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#4 Xabi Alonso
Xabi Alonso just always had time on the ball. There was an unsettling sense of calm about him. And he kept that up from the time he was a young and belligerent Spaniard to the time he was winning the World Cup, the Euro Cups and the Champions League with Bayern Munich. He's done it all.
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He relished his role as a deep-lying playmaker and he was as deadly with his thunderous strikes as he was with his precision passing. Those diagonals, OhmyGod!
Alonso was a menacing presence in the Premier league when it was the best league in the world. At the height of the the El Clasico rivalry, Xabi Alonso was pulling the strings in the Madrid midfield. When tiki-taka took over the world, he was running oppositions ragged with neat exchanges with some of the best in the world.
Xabi Alonso exudes class and will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the greatest midfielders of the modern era.
