Bielsa was attracted to Lille by the vision of two men, the owner Gerard Lopez [ex-president of the Lotus F1 team] and the former vice president of Barcelona Marc Ingla, who is now director general of Lille.
Ingla played a big part in the appointment of Guardiola as head coach at Barcelona in 2008 and working with Bielsa is bringing back memories.
“He reminds me of Pep Guardiola sometimes in the way that he has an extreme intensity,” said Ingla.
“Playing at extremes always generates stress in the systems but I think it’s good to push everybody and every single point or lever that can make us better. The players, the club or the infrastructure at the training ground.”
El Ghazi said: “He is a little bit different, he can be very aggressive and shout at people but then he’ll be very quiet.
“He pushes everybody to the limit, for example my body fat used to be 10% or 11% and now it’s 8%.
“We train a lot, it’s very physically and mentally hard.
“You do the kind of actions that you do on the pitch. We train like a realistic game, like passes you would do during matches, those type of things. Training is very different to what I experienced when I was playing at Ajax. We don’t do position games and we don’t do a lot of matches during the training sessions.”
