Bayern barely hesitated when, in December, Bixente Lizarazu asked if he might come back to Germany and spend an eighth year with the club. They understood that when the journey’s over he’ll go somewhere with his surfboard, to the sounds of Bob Dylan and Bob Marley in the background, and breaking waves.
Lizarazu loves the ocean (a passion to which we shall return), so it has always been a quirk that he also came to love landlocked Munich — snowbound the day we met — and stayed, even when more fashionable leagues offered themselves to him. But then Lizarazu is a little quirky: a bit bohemian, in his own words. And now a bit Bavarian.
Against Arsenal, he is hoping to play his 55th Champions League match for Bayern Munich, so we can hardly ask him if he’ll be feeling butterflies at the Olympic stadium. What he will be, though, is more grateful than before to be involved. Not because he has lost any of the bite and energy that made him the finest European left-back over the best part of the last decade, but because last month Bayern agreed to make sure his highly decorated career would continue at the level to which he has become accustomed.
Lizarazu had left the club last June, wanting to fulfil an ambition to finish his club career by playing again in his native France. His mistake was to choose volatile Marseille, where a change in management in the autumn suited him very badly. The new coach, Philippe Troussier, joined in October, and soon Lizarazu reached this conclusion: “I can’t work with this man. I don’t like his football and I don’t like his way of thinking.”
The player thought to himself: “I have to go back if Bayern want me because I love the club, I know its character and its culture.” Bayern said: “Give us 24 hours.” That’s the whole story in brief, says Lizarazu. “Now I’m excited. I think of it not like a second chapter, just a break of six months. Sometimes you have a rupture.”
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Lizarazu is 35 and has had only two ruptures, a pair of wrong turns, in a career of endurance, excellence and serial achievement. He began at Bordeaux, where he developed his game with a young Zinedine Zidane, before joining Athletic Bilbao, the Spanish club that employs only Basques. Lizarazu was born across the French border but is Basque to his bootstraps, in case anybody hadn’t guessed it from the X and the Zs in his name.
Playing for his own people, however, turned out to provide limited compensation for being with a team that just didn’t feel right to him. So he went to Bayern, and the prizes there kept coming: five German championships and the European Cup in 2001, spaced around a leading part in France’s World Cup of 1998 and their triumph at Euro 2000.
Manchester United came closest a year later to drawing him away from Munich. “We talked with Bayern about it, but in the end I decided to stay here,” he says. He liked their stability, and at the time the France team was still a consuming adventure for him. Lizarazu retired from international play last summer, not because the writing was on the wall but with the conviction that an era had passed. “When I think about what Les Bleus did, it was a big time. For four years we were the best of the best, from 1996 to maybe 2001. For me, the national team was an experience to do with friends. When a guy like Zidane stops, well, that was too much for me. A lot of the things that we were used to weren’t around any more, so it was the moment.
“And you know,” he says, breaking from his reverie with a smile, “it’s more fun when you are winning everything. Maybe the collective wasn’t as good as in 1998 and 2000, maybe there were more individuals. The mindset was not as strong. Anyway, it’s a new story now.”
France still has Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira, but otherwise it’s a new team. Mention of them prompts talk of Arsenal. To know the French side is to know something about the current Premiership champions, and to be confused. The dashing Henry of Arsenal was not the same player at Euro 2004; nor does Vieira, so influential in the last championship, have the same influence on his country ’s team. And Robert Pires is no longer selected by Les Bleus. Pourquoi? “They believe more in the environment they have around them at their club. You feel it, even when you’re playing a high-level game with all that pressure. You feel that power and you relax. I think Arsène Wenger gives his players some of that power and they give more because of that relationship. For France now, for Thierry, for Patrick Vieira, there is more pressure, a pressure they didn’t have when Zidane and others were there. It’s concentrated on them.”
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Not that Arsenal have given their French players international trophies. The current champions of England are obliged to wear their Champions League record around Europe like a dunce’s cap, their best grades from eight attempts being a paltry pair of quarter- finals. The kindest compliment that might be paid them is that their serial failings on the Continent mystify almost everybody else as well. “I don’t know why it happens,” shrugs Lizarazu. “I know they really want to do something better.”
Bayern Munich will present a tough barrier to Arsenal on Tuesday: the Germans almost always make at least the quarter-finals, although Lizarazu acknowledges that consensus would place them a little outside the group of most likely champions this year. “We’re good physically, we’re well organised. Against Arsenal, you’ll see two different cultures of football.”
Thus it was last time. The 2001 champions encountered Arsenal on the journey to that final. At Highbury, Bayern suffered an hour of vintage fluency — the match finished 2-2 — and then beat an insipid Arsenal 1-0 in Munich.
Bayern have changed a good deal since then, Lizarazu advises. “In that season we had a side very good at combating the way our opponents wanted to play. We still played good football, but we had this capacity to make other teams only reach 60% of their potential because we were so strong in the duels, man-for-man. Even if we were not playing great football, we were a nightmare to play against. That was how we won the Champions League.”
The new Bayern team are younger, he points out, have a rigorous coach in Felix Magath, and produced one stirring performance against Ajax in a first-round group won by Juventus, yet are still capable of being beaten 3-1 by Arminia Bielefeld, as they were last weekend. He trusts that was a blip.
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In the weeks since Lizarazu has rejoined Bayern after the winter break, he has seen them open a significant lead in the Bundesliga. They are pleased to have a loyalist return and to have reacquired a strong character. At a club notable for its loudmouths, such as Stefan Effenberg and Lothar Matthaus, there had been concern over recent seasons of a gap in leadership.
Lizarazu does not carry a loud-hailer onto the pitch, but he brings the authority of a champion. He is also discovering how to apply his powers of inspiration a long way from Bavaria, outside his career.
Growing up on France’s Basque coastline, Lizarazu has always loved the sea. He took to the mountains, to nature. Becoming a professional footballer, he occasionally found that colleagues looked at him askance when he voiced his enthusiasm for conservation issues. “It was a mystery for them,” he laughs. “When I was younger, with Zidane and Christophe Dugarry, and I used to let them know about my concerns, like about pollutants and chemical waste, they looked at me, well, like I was an alien.”
By the time he was in his thirties, he was meeting oceanographers, meteorologists and fishermen to discuss “the problems of pollution, the human activities that harm the ocean”. It has become his vocation outside football.
As a national hero and owner of 97 caps for France, he was persuaded that his voice might have some weight, so he established a foundation for environmental research and education. After the Prestige disaster in 2002, when a tanker spilled oil towards beaches from Galicia to Biarritz, he raised that voice. But in case readers fear they are about to hear a footballer start speaking like a Miss World candidate, all scripted charity, they can be reassured. He is earnest but also self-deprecating.
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“Actually,” says Lizarazu, “there is a lot frustration in it. Yes, the sea is really important for me, but you have to be modest. Everybody can do something but, hey, I can’t save the world. Now I’m talking like a song: I can change the world.”
The Frenchman might not save the world, but he would recommend to every athlete who wants to continue thriving at the age of 35 and who would like to retain the physique of a man a decade younger, that they take to the sea. It’s Lizarazu’s passion and his Peter Pan drug.
“I don’t really like gym training so much, so I like to do fitness training by playing another sport. And if you do three hours a day surfing for three weeks in the summer, you come back and you’re like . . . whoah!” With that he flexes his muscles and grins, just in case we take him too seriously.