I was checking some stats just out of curiosity and some of Illarramendi's numbers are actually quite similar to Xabi Alonso's stats in his last season at Real Madrid, while some are better.
The number of passes Xabi makes for Bayern are unreal (100+ passes per game) but at Real, where the style of play is different, he made 72.91 passes per 90 minutes, 64.01 of which were successful (87,79%), while Illarramendi made a bit over 70 passes per 90 minutes and had an accuracy of 88,77% in his first season for Real and 91,55% in the current season. Xabi passed forward 70% of the time, while Illarra had approx. 65% of forward passes. The average pass length was 18.92m for Xabi and 16.55m for Illarramendi, who had an average pass length of over 19m at Real Sociedad.
In the tackling department, Illarramendi seems to have had an off year this season with only 1.71 per 90 minutes (compared to Alonso's 2.21 for Bayern and 2.18 in his last season in Madrid), however in his first season for Real he averaged 2.58 tackles per 90 and 3.23 in his last season at Real Sociedad - in that respect, he seems to be more of a presence than Alonso. Indeed, apart from the current season, Illarramendi seems to have a considerably higher % of duels won in the comparison between both players (57.07% in 2012/13 for Sociedad and 53.37% in 2013/14 for Real Madrid).
Tackling was never Alonso's greatest strength so on that point I've added another player to the comparison - Morgan Schneiderlin - and what I have found is that Illarramendi's numbers in his final season for Real Sociedad are similar or better than Morgan's in terms of number of successful tackles and duels won. Schneiderlin averaged 3.25 tackles per 90 this season and 2.83 last season, with 44,73% and 49,34% of duels won - as noted in the previous paragraph, Illarramendi compares rather favourably here, although his numbers have seen a significant dip in the current season where he's played only 1160 minutes.
I've spent like 5 minutes at most looking at those numbers and I'm not by any means suggesting that's a comprehensive analysis of the player, however I think there are some interesting indications here that he's not simply a deep lying playmaker who can't defend as some seem to believe - indeed there's no reason to think a DLP is necessarily a midfielder lacking in the defensive department.
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