Alphonso Davies, Bayern Munich's roadrunner, speeds on to centre stage

“eep meep.” In one old-fashioned phrase uttered immediately after the win at Borussia Dortmund that marked the home straight towards the Bundesliga title, Thomas Müller succinctly coined the flavour of Bayern Munich’s season. Yes, he was talking about one player, rather than the team, but that player has come to personify the side that has lifted itself from autumnal ignominy to the verge of being cast into this mighty club’s hall of fame.

“For me it’s a dream come true,” said Alphonso Davies in the aftermath of Wednesday’s 3-0 win in the Champions League semi-final against Lyon, which saw Europe’s inexorable juggernaut roll into Sunday’s final against Paris Saint-Germain. “Playing in the Champions League and making it into the final is everything you can ask for.”

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Bayern deserve the moment, and so does Davies. Just as a team who were ninth in the Bundesliga in December have propelled themselves to the verge of the treble in breathtaking style (they go into the final having won 28 and drawn one of their last 29 in all competitions), a player who began the campaign as a reserve winger finishes it as an indisputable first choice, and as one of the world’s elite full-backs to boot.

The journey for a player who doesn’t turn 20 until November has been an extraordinary one, and was destined to be so even without the pandemic turning the world upside down. Everything Davies has done since he joined Vancouver Whitecaps in his early teens has been authored at breakneck speed, figuratively in terms of his career and literally on the field. Born in a Ghanaian refugee camp in 2000 after his parents fled the civil war in their native Liberia, Davies arrived in Canada as an infant and excelled at football from an early age. He was still only 15 when he became the second youngest MLS debutant ever, behind Freddy Adu.

Davies still looked green when he joined Bayern in November 2018, softly spoken and with his shy smile exposing his braces, but he was brave enough to be curious, frequently asking for advice from the experienced – and English‑speaking – David Alaba. The Austrian would go on to become a key figure in his development. Bayern had sealed a deal for the Canadian months before in summer, paying what was then an MLS record $13.5m initial fee, but left him to finish the season with the Whitecaps. This column first saw him in the flesh in his penultimate game in MLS, prowling the left wing away at Los Angeles FC. The effortless sprints and the pirouettes which we now know and love were present, and magnetic.

What wasn’t so clear was that his future was at left-back. Like many great advancements, Davies’s reinvention was part design and part accident. A defensive injury crisis forced Niko Kovac to try out the teenager at left-back in a scratchy home win over Union Berlin in late October last year, and Davies did well enough to retain his place for the following weekend’s game at Eintracht Frankfurt – not realising that he would last much longer in the post than the coach would in his.

The 5-1 humiliation (which now seems as it was from a different dimension, let alone season) in Frankfurt, broadcast live on free-to-air on the first Saturday in November, was a step too far for Kovac. Davies was one of the few players to escape the experience with any credit on what must have been a head-spinning 19th birthday. He set up Robert Lewandowski’s sole reply, hit the bar and prevented it being even worse, clearing a Filip Kostic effort off the line. On that chastening afternoon on the Main, Davies was an Ewok hacking away at the foot of a Scout Walker with a sharpened rock.

Even if Davies was already in situ, Hansi Flick’s first Bundesliga game in charge, the following week’s 4-0 demolition of Dortmund, was a rebirth for him and the team alike. The team’s new left-back terrorised the Bundesliga’s next best and marked the beginning of Bayern bursting out of a long funk. Flick might not have been the first to place Davies in the position, but he was the one who made it a permanency, even when World Cup-winning record signing Lucas Hernández recovered from injury.

Flick figured that starting from a deeper position gave Davies room to surge and build momentum, which has proved to be the case time and again. The side effect of Alaba developing into a magnificent, first‑choice centre-half while he has been beside Davies, talking him through games, has been equally season-shaping.

Davies’s intelligence is the reason he cuts it as a defender, though the pace definitely helps. “You think you have time, and then the FC Bayern roadrunner comes and steals the ball,” said Müller after that win at Dortmund. If PSG’s superstars are the latest to be left trailing in his wake on Sunday, the teenager will have already written himself into Bayern history.