This article is part of Football FanCast’s Pundit View series, which provides opinion and analysis on recent quotes from journalists, pundits, players and managers…

Leeds United are sitting pretty in the Championship at the moment as they’re currently five points clear of third place and they look good value to go on and achieve automatic promotion.

However, we’ve been here before, and it’s likely that many will be fearing a repeat performance of last season’s capitulation.

At the time, Leeds’ poor run towards the back end of the season was partly attributed to the much perpetuated ‘Bielsa burnout’, but one player from that team believes that wasn’t the case.

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What’s been said then?

Kemar Roofe took part in an interview with The Daily Mail, and he spoke about his time at the club.

One topic that the striker was keen to speak about was the rigorous training regime that the Argentine put him and his teammates through.

“You’re coming off the training pitch properly tired. You’d be empty. You couldn’t go and do extra finishing. Before every game we’d work on about five different formations and our individual roles in each of those.”

“We’d play 11 versus 11 at least once a week and that was harder than an actual game. He’d be shouting, shouting, keep going. If he saw you walking he would be on to you, shouting. No rest. You had to be at 100 per cent. People thought we’d die off but our stats showed we didn’t,

“Our training load didn’t die off, either. If anything, he upped it through the season. You’re told you’ll get fatigue and you can only do a certain amount of kilometres during the week before a game, but he blew those theories out of the water.”

Encouraging

This should be music to the ears of every United fan.

We know the Argentine is still going on with his tough regimes after Kalvin Phillips’ recent comments on his ‘murderball’ sessions, but there is seemingly no need to be worried about potential burnout.

Unfortunately, Roofe was unable to put his finger on what cost United last term, but the fact that he wrote off this particular theory should be encouraging. Leeds’ injury history has been well documented but even despite that, it looks as though Bielsa continues to push his players.

This might seem like madness but the Anderlecht striker claims the pure effort put in by the players in training wasn’t actually the issue.

Roofe’s comments make it seem as if they’ve been doing everything right on the training ground, so the Whites shouldn’t be expecting a repeat performance of the disastrous conclusion of the 2018/19 campaign.

If you bear in mind Bielsa has now had even more time to bed in this method, the players should be accustomed to it.

In other news, Marcelo Bielsa may want to consider switching his system after one man was ruled out of this weekend’s match