The oddball coach they call El Loco

If that all sounds like something out of a David Lynch film, then you should see him in public action. His performance is so odd that he might just have stepped off the set of Twin Peaks.

Take the eve-of-match press conference here where he was in classic form, sitting motionless at the top table, tracksuit zip pulled uptight to his neck, never once making eye contact with anyone but just gazing down at his microphone and mumbling answers, ranging from the monosyllabic to rambling lectures, which routinely drive the country's football writers to despair.

When Argentina played in Wales recently, the official interpreter was left crushed because he could barely understand a word of what he was saying. To Bielsa, the World Cup is not a football tournament but "an aesthetic, visual, artistic episode." To him, Argentina's one weakness is "a lack of purism in its technical gestures." Er, thanks, Marcelo.

His glum demeanour is so unchanging that you wonder if he's ever smiled. When asked how a man who presides over such high-profile teams could himself maintain such an invisible profile, he just muttered: "Because I'm not a star."

In terms of lack of charisma, this is true. Yet as a football coach, there are those coming round to the idea that the cerebral approach of this lawyer's son, who brings everything from the study of modern philosophy to group psychology into his demanding coaching mix, may be turning him into one of football's brilliant revolutionaries.

When he got the job in 1998, his record at club level in Argentina with Newell's Old Boys and Velez Sarsfield had been impressive, but given the most enviable selection of international talent to work with, it has now become awesome. Before today, Argentina had lost just once in 25 games.

There were plenty who first doubted his stature and ability but they've long since been converted, even if he's now become probably the first coach ever to be accorded that familiar, affectionate South American tag of El Loco, the crazy one.

When you watch him putting all those countless hours of study into practice at the Argentines' JVillage training HQ, pushing his players through monotonous, repetitive set routines designed to create a high-tempo, high-pressure game which everyone from Batistuta to Juan Sebastian Veron has to embrace, he says little. Yet when he barks, his command is evidently absolute.

What's a Bielsa training session like? "Brother, he kills us," Ariel Ortega once explained. "His system forces us to concentrate as a unit and we work so much, even my eyelashes hurt." Yet no-one complains. To a man, they applaud his ideas of expansive, perpetual motion football and Ortega reckons he has skill to drop his boffin's jargon to get across those ideas with simplicity.

It's a measure of how he's won everyone over that nobody complained when he failed to pick Javier Saviola and Juan Riquelme, two of the country's most stellar talents for this tournament. For even if his compatriots cannot quite fathom El Loco, they now trust in the man's ability to know his own brilliant mind.