As Xabi Alonso arrived into Dublin, he was of course asked whether it was good to be back. The Bayer Leverkusen manager came to Ireland for a summer when 14 years old to learn English, and it only fosters the sense of a figure coming full circle. There’s a personal history here, and there could well be a football history through a series of doubles. Alonso may ensure an unbeaten European campaign in Wednesday’s Europa League final, against Atalanta, to go with an unbeaten league campaign. There’s still Saturday’s DFB-Pokal final to come, and that is against second-tier side Kaiserslautern. The Basque is so close to an unprecedented unbeaten treble, and what would be one of the great football achievements.
It should be stressed he has already done something alchemic, arguably up there with Sir Alex Ferguson’s first Scottish title with Aberdeen and maybe Jose Mourinho’s Champions League with FC Porto. It is not just denying Bayern Munich the Bundesliga title for the first time since 2012, and that after the perpetual champions spent over €100m on players such as Harry Kane. It is doing it with a club that had only claimed one major trophy in their history, and been branded as perpetual losers. This wasn’t supposed to be possible in modern football. It’s not like this team has just played the percentages or strived to get there through some freak campaign, either. The invincible season speaks to the emphatic nature, the emotion of it all amplified by so many late comebacks and winners. It is vintage stuff.
