Bismarck Street was renamed Xabi Alonso Street yesterday morning, in Leverkusen. During the course of Saturday night, the team’s fans repainted all the signs on this popular crossroads in the most enthusiastic suburb of Cologne, a town whose identity is linked to the Bayer headquarters. The chemical-pharmaceutical multinational is going through the worst crisis since Germany’s defeat in World War II. The shares fell 56% in the last year, but thanks to Xabi Alonso, his football club, Bayer Leverkusen, won the first Bundesliga in its centenary history. The victory against Werder Bremen caused the expected uproar. The crowd gathered at the Bay Arena celebrated its biggest party after 11 years of indissoluble dominance by Bayern Munich.
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Hradecky, Edmond Faycial Tapsoba, Jonathan Tah, Kouakou Odilon Kossounou, Piero Hincapie Reyna (Grimaldo, min. 76), Xhaka (Exequiel Palacios, min. 76), Robert Andrich, Nathan Tella (Jeremie Frimpong, min. 62), Victor Okoh Boniface (Schick, min. 61), Amine Adli (Florian Wirtz, min. 45) and Jonas Hofmann
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Michael Zetterer, Julián Malatini, Christian Groß, Veljkovic, Bittencourt (Isak Hansen-Aaröen, min. 76), Weiser, Romano Schmid, Senne Lynen, Felix Agu (Olivier Deman, min. 69), Nick Woltemade (Kownacki, min. 69 ) and Marvin Ducksch
Goals 1-0 min. 24: Victor Okoh Boniface. 2-0 min. 59: Xhaka. 3-0 min. 67: Florian Wirtz. 4-0 min. 82: Florian Wirtz. 5-0 min. 89: Florian Wirtz.
Referee Harm Osmers
Yellow cards Amine Adli (min. 30) and Bittencourt (min. 46)
“What Xabi has done with this team has been superb,” says Michael Reschke, who in addition to being a legend among the trainers of the Leverkusen youth team, was the club’s sporting director between 2004 and 2014, when Guardiola’s Bayern signed him. His first signing for the Munich club was Xabi Alonso. Yesterday Reschke sang the praise at the Bay Arena, excited about the work of the Spanish coach. “Pep and Klopp,” Resckhe observes; “They have been the most dominant coaches of the century. Pep has been the most influential coach in recent decades and Klopp has been the revolutionary who managed to completely transform the clubs and communities where he worked: Mainz, Dortmund and Liverpool. Xabi has the best of Klopp and Guardiola. I know that Pep’s influence on Xabi was decisive since they met at Bayern.”
The last coach to raise the Bundesliga shield for a team other than Bayern was Jürgen Klopp at Dortmund, in 2012. The successor in the line of rebels who successfully rise up against the omnipotent Bavarian club is Xabi. At 42 years old, the Basque coach is consecrated after a season and a half on a first-class bench. “No one in Spain can imagine how people love Xabi in Germany!” says Reschke. “Today Xabi is the most popular person in the Rhineland by far. Everyone loves the calmness of him, the confidence of him, the character of him. What he has done in Leverkusen, without arrogance, without talk, is one of the best jobs that have been seen from a coach in the last 40 years. This is historic. Against West Ham in the Europa League we saw seven Leverkusen players playing one touch in the West Ham area; with Jonathan Tah the last man, 25 meters into the West Ham field. Incredible!”.
A member of the Leverkusen coaching staff says that one day a player questioned Xabi to tell him that what he was asking for was impracticable. That in a certain circumstance of the midfield game, making the pass he demanded implied seriously risking losing the ball. Then Xabi, who if he was characterized by something since he sat on the San Sebastián bench, is by his redoubled efforts to appear humble, he stirred. “It’s not that difficult,” he warned. As if his midfielder’s heart had pumped a burst of vanity, he entered the training field, and in the middle of a match simulation he picked up the ball and after opening a horizon with the movement, he placed the ball where he had said it should be sent. “This is how it is done!” he indicated. The players surrendered to the coach, the leader, and the idol. The magic of this Leverkusen is that with the passing of the months, since the summer of 2023, the tormented Exequiel Palacios, the extravagant Granit Xhaka, the shy Jonathan Tah, and the adventurer Edmond Tabsoba, were acquiring the sense of sobriety and accurate judgment of the man who teaches them to pass the ball. A solid character was formed.
Nobody has managed to win a game against Leverkusen this season. Against Werder, without Wirtz, without Palacios, without Frimpong or Grimaldo in the starting team, embarking on a rotation to prepare for the tie with West Ham in the Europa League, the team maintained its form, its associative style and its dominance. Thanks to the goals of Boniface, Xhaka and Wirtz, who scored three, they reached 5-0 and 29 undefeated. With the victory, they surpassed the unbeaten record in a campaign held until now by Guardiola’s Bayern.
“Bayer has a super coach,” observes Jonas Boldt, who joined Bayer as a scout in 2007 and left for Hamburg as sports director in 2019. “Xabi has not invented a system with his 5-3-2; but he has given everything he had to his team: experience, patience, hunger, quality. What was Xabi missing? He won everything and he has everything: success as a player, success as a coach, loved by the people, blameless in every way. He shows a calmness as if with him everything was solvable. The players see him as a leader who does not seek personal gain but rather helps them. These types of figures help a club a lot. For me, a key to this success is Kim Falkenberg, who came out of the Leverkusen youth system and became an exceptional head of talent detection. “Kim has chosen a lot of good players who have improved his position thanks to Xabi’s leadership.”
Triplet path
The fans chanted: “Nie deutscher Meister… Wir werden nie deutscher Meister!” “We will never be champions of Germany!” They laughed at themselves. For half a century since they were promoted to the Bundesliga in 1979, they had come close to winning the title and lost it for one reason or another, and had heard their rival fans sing the cruelest of verses: “You will never be champions of Germany!” . The black destiny was illuminated with Xabi Alonso and with players like Wirtz, the young playmaker, great promise of German football, at 20 years old the author of three goals on the day of the alirón, the last one, the signal of the invasion of the field, of tears , of the endless embraces of the human river. The crowd swallowed up the players. Xabi, far from fleeing to the locker room, threw himself into the red-black sea of eternal love.
The title was decided on matchday 29, when there are still five to play, but Leverkusen has been so dominant in Germany this season that it is 16 points ahead of second-placed Bayern Munich, with 15 to play. Bayer is also in the final of the German Cup – in which it is a favorite against Kaiserslautern, currently in the second Bundesliga – and has paved the way to the Europa League semi-final after the 2-0 victory in the first leg. against West Ham. The aspirin team is undefeated this season in all competitions and can crown its great campaign with three titles.
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