Ring of Fire

by Simon Hughes

  ‘You’d be surprised, not always,’ Alonso informs me, stroking his gingery-bearded face as we pass the pitch-side cameras of the club’s in-house television station. I realize he is joking when he clarifies his comment. ‘On one occasion we started five minutes late,’ he says, delivering it deadpan. ‘You have heard of mañana haven’t you? Not in Germany they haven’t.’

  The Säbener Strasse site offers Bayern’s entire roster of teams, from the Bundesliga seniors down to the under-8s, elite training and playing conditions. The stars of today and tomorrow hone their skills on five grass bowling-green standard pitches, two of which boast undersoil heating. Across eighty thousand square metres there are two third-generation artificial turf pitches, a beach volleyball court, a multi-purpose sports hall, a service centre for supporters, a performance centre for players, a head office for directors and a youth academy apartment block that accommodates up to fourteen players aged from fifteen to eighteen whose home towns are too far away from Munich for the daily commute to training. There are also Bavarian beer cabins for the fans on the days they are invited in to watch.

  ‘This is a club that really takes care of everybody,’ Alonso continues, sinking into one of the leather couches next to Bayern’s canteen with the smell of strong coffee wafting between us. ‘The organization is perfect, the best I have experienced in my career. A lot of people ask me why Bayern get it so right, why the club is so successful. I always say it is the attention to small details and the fact this place feels like a community. It is run by ex-players who understand the game. Financial decisions are taken but they are always determined according to football sensibilities. In the modern game, when players and managers come and go, it is very difficult to achieve this atmosphere. But Bayern have got it because they are always planning for the future while focusing on the present at the same time. The organization means there is no excuse not to be successful.’

  Alonso left Liverpool in 2009, when the running of the club could not have offered more of a contrast to the situation at Bayern now. A league finish of second the season before represented Liverpool’s best performance since 1990 and yet the club was lobotomized – run by a pair of feuding owners who were separated from Merseyside by an entire ocean and several time zones – eighteen months away from the edge of financial administration and potentially, had it not been for the supporters, complete collapse.

  Watching Alonso train makes you question why Rafael Benítez deemed it appropriate to try to sell him in the first place. Alonso was close to leaving in 2008 when the manager made it clear that he wanted his sale to fund the signing of Gareth Barry from Aston Villa, and although Alonso remained for another twelve months, he concedes ‘something changed’ in their relationship at that moment.

  Alonso was twenty-six years old then and he is thirty-four now. He remains the player his teammates look for, the one who never hides, the manager’s coach on the pitch: a description once used by Benítez, in fact.

  He starts in almost every game for one of Europe’s greatest teams, believing this is only possible because of the levels he meets in training sessions, where ‘the quest to prove myself remains day after day after day’. He emphasizes the point by punching his right fist into the left palm, an action repeated several times during the course of an interview where he speaks eloquently, wisely and frequently with passion. Unlike some footballers, he loves everything about the game, displaying his intelligence by challenging popular misconceptions.

  ‘Without that love,’ he says, pausing, ‘I’m not really sure whether I’d still be playing.’

  After the team warms up, I later watch him take part in a simple drill known in England as ‘strings’, where one player stands in the middle of a circle, being fed passes. At Bayern, the central figure’s control is expected to be in the release, because he is afforded only one touch. Alonso is nourished by Philipp Lahm and Thomas Müller: multiple title holders with Bayern and World Cup winners with the German national team, feats Alonso has also achieved in his post-Liverpool years.

  Alonso is the only player in football history to have experienced the management of those considered as the great four modern European coaches: Benítez, José Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti and Pep Guardiola. Each one of them has admitted that success follows them because they find a way to govern the midfield, the area where Alonso plays. He is far too modest to acknowledge that his presence and brain have been a crucial influence in all of the teams he has performed in.

  ‘If you win the midfield, you probably win the game,’ he confesses. ‘But that doesn’t mean the players in the midfield are the ones alone who determine that, because now we have strikers who drop into midfield and defenders who move up into the midfield. It is the area you must dominate. If you have control of the midfield, you have control of the game and you have more chances to win.’

  Though reliably tasked with influencing the deepest midfield position, Alonso explains that his brief at each club has been slightly different. At Liverpool, Benítez wanted him to feed Steven Gerrard; at Real Madrid the target – Cristiano Ronaldo – was slightly further away, meaning longer passes. At Bayern, where the game is shorter, Guardiola has called Alonso a ‘funnel’.

  ‘In my position, wherever I have been, I have needed to be responsible,’ Alonso says. ‘You are in the middle of everything. You don’t have to take many risks. It is not like a striker, who tries different things to define the outcome of a result. For me, the midfielder is about security, balance and collective play. My first thought is to appreciate my teammate and his needs. I think about every other player on the pitch, because I will receive passes from every position: the goalkeeper, the centre-back, the full-backs, the attacking midfielders, the wingers and the striker. If there is a player like Luis García, who was great in between the lines of the opponent’s defence and midfield, you know you can give them more balls into a little space. If there is a player who does not have the quality in those small spaces, you have to ask them to run, to expand the game.

  ‘I am the link between the defence and the attack, so I have to be a solution for my teammates as well, to help move the ball from one side of the pitch to the other. At every club, this has been my job: Sociedad, Liverpool, Real Madrid and here at Bayern. As I get older, I think I become stronger mentally and this makes me a better player because in this position you need to be streetwise and to use common sense. It is frustrating that physically you lose something with age. I guess that is life: you gain wisdom while other faculties fail.’

  Alonso, however, has not just acted as a comfort blanket for others throughout his career. He has scored some outrageous goals. At Liverpool, two were delivered from the halfway line: at Luton Town’s Kenilworth Road, then against Newcastle United at Anfield. These were not his only attempts.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, but where is the risk in that?’ he asks quickly. ‘There is no risk. If the shot does not result in a goal, it does not matter, because nobody expects me to score. In these situations, only the goalkeeper looks stupid. I don’t try to do things that might make me look stupid, because the risk is there. How many times have you seen me run into the box with the ball, dribbling past players? It’s uncommon because it’s not my game; it’s not my thing.

  ‘For my game to be better, I need to be surrounded by better players than me. My game is not to have one great action. My game is to be consistent throughout: to bring the ball in the best and quickest possible way for the best players to make the last action. I know what my strengths and weaknesses are on the pitch. My duty is to be risk averse.’

  It seems strange for Alonso – or any other footballer – to speak of vulnerability, especially in this age when many project a persona of being able to take on the world. He begins to slap the side of his thighs, illustrating where his problems lie.

  ‘Well, it’s not a weakness; it’s a fact,’ he corrects himself to some extent. ‘I know I am not the quickest player on the pitch. I will not change, because it is not in my l
egs. I know how to work around it. I have to be quick in my mind and not my legs. Whether you are a football player, a writer, an actor or a singer, you need to appreciate how you are, what you can do well and what you cannot do. Only then do you become stronger. The word in English is “perception”, I think.’

  There was a time in English football when ‘midfield’ and ‘battle’ equated to hard tackling and, more often than not, outright intimidation. Alonso arrived at Liverpool as a floppy-haired twenty-three year old with a different idea of what aggression really constitutes.

  ‘I have always said there are different types of aggression,’ he explains. ‘You can tackle aggressively but you can also pass aggressively, although I prefer to use the word “authority” here. Of course I was aware of the previous Liverpool midfielders. I had seen videos of Graeme Souness. Wow – what a player, what a player. I loved him. My father was a midfielder and he loved him too. Souness commanded an entire pitch. By the time I started playing, football was moving, though. You couldn’t get away with rough tackling. But you could still pass with aggression, with “authority”, do everything convincingly, as Souness did.

  ‘A small fraction is the difference between a good pass and a bad pass,’ he continues, before he uses the flesh of his thigh as a prop again, clouting it with some conviction. ‘This is always on my mind. Pace on the pass, pace on the pass. Soft passes are not good. They are risky. You have to trust that your teammate has the technical ability to deal with the pace, to deal with the aggression and take on the mantle of authority.’

  Alonso views passing as a creative art – proactive – compared to tackling as destructive and therefore reactive. He does not see tackling as a quality at all and when he has spoken about this in the past, his view has been met by criticism, particularly from English defenders.

  ‘I stick with my opinion. I know it is viewed differently in Britain. It’s not the action [of tackling]. It’s the idea: the cause and the consequence. I love to tackle. But if I could avoid it, I think I have done better in my job. If I tackle, sliding across the floor, it means that I – or someone else – have been caught out of position at the start of the move and that drives me crazy because team shape and balance is crucial. At Bayern, this is what we practise all of the time: “shape, shape, shape”. If you spend too much time on the ground, it means your positioning is not so good. I would say I pride my game on positioning, being in the right areas – that’s why I get chosen.

  ‘It’s a different view. I remember reading the programme in the dressing room at Anfield before a game. There were interviews with young players. There were questions like, “What are your qualities?” Many of them would say tackling. This shocked me. OK, some days you need to tackle. But I’d never aspire to have my main quality as tackling.

  ‘Stevie’s [Gerrard] tackling? OK, of course, I love it. They are spectacular and the crowd gets so excited. But for me, I get excited when he receives the ball and plays the last pass before a goal. That makes me smile the most. This is his greatest strength. Seeing the pass, seeing what other players do not see.’

  Alonso thinks similarly about courage: the quintessential British quality that supporters of most clubs look for in their footballers.

  ‘Again, courage can be defined differently,’ he says. ‘Some fans want to see players up for a fight and when they lose they ask where the characters are. But there is a lot to be said about players who will take possession of the ball when the atmosphere is bad and attempt to take responsibility for the team. When I was very young, I used to think to myself, even if the team I was playing for was losing heavily, that I must keep showing for possession, show my belief. Of course you need passion. You can lose with passion and you can lose because of passion. There is a right way of winning. There is a right way to lose as well. Striking the balance is key.’

  Alonso thinks differently but that does not make him an extremist. He does not believe in the ‘death by football concept’ that infested football management for a while, where many teams tried to play like Barcelona.

  ‘There is a middle ground for everything,’ he says. ‘We think of Spanish football as “pass, pass, pass”. We also think of English football as running and tackling: “run, run, run, run”. Spain has been very successful with their idea in recent years but it could change and every other nation might try to be like England. English clubs dominated European football in the 1970s and 1980s. How many times did English clubs win the European Cup? All of them played 4–4–2. It was only when AC Milan switched to 4–4–2 in the late 1980s under Arrigo Sacchi that football changed and Italy began to dominate European competitions. Football goes in cycles – there are trends.

  ‘What I think is, you must protect your identity and believe in it even after bad results. When I started playing in San Sebastián as a twelve year old, it was all about playing good football and using technique. It was also about a tactical understanding of the game: learning a position and the responsibilities you have to your teammates. I was never encouraged to run after the ball, to run with the ball or to make great sliding tackles. I was taught to control and release, then show for the next pass. It was a very simple strategy. When I played for the national team and won the World Cup all those years later, the strategy was the same. The process carried across decades.’

  Alonso’s father, Periko, won successive La Liga championships with San Sebastián’s Real Sociedad at the start of the 1980s before moving to Barcelona, where he played alongside Diego Maradona and Bernd Schuster, achieving another title in 1985. It is difficult to explain what it meant to the supporters of Sociedad to win the league so soon after the Franco years, considering the hardships suffered in the Basque country.

  In many of the bars in San Sebastián’s cobbled old quarter hangs a black and white photograph showing Jesús Zamora, Periko’s moustachioed midfield partner, scoring the goal away at Sporting de Gijón in 1981. The goal secured the point needed by Sociedad to win the title that Real Madrid players had thought was theirs. While celebrating after a 3–1 away win against Real Valladolid, they heard of Zamora’s intervention over the radio. The year before, Sociedad had surrendered the title in similar circumstances to their enemy from the capital by losing unexpectedly in Seville, having gone the entire campaign undefeated up to that point.

  Alonso spent the first six years of his life in Barcelona but as soon as Periko moved the family back to San Sebastián, he started playing football on the city’s La Concha beach. Despite the broad sweep of golden sand fringed by the clear waters of the Cantabrian Sea, as well as the handsome grid of alluring Art Nouveau architecture behind, there was an obvious challenge to playing football in such a setting.

  ‘I learned to adapt to circumstances very quickly. If the sea was too high, it was impossible to play and you would have to wait until the next weekend,’ Alonso clarifies, enjoying the memory. ‘It meant waking up at seven in the morning to set up the goals and mark the lines of the pitch before the tide came in. It was a tradition for the young to do this. It made you appreciate the game a lot more because you could never take it for granted. I’d be angry all weekend if we couldn’t play.

  ‘Not being on a super-perfect pitch helped my technique also. I learned to adapt. The ball would not always run the way you wanted it to run, so you had to be alive all of the time. If you risked taking your eye off the ball, you’d look silly. No kid wants to look silly.

  ‘Mikel Arteta [the future Everton and Arsenal midfielder] was involved in these games too. We lived in the same neighbourhood but went to different schools. When it came to the selection of the teams, we’d get picked on opposing sides because I guess the rest saw us as the most talented footballers.’

  Alonso cannot remember seeing his father play and, despite his background as a professional, Periko did not attempt to impart knowledge or put pressure on any of his sons, including Mikel Alonso, who would also later feature professionally for Real Sociedad before a couple of unsuccessful spells
in England with Bolton Wanderers and Charlton Athletic.

  ‘I remember reading in England about the parents getting too involved, all the shouting and screaming, telling their kids what to do all the time; it was as if the disease was exclusively English. Let me tell you, this happens in Spain as well. The parents, they have so much passion. They try to translate that passion to their kids. It does not matter where you come from. I see it here in Germany too. It is a part of the wider society we live in now.

  ‘My father left me to learn and do my own thing. Of course, he’d always try to be supportive. But he never tried to push me, “You have to do this, you have to do that.” There was advice but it was always very gentle. I only saw videos of him playing. Like me, he was a defensive midfielder. He was very physical and could mix it with powerful opponents. He also knew how to pass and move into the right areas.’

  Alonso considers himself fortunate in being able to witness professional footballers at work with his own eyes from a very young age. After retiring from playing, Periko moved into management, first with Tolosa.

  ‘I was a very lucky boy. When I was five or six years old, I would go with my father to the training ground on Saturday mornings. The first team would train on one pitch and I would warm the goalkeepers up on the next pitch with my brother by shooting at them. You grow up with an impression of a goalkeeper being good or not so good. It is only in these moments you realize how high their level is. Their professionalism stood out. They were fit and agile. They seemed to be the size of buildings compared to me. Through these experiences you begin to appreciate how good you have to be to beat them. And I did a few times.