Alex Kirkland

One of the things about Alonso is he came in after Ancelotti as the guy that in theory was going to make them modern.

and structured and there was going to be a formation and a clear identity and that didn't happen whereas whereas Ancelotti was a bit more kind of free-flowing let the players express themselves find find a basic way of getting the best out of them whereas Alonso we all felt was here's a systems manager unfortunately of course it's a systems manager at a club that generally speaking hasn't liked systems very much now so as as Stevie rightly says if you take what's happened at Real Madrid is there anything there that says this has worked

The truth is, there's almost nothing.

Those first three games at Club World Cup and then it collapsed against PSG.

The first six games, seven games of the season they won in La Liga.

But really and truly, in none of those games did we think until the Classico, this looks like a good team.

We thought they look strong, but they don't look particularly exciting.

I remember referring to them, Kay, I don't know if you're on the show this day, but I remember referring to them early in the season as boringly good.

because I thought they were going to be structured, not very interesting, but they were just going to win lots of games kind of effectively just because they're a bit better than everybody else without ever really exciting us.

And then, of course, what happened is the boring part didn't really change, but the good part did.

And they weren't very exciting and they weren't very good either.

So in that sense, Steve, he's absolutely right.

Now, the flip side of this is that there's two ways of looking at this is to be perfectly honest.

If you're Liverpool and you are convinced for whatever reason that Arnie Scott doesn't continue,

then there's a bit of me that thinks that this spell at Real Madrid doesn't put you off, Xabi Alonso.

It doesn't put you off.

Because you believe that the environment will be different, that the authority you give him will be different, that the players around him will be different, and that you can get it closer to what happened at Leverkusen than what happened at the Santiago Bernabeu.