Ice cold Kroos keeps his side in the hunt for trophies

MADRID: When Toni Kroos arrived for his first training session with Real Madrid in 2014, he went the wrong way.

Walking out onto the pitch at the club’s sprawling Valdebebas training ground, Kroos saw two circles of players kicking the ball between them and jogged over to the one on the left.

In his mind, that circle had fewer players in it. It was logical to bolster the numbers. But generally, the left circle is for the club’s Spanish players, the right for foreigners.

Nobody minded, some thinking Kroos was looking to assert himself or perhaps just was not aware of the code.

The truth was Kroos knew the code but in that moment it made no sense to him.

For a club like Real, arguably the biggest in the world, where the fans are among the most demanding and the attention and pressure on players is almost certainly the most heated, Kroos has continued to stand out as a figure of cold, clear thinking.

The esteem in which he is now held at the Bernabeu, or more recently the Alfredo di Stefano, was certainly not automatic.

The same suspicions that hung over him at Bayern Munich endured, that here was a midfielder with no major flaws but no obvious strengths, neither destroyer nor creator, hard to define and, at first, difficult to admire.

In Germany, there had been a deeper mistrust of character too, that Kroos’ lack of outward emotion stemmed from a lack of fortitude, an accusation regularly levelled at the generation that later went on to win the 2014 World Cup.