Phil Hay - Inside Elland Road column: Marcelo Bielsa's injury-crisis hands Leeds United's youngsters chance to shine

Leeds United head coach Marcelo Bielsa (middle) with Jamie Shackleton (right) and Carlos Corberan (left).

Carlos Corberan's job title, convoluted though it is, gives him the task of quality control. He is part of Marcelo Biesla's iron circle, the often impenetrable backroom team which assists Bielsa anytime and anywhere, but Leeds United left one of Corberan's feet in the academy with 'responsibility for creating a pathway with the Under-23s and Under-18s, and ensuring consistency of football philosophy.'

In layman’s terms it falls to Corberan to encourage a single, defined style of play but Leeds pushed the policy of consistent coaching further when they asked Richard Cresswell to head up their clutch of academy managers in April.

Cresswell was given the remit of maintaining a training model from the eldest of Leeds’ youth teams down to the youngest. It was not about asking primary school kids to mimic Bielsa’s tactics and high-press – “that would be madness,” Cresswell told the YEP – but about having a system where different squads blend naturally with each other.

Continuity matters at Thorp Arch because Leeds’ better prospects rarely move with in line with their specific age groups. Many years ago, without realising, the club breached Football Association guidelines by fielding Lewis Cook in the Under-18s when the midfielder was only 13.

Ronaldo Vieira bypassed United’s development squad completely and James Milner is still the second youngest goalscorer in the history of the Premier League. Those were quantum leaps made to look easy by footballers so precocious and they explain why a club would devote itself to establishing the same philosophy at every step of the ladder.

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Three or four years ago, when Neil Redfearn was switching between running the academy and firefighting with Leeds’ first team, he had several players to show for the work Thorp Arch was doing: Cook, Sam Byram, Alex Mowatt, Charlie Taylor and Kalvin Phillips.

They were in full view of everyone, an advert for the production line, but Redfearn would often say that what was hiding in the squads at Under-15 and Under-16 level had the scope to be more special again. Some of those names are filtering through now and few individual crops in all of the years of youth development at Leeds have allowed the club to fall back on academy footballers in the way that this one has.

Bielsa has a track record of pushing potential, beyond the odd gamble here and there. He gave Newell’s Old Boys the teenage centre-back partnership of Mauricio Pochettino and Fernando Gamboa and he fast-tracked a core of the players who took Chile to the Under-20 World Cup semi-final in 2007.

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Throughout his tenure as Chile’s head coach he listened to calls for him to drag David Pizarro, the silky playmaker who was then at Roma, out of early retirement but Bielsa always refused to go begging to his door. Chile qualified for the 2010 World Cup without Pizarro and Bielsa increased the debt of gratitude which grows wherever he goes. “It’s because of him that I am who I am,” Alexis Sanchez said in 2012.