Dean Smith Aston Villa
As with most managers in the top flight of English football, Dean Smith a coach with pedigree and the success to back it up. Speaking ahead of this weekend’s return fixture, Dean Smith has addressed the challenge of Leeds, gushing in superlatives for the Yorkshiremen.
Dean Smith said: “They’re a team that I love to watch play. They’ve come into the Premier League and lit it up, in terms of how they’ve played. I have an awful lot of respect for the work that Marcelo Bielsa has done. I’m not sure another manager could have gone into a club like Leeds and made the impact that he’s had on them,” Smith said, at odds with many assumptions made by Premier League pundits and opposing fans that Leeds’ style is unsustainable, and embarrassing in the event of a heavy defeat.
The 49-year-old then drew specifically on Leeds’ exertion as a team, running more than any other opponent this season.
Dean Smith added: “I look at the players’ physical outputs and they’re doing things now that they weren’t doing before. That’s a credit to Marcelo Bielsa and his tactics. I think there are an awful lot of similarities between the two teams. We got to the Premier League a year earlier than Leeds and we had our struggles last season,” Smith divulged, before going into the particulars. We lost a few of our key players to injuries for the season – Wesley, John McGinn and Tom Heaton. We had our struggles and we managed to stay up. Leeds have hit the ground running and found that it’s a real tough league and you can be inconsistent. They’ve done fantastically well and there are similarities between how both teams play.”
