Billy Elliot, Marcelo Bielsa and how ballet can help football - Anthony Clavane

After the film hit the cinema screens in 2000, there was a surge in the popularity of ballet.

The Billy Elliot effect, which led to a rise in the number of young lads attending dance schools, will surely now be supplanted by the Marcelo Bielsa effect.

Let me explain.

To the uninitiated, Bielsa is the genius currently driving Leeds United’s push for promotion to the Premier League.

When the heartwarming tale of a coal miner’s son growing up during the miners’ strike was released at the turn of the millennium, the Mighty Whites were soaring.

In the following two decades, the club’s demise has been the stuff of folklore.

Now, just as Billy Elliot is about to be re-released to mark its 20th anniversary, United are flying high again, playing the kind of football that is blowing the mind of both opposition coaches and broadsheet scribes.

“When you watch Bielsa’s teams,” gushed Cowley, “it’s almost like you are watching a choreographed dance.”

This was before Luke Ayling’s astonishing opening goal, which took football choreography to a new artistic level. Watch it on YouTube and prepare to be amazed.

It also blew the mind of The Guardian’s Jonathan Liew, the latest columnist to fall for the charms of the Yorkshire club’s “thrilling and iconoclastic” play.

With nine games to go, Leeds’ long-awaited return to the promised land is in their own hands.

“The Premier League is a multiplex,” noted Liew, “and there are few more

box-office managers in the world than Bielsa: a method actor in football’s theatre of the absurd.”

It might seem a tad pretentious to suggest the enigmatic Argentine has got Ayling and Co playing like a team of Rudolph Nureyevs, Marlon Brandos and Eugene Ionescos. So, let’s just settle for a team of Nureyevs.

It was the sitcom character Alf Garnett, bizarrely enough, who said “football is

working-class ballet.”

Perhaps the English National Ballet had Alf’s quote in mind when they put on a show called The Beautiful Game a few years ago.

In it, they interpreted several great soccer moments, including Gordon Banks’ save against Brazil in the 1970 World Cup and Johan Cruyff’s famous turn four years later, through the medium of dance.

Nureyev, by the way, once said Cruyff should have been a dancer.

If the ENB ever revive the piece, they must include Ayling’s goal.

It was the culmination of an aesthetically exhilarating sequence of passes, the epitome of control, balance and grace – although as his players exploded into ecstasy a few yards away, Bielsa sat motionless on his bucket, staring into middle distance, refusing to join in the celebrations.

There remains, of course, a stigma around boys and ballet. Even shows like Strictly Come Dancing and the rise of world superstar Carlos Acosta – who dreamed of being a football player in his native Cuba before going on to become one of the biggest names in dance – have not made pirouettes as popular as step-overs.

Many lads are still uncomfortable taking classes due to the stereotypes associated with men in tights.

They should know that the former England star Rio Ferdinand won a five-year scholarship to the Central School of Ballet before becoming a professional player.

That John Barnes was sent to ballet classes to improve his footwork, co-ordination and balance.

That pundit Dion Dublin once used the dance discipline to help him recover from a serious injury.

And that, according to a study undertaken in the 1970s, ballet is ranked as the most physically and mentally demanding of all performance arts.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s back to YouTube to watch Mateusz Klich’s back-heel to Pablo Hernández. Hernández’s first time lay-off to Jack Harrison. Harrison’s deep cross to Ayling who, having run 60 yards up the pitch, spectacularly volleys the ball into the net.