Dette er vel egentlig litt på kanten i forhold til å kopiere fra en betalingsartikkel. Men Phil Hay får ta det som reklame..
Anbefaler absolutt alle å tegne et abbonement med The Athletic. Har hatt det i flere år pga NHL. Nå er Hay ansatt som journalist og skiver om Leeds. Tror ikke du finner bedre tidsskrifter der ute. Rett og slette magisk!
Link fra Hay med et bra tilbud
https://twitter.com/PhilHay_/status/1158642665933672448?s=20Dette er siste artikkel fra Hay der han skriver om Kiko. Verdt å lese om vår keeper!
Leeds’ first ever signing from Real Madrid, the maligned and now embattled Raul Bravo, is a footnote in their competitive demise. But it was Kiko Casilla’s salary that evoked the days when Premier League money was theirs to burn.
Casilla is committed contractually for another four years, but so much of his deal was predicated on promotion when the terms were agreed. A goalkeeper on £35,000 a week is a short-term luxury for a Championship… assuming the club can finance him at all.
Leeds have carried Casilla as their highest earner for seven months, and at the start of this transfer window they were not sure if his deal would be affordable any longer. The wage bill at Elland Road is climbing steadily towards £30million a year and Casilla sits at the very top of it, a Champions League winner (albeit as a perennial Madrid understudy) with more medals in the dressing room than anyone else.
The calamity of his performance in the Championship play-offs last season was less worrying than the basic financial calculations. Could Leeds, with their current turnover and annual losses, justify the cost?
Beyond that was another question: Would Casilla himself want to stick around?
Leeds drew him to the English second tier from the back-to-back-to-back European champions – a transfer United boss Marcelo Bielsa himself told Casilla was “crazy†– by offering the prospect of exposure in the Premier League.
In January, when Casilla signed on a free, the portents were good. The club led the division with 19 games to play. It would not have occurred to the 32-year-old that the season would end with Leeds staring into space and his name attached to the horrible mistake that dictated the second leg of their play-off semi-final against Derby.
Casilla went to Bielsa immediately after that defeat and told him he intended to stay; that he had taken time to adjust to England and the ferocity of his training – liable, players say, to get harder and more exhausting whenever results deteriorate – and was not inclined to run and hide in Spain.
Bielsa liked that attitude, as he liked Casilla from the outset – a goalkeeper with the traits he believes a goalkeeper should have.
So it is that he starts the new season as first choice, but with a reputation in need of rehabilitation.
Casilla is the archetypal sweeper-keeper; a necessary feature in Bielsa teams, which flow from their last line of defence. He was in the Championship for less than half of last season but swept up more times than all but three goalkeepers in the division, all of whom played more than 30 games.
The irony of his hellish evening against Derby in May is that, statistically, Casilla was good at it, drawn into sweeper-keeper mode on 18 occasions and cleaning up successfully 14 times.
What Leeds found was that when he did get his bearings wrong, the costs were high: A red card for a foul on Sheffield United’s Billy Sharp outside the box, a handling error leading to an injury-time defeat at Ipswich and the confusion with Liam Cooper that let Derby back into a tie they were 46 minutes from losing.
Casilla has plenty of good moments last season
Bielsa was generous about the last of those mistakes, saying he could not blame “a specific moment†after a second leg which produced six goals, a red card and more drama than most at Elland Road could cope with. But it was critical nonetheless, allowing Jack Marriott to roll a shot into an empty net at a point where Derby were 2-0 down on aggregate 60 seconds from half-time.
Casilla came, but then hesitated, and a retreating Cooper was caught in two minds. Both players swung at the ball and missed, and the mood in the stadium changed in an instant.
The effect was evident in Casilla’s body language, sheepish and self-conscious as he headed for the tunnel soon after.
Elland Road has not seen a goalkeeper suffer like that since Paul Rachubka’s Leeds career was brutally buried on a November evening in 2011. Rachubka lost his faculties in a league game against Blackpool and the damage for him was terminal. Alex McCarthy arrived from Reading on loan two days later and Rachubka was sent to Tranmere within a month. He never made another senior appearance for Leeds.
Casilla’s display was at a lower end of the shambolic scale than Rachubka’s but came at a higher cost – promotion gone, there and then. Though others in Bielsa’s line-up were culpable, Gaetano Berardi not least for a rash red card, Marriott’s goal burst the balloon.
Nigel Martyn, as safe a pair of hands as Leeds have ever had in goal, felt some sympathy for Casilla.
“A situation like that gets magnified by the profile of what’s at stake,†said the former England international. “If you watch football every week, you actually get confusion like that quite regularly. But more often than not the keeper or the defender sticks the ball into the stands and then they have words with each other. No harm done.
“It can be a difficult call when the ball comes over the top. I used to take the attitude that if I was going to get there first, it was my ball. If your centre-back was closer, you backed off and left it to him. But you get moments when neither of you is sure and you end up half going for it. I made that mistake myself but keepers like to be positive. They like to be seen to be positive. It’s a natural thing.â€
Casilla was brought up to think that way in Spain, coached at Espanyol for several years by Thomas N’Kono, the goalkeeping icon in Cameroon’s run to the last eight of the 1990 World Cup.
N’Kono, nicknamed the Black Spider, stood out with his mannerisms and striking dress sense, always in tracksuit bottoms, and was noted for his powerful, two-handed punches (a habit Casilla has acquired). A young Gigi Buffon, watching on television in Italy, confessed to being mesmerised by him.
Still on the staff at Espanyol, N’Kono has memories of a young Casilla arriving from Real Madrid in 2008 and taking time to blossom until a loan at Cadiz, in Spain’s lower leagues brought his talent out.
“He wasn’t a confident guy,†said N’Kono. “He was quiet and if you told him to do something, to sit down here, then he’d do it and not argue. But he had a big personality as a goalkeeper in the box, one of the best (that N’Kono has dealt with).
“When he went back to Real Madrid (in 2015) I told him, ‘Kiko, you must think of yourself as the best there. You must have the objective to be the best and to play always.’ It didn’t surprise me that he went to Leeds because he wants to play, I’m sure. The condition of having Marcelo Bielsa there, maybe that was it. They were a very big club once.
“At Espanyol, first we wanted the goalkeeper to be good on the ball. Second, we wanted him to guard the goal. Kiko had perception in his play, to see what was happening, and strong technique. Short passing, long passing, he could do it, and he dominated in the air.
“For him, the goalkeeping coach (Leeds’ Marcos Abad) will be important now. Everybody makes mistakes, but they have videos they can use to look and see what really happened and makes some corrections. I don’t know if Kiko really knows how good he is, but he is a very good goalkeeper.â€
Casilla’s positioning game-by-game last season showed a commitment to being as high up the pitch as possible. In that ill-fated tie against Derby, half of his 37 touches were taken outside his box. In the last league appearance made by Bailey Peacock-Farrell before Casilla displaced him, all but one of the youngster’s touches came inside his area.
Playing Casilla brings an element of risk, and there was no compromising with it at Bristol City on Sunday, but Bielsa likes to coach on the edge, with a goalkeeper who retrieves the ball, pushes the tempo and passes as ambitiously as the 10 outfield players.
Peacock-Farrell’s future, as it turned out, was altogether less secure than Casilla’s.
He was first choice until Casilla signed and has been in the Northern Ireland team for the past year, despite being 22, but his contract was due to end next summer and his wage was at the bottom end of the ladder, a mile below Casilla’s.
Asked in June what his intentions were, Peacock-Farrell said: “If I stay at Leeds I’ll be staying at Leeds to play. The two scenarios would probably be I’m staying at Leeds and I’m playing or I’ll have to be elsewhere.â€
An attempt to tone down those comments in a subsequent interview did not change the underlying sentiment; that, as Billy Bremner once said, you get nothing for being second.
Last week, Peacock-Farrell signed for Burnley.
Despite holding a place in the line-up until after Christmas, Bielsa lost confidence in Peacock-Farrell around November and would have dropped him had Chelsea loanee Jamal Blackman not broken a leg in an under-23 match. It all left Bielsa in a delicate position, with one goalkeeper who had been cast as a liability and another who didn’t quite fit.
Leeds needed a good start to this season; and in light of events against Derby, Casilla did too.
“Casilla needs five or six good league games before people will let him off,†said Martyn. “He won’t struggle to process the mistake, because he’s operated at a very high level for a long time. The best thing you can do is show that you care and if he’s committed to staying then he obviously does. But when something like that happens, it leaves a label on you.
“He could be player of the year this season, absolutely outstanding, and Leeds could get promoted, but if he goes into the Premier League and makes a mistake, straight away people think back to what happened against Derby. It’s harsh but true. You can’t get away from it. Not entirely.â€
Had Casilla wanted an exit strategy, Sevilla and Villarreal were viable destinations for him but Leeds saw no agitation in his demeanour and no indecision about what should come next.
Outgoing transfers and the relief of shedding excess salaries gave the club the breathing room to keep him in the building. He has trained well and trained hard and let his personality come out, in a way which convinced everyone that the error against Derby has been boxed off.
Casilla rarely played for Real Madrid but they valued him and on the day he left for Leeds, their squad presented him with a shirt bearing the words “siempre de los nuestrosâ€: always ours.
They love him in Spain but in England he is searching for kudos, under pressure to ensure that Marriott hitting an open goal is not his defining image.
