than £50m from the insane notion of a transfer.

Leeds United are very lucky to have one of him. How could they possibly have two?

It’s a paradox of Premier League squad building. You want the best players possible in the first team, but the better the first choice gets, the more ordinary his back-up looks.

Even if Leeds could afford another Phillips for emergencies, it wouldn’t be long before they wanted to play in a first team elsewhere.

Liverpool have this problem with Virgil van Dijk. Arguably the best defender in the world, he completed Jurgen Klopp’s team, as he should for £75m.

With him, Liverpool approach perfection. Without him, Liverpool approach Preston with a couple of million quid and a scouting datasheet, desperate for reserves.

Instead of stocking up on one-to-one copies, versatile players expand a small squad, as Don Revie found with Paul Madeley. He was United’s most valuable player because he could play anywhere, a real one-man team.

The problems came for Revie when his players tortured themselves through 60-game seasons and Madeley, exhausted himself, couldn’t cover four absentees at once.

That’s Bielsa’s problem now.

By normal calculations, Phillips should be available for 90 per cent of games, so his cover only has to get Leeds through the other 10 per cent. Struijk or Koch could do that. Football doesn’t care about your abacus, though.

At Arsenal the attention was on who filled in for Phillips but, as Bielsa pointed out, the team was already without Koch, Diego Llorente, Rodrigo and Ian Poveda; Klich played unfit.

Defensive midfield was just the last domino of the overall effect. We might wonder, then, with so many changes already forced, why make more to shuffle Shackleton and Luke Ayling around?

Perhaps because this was the last chronological domino, but the most important. Leeds are not a one-man team, but Kalvin Phillips’ quality is unique. Bielsa was trying to cover for a player like no other, and no squad will ever have an easy answer to that.