Everton v Leeds United: How Dan James solves Whites’ Patrick Bamford issue

But the Hull-born player did prove him right, at least as much as one game can.

With Patrick Bamford having only played 22 minutes of football since mid-September, Bielsa has had to find alternatives. The England international will be missing again for Leeds United at Everton this afternoon.

Almost every other Premier League manager would have another No 9 – possibly a few – available. As Bielsa says, “In the Premier League, and we have shown it already, no one position can be covered by just one player.”

Bielsa has other forwards, but does he have another No 9 – a player who can lead the line, hold the ball up and take the poacher’s chances James snaffled twice at Villa Park?

Maybe Joe Gelhardt can be that player, but Bielsa seems to think the 19-year-old is not there yet. Rodrigo has done the job, but the Argentinian prefers him deeper. Tyler Roberts has only led the line alone four times this season.

Despite that, there was no concerted attempt to sign a senior centre-forward in January – Mateo Joseph Fernandez arrived but the 18-year-old was bought for future first teams. Well, No 9s are so last season, darling – just ask Pep Guardiola.

More often than not, the job has fallen to James, a winger who often plays in a front two for Wales and occasionally did for Manchester United, but has never really convinced as a lone frontman. Wednesday’s brace doubled his Leeds goal tally.

After a precise finish with no backlift and a header bundled over the line from a yard out, James revealed he had been getting into the positions and making the runs Bielsa had spoken to him about but if there is one thing his coach is fiercely allergic to, it is self-congratulation.

“James is a product of his skills, not the habits he may have acquired here,” he insisted, as if we are supposed to believe that a coach with so many worshippers amongst his former and present employees just stumbled upon James’s improvement.

Bielsa always seems to be stubbornly resisting some question or other about his methods as almost all of us doubt him at times, and James has been top of the list lately. He is not the told-you-so type, but a little quiet smugness at the fact the questions about why he insists on playing James down the middle have stopped, at least for a few days, would be justified.

“No special work has been done,” he says when asked how James has adapted to the job. “I think he has the characteristics to play in that position.

“The important thing is the players that compose attacks manage to make them dangerous. The fact James was able to score goals has a special resonance.

“Fundamentally, I think about the offensive game of the team, how best the four positions in attack articulate, the availability of the players and the form of each and depending on that I see what is the best decision I can make.

“To have scored nine goals in the last four games (as a team) allows us to think it is an attack that works.

“In some games, one player scores and in another game a different one does, and there are games where you score goals and games where you don’t.

“But the fact that James scored, I don’t use it as a reason to prove me right because the arguments made after the game against Newcastle (a 1-0 defeat) were also legitimate conclusions.”

On Wednesday it was about more than just James, always a good leader of the press, showing the goalscoring instincts the job demands.

Behind him, playing left of centre in a 4-1-4-1 was Rodrigo, dropping deep and picking passes not just for James’s runs into the channels, but others. He made both his team-mate’s goals.

“They compliment each other,” explains Bielsa. “Rodrigo is able to act as a centre-forward and James is constantly opening spaces for him. Rodrigo has a good capacity for a pass and James makes a lot of movements into the space.”

Perhaps the flipside of Rodrigo partnering Mateusz Klich explains the other number three on the Villa Park scoreboard but as we all know full well by now, Bielsa is a man who sticks to what he believes in.

And whether we can get our heads around his methods or not, he definitely does know what he is doing.