Something seemed to break here, and it was not just Xabi Alonso’s proud unbeaten record over Bayern Munich. For Vincent Kompany’s side are cruising to the Bundesliga title and now they are cruising to the Champions League quarter-finals too. They may well sign Bayer Leverkusen’s best player in the summer, but here they played him off the park. It smells like game over, and in more senses than one.
This week the Bayern director of sport, Max Eberl, made an eye-catching comparison. He compared Alonso and Kompany to Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, the coaching duopoly that shaped modern football for almost a decade. Bit soon for all that, most people reckoned, but it feels just a little less fanciful now. The bloke who got Burnley relegated to the Championship may just be the next big thing in European coaching.
