Midfield master Xhaka has shown England - and Rice - how to be team dictator

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.

- Malik Ouzia

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 longterm, certainly not to the extent Bayer Leverkusen would in offering a fiveyear 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.