England: Midfield master Granit Xhaka has shown Declan Rice how to be a team dictator
‘Granit Xhaka: Drei spiele entfernt, kandidat für Ballon d'Or zu sein?’ So, went the headline in one Swiss newspaper on Monday, and despite picking up roughly no German across three weeks travelling the nation to cover this tournament, it was not a line that took much translating.
More remarkably, for a player who was once best known for a late lunge, a first-foul booking and telling his own fans to "f*** off", it did not need all that much justifying, either.
When Xhaka left Arsenal last summer, having played a superb part in an unexpected title charge, the inevitable assumption was of a career that had just witnessed its peak season about to start a gradual wind-down.
He would happily have stayed, but with only one year left on his contract and approaching his 31st birthday, Arsenal were reluctant to commit long-term, certainly not to the extent Bayer Leverkusen would in offering a five-year deal and a central part in Xabi Alonso's plan.
Alonso sold him the project; Arsenal received more than £20million for a 30-year-old midfielder who was never the most mobile player. Everyone's a winner, it seemed; no one more than Xhaka himself, as it turned out.
In the 12 months since, the Switzerland captain has lost just two football matches, one in a qualifier against Romania and the other in the final of the Europa League. That last was all that stood between Leverkusen and an unprecedented unbeaten treble, but for Xhaka, a domestic league and cup double, as well as a place in the Bundesliga team of the season, represented quite the extension to a redemption arc it was assumed was already complete.
And it could yet get better. The Ballon d'Or remains both a stretch and a broadly irrelevant sub-plot. But those same "drei spiele" — three games — are all that stand between Switzerland and a shock European Championship success to rival those of Denmark and Greece in the past.
The first, as might have stumbled onto your radar by now, is a quarter-final against England in Dusseldorf this Saturday, when Xhaka will meet the man who replaced him in Arsenal's midfield. Sort of.
It was not the initial plan for Declan Rice to step into Xhaka's shoes as Mikel Arteta's left-sided No8. That was supposed to be Kai Havertz. As the German struggled early on, plenty of Arsenal fans began to fear that £60m really had gone down the drain and wonder whether keeping Xhaka to play alongside Rice and Martin Odegaard might have been the better play. Eventually, both Rice and Havertz were pushed one square up the chessboard and everything clicked. How Gareth Southgate would love such a quick fix.
As Southgate continually says, he does not have a Jorginho-type player to dictate games from the base of midfield, which is why Rice continues to be deployed as a more English style holder.
Even perhaps the Premier League's most consistent player last season, though, has shown himself not to be immune to the disease of this England team. He, like it, has looked lost between identities, carrying the burden of being the lone sitter in a makeshift, ever-shifting midfield, while knowing his power higher up the pitch could deliver the thrust England so clearly need. Wrestling with both instincts, he is yet to nail either.
A meeting with Xhaka comes with a point to prove. For all he was not a direct replacement, Arsenal, rightly, saw Rice-in, Xhaka-out as an upgrade. Against the Swiss on Saturday, there will be onus on the 25-year-old to do what he has not yet this summer in truly dominating a game. Watch it go by, as England's midfield did against Denmark, and late-stage Xhaka will rip them apart.
