"Highly likely...": Phil Hay drops big Thorp Arch change that'll have LUFC fans raving - opinion

The Athletic’s Phil Hay has revealed one of the big changes that Jesse Marsch is “highly likely” to make at Leeds United…

The American was appointed swiftly after the club’s heart-breaking decision to remove Marcelo Bielsa from his position as manager at the weekend following their latest loss in the Premier League.

Now, all eyes turn to what Marsch can do in these final few months of the top-flight campaign, and Hay has claimed that Thorp Arch could see one critical change.

In a fan discussion for The Athletic, he detailed: “It’s highly likely too that Marsch will alter the training week and alter the training load, which might help to refresh the players.

“Bielsa pushed them to the limit and while that was a virtue for so long, I felt it was apparent in the past month that nothing was working as it needed to. There was a sense of a plan grinding to a halt.”

As Hay suggests, Bielsa pushing these players to their absolute limit of what they could do, both physically in terms of their conditioning and technically, eventually saw the Whites just hit a bit of a brick wall.

The Argentine managed to push every last drop of blood, sweat and tears from his players and they duly responded with getting the side promoted and achieving a superb finish in their first season back in the Premier League.

But such an approach over a long period of time was always going to come with its pitfalls, none more so than the club’s disastrous injury record – the likes of Kalvin Phillips, Patrick Bamford and Liam Cooper among others have all spent considerable time away on the side-lines when they have been so desperately needed on the pitch.

If Marsch can come in and just make that very important tweak of how hard the players get worked during