Xabi Alonso is the Dorian Gray that Irish fans want to claim as one of their own
Bayer Leverkusen manager is one of the most promising bosses around and must be bewildered when the details of a long ago teenage summer are put to him
IT WAS hard not to be distracted by Xabi Alonso on Tuesday night at Anfield.
Sure, Luis Diaz did his best, helping himself to a second half hat-trick as Liverpool put Alonso's Bayer Leverkusen to the sword.
But the TV cameras often focused on Alonso in the technical area. Partly because he was idolised by the Kop during his time at the club, and also because he's often a blur of perpetual motion.
Former Ireland centre-half Gary Breen was on co-commentator duty for Premier Sports and he was left with a question after one Alonso routine.
It involved plenty of hand movements, a couple of spins on his heels and a few shouts. Breen wasn't the only one wondering aloud 'what was that all about?'
But maybe what distracted many of us by Alonso's appearance was just that. His appearance. He is carrying no excess weight, there isn't a trace of grey in his full head of hair and he looks the same as when he dominated the Anfield pitch for Liverpool.
But Alonso was 23 2005 when he won the Champions League with the Reds. He turns 43 this month. Has anyone checked if the Spanish Dorian Gray has a portrait in the attic?
There was a time when I had an uncomfortable interaction with Alonso. He was fine, it has to be said, but I wanted the world to open up and swallow me.
In the time of money, when the Celtic Tiger was still roaring, the Star newspaper sent me to cover the 2005 Champions League final between Liverpool and AC Milan.
As part of my extensive research, I went to the press day in Anfield on a jolly, er, a reconnaissance mission.
My brief was simple, but no less daunting for that. Ask Xabi Alonso about playing Gaelic football in Meath. This had been a half-rumour that had been going around for a while.
But, somehow, a Meath native had managed to get employment in the Star and had come upon photographs of a young Alonso during his time learning English, or the Kells version of English, to be precise...
Our luck was in. Three players were set aside for the daily newspapers, and Alonso was one of them.
The great and good of both English and European journalism were there.
And they wasted plenty of valuable minutes asking Alonso irrelevant stuff about how he combined with Steven Gerrard, the influence of Rafa Benitez, keeping Kaka quiet and so on.
Eventually, there was a split-second's silence for me to grab the opportunity.
Xabi Alonso still looks as fit and as youthful as in his playing days PIC: Inpho
Cheeks burning, I jumped at it: "Is it true you used to live in Meath?"
Truth to tell, this came out sounding more like ''IsittrueyouusedtoliveinMeath?''
Alonso, being the second nicest man in football - Kevin Kilbane, if you're wondering - got me to repeat the question.
He then talked about how he'd gone to Kells to learn English at 15 and had a great time.
Alonso left an opening for a follow-up question so I asked him if he'd tried Gaelic football and gone to see any GAA games.
By this stage, several of the bigwigs from the English papers were calling for security.
But Alonso just smiled, and five days before the biggest game in his life up to then, talked about Ollie Murphy's shimmies, Trevor Giles's disguised passes, the longevity of Sean Boylan and how he wished he'd been around in Red Collier's time.
Nah, Alonso talked of playing Gaelic football in a local park with some of his Kells pals.
He said he'd never played an actual organised game but had enjoyed a visit to Croke Park for a Meath match.
And he put forward the view that players should wear crash helmets.
Since then, Alonso's GAA past has taken on the same mythical status as Socrates playing in the Sigerson Cup.
Stick the Spaniard's name into a Google search and you'll find references to him having played in Croke Park, to winning an Under-16 Championship in Meath, to being called up for a development squad.
All nonsense. One summer, Alonso tried a bit of catch and kick and a few solo runs in a Kells park. Sin a bhfuil.
Since our encounter in a claustrophobic windowless room in Anfield nearly two decades ago, Alonso has done alright for himself, hoovering up trophies with club and country as a player, and taking Bayer Leverkusen to an unbeaten double in Germany as manager.
He's made a couple of visits to Ireland since 2005 and has been asked about his Gaelic football past each time. Methinks the novelty of such an odd question might be wearing thin with him...
There is another reason why I'll never forget Liverpool's Champions League adventure that year.
In extra-time, there was one incredible sequence when Jamie Carragher made a block, went down in agony with cramp, but got up straightaway to make yet another block.
And Jerzy Dudek made a save from Andriy Shevchenko that defied the rules of physics.
When the game eventually went to penalties, it was Carragher who said to Dudek ''remember Grobbelaar''.
In the 1984 European Cup final win over Roma, Bruce Grobbelaar's rubber-legged routine succeed in putting off the Italian penalty-takers in the shoot-out.
Dudek took Carragher's advice and the same trick worked against Milan in 2005.
They finished the job in a shoot-out with Dudek's jelly legs spooking the Milan galacticos.
There was still time for me to get punched in the mixed zone by a Scottish reporter as a bewildered Carragher looked at us.
And Ireland full-back Steve Finnan did nod to the Irish reporters on his way through the mixed zone but didn't stop. Maybe he didn't have the words to make sense of it. None of us had. It made no sense.