Mourinho and Tottenham fans unlikely to agree when it comes to Dele Alli

TOTbotao · 2021 年1 月 7 日 08:59

Watching substitute Dele Alli warming up dutifully on Tuesday night, it was hard not to feel a little, well, sad.

Dele probably knew, like the rest of us, that he was unlikely to get on against Brentford in the Carabao Cup semi-final but still he smiled and stretched out his limbs on a bitterly cold north London night.

Even with five substitutes permitted and with Lucas Moura misfiring and Tanguy Ndombele tiring, Dele remained on the sidelines. When Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg was taken off injured in the 86th minute, it was 21-year-old defender Japhet Tanganga, not fellow midfielder Dele, who was summoned to take his place. Spurs were 2-0 up against a 10-man side from the division below but head coach Jose Mourinho was taking no chances. So on Dele watched — four years and a day since he scored twice against leaders Chelsea in the 2-0 victory that remains one of Tottenham’s best ever Premier League performances.

This is not, it should be said, an attempt to judge whether Mourinho is right or wrong to have kept Dele on the periphery this season. The head coach is employed purely to win matches and if he believes starting Dele is not the best route to achieve that, then that is his prerogative. Broadly speaking, Spurs’ results this season vindicate Mourinho’s selections — even if the reliance on Harry Kane and Son Heung-min for goals and their lack of creativity in some matches suggests Dele could have a part to play.

This is more to try to explain the disconnect that can exist between fans and coaches and owners when it comes to players like Dele.

This was laid bare after the win at Stoke City in the Carabao Cup’s previous round last month, when Mourinho furiously substituted Dele after he had given the ball away in the lead-up to Spurs conceding an equaliser. “Your flick has cost us that goal,” Mourinho could be heard saying. After the game, he expanded on his frustration, saying: “For me, a player that plays in that position is a player that has to link and has to create, and not to create problems for his own team… so yes, I was upset.” The reaction of the Tottenham fans, in contrast, was to vote Dele as their man of the match on social media.

Dele’s current transfer situation similarly outlines the differences in perspective. Most supporters, driven partly by emotion and the connection they feel to a player who was such a symbol of the club’s rise under Mauricio Pochettino, want him to stay. For chairman Daniel Levy and Mourinho, however, there are different, more calculated, considerations.

Despite liking Dele as a person, Mourinho would be open to him leaving — but there is a wariness about the risk of doing so, especially from Levy. They worry Dele may well be needed if Spurs pick up injuries, especially with so many fixtures being played in a short space of time and Giovani Lo Celso and Gareth Bale already out.

Essentially, then, Dele has gone from automatic starter to a third or even fourth-choice insurance policy it would be a risk to lose. It’s a pretty steep decline from the freewheeling rookie who won the PFA Young Player of the Year award in each of his first two Premier League seasons after making his Spurs debut aged 19.

From Dele’s perspective, the situation with Mourinho has become understandably difficult and he wants to leave and start playing regularly again. At this stage, there have not been talks of note with any prospective buyers and it’s understood that Dele would not move just for the sake of it. He would rather stay and fight for his place if the right opportunity is not there. Christian Eriksen’s pretty disastrous mid-season move to Inter Milan a year ago serves as a cautionary tale in that regard. Should a club like Paris Saint-Germain make a move, however, that would naturally appeal.

In the immediate term, Dele’s next assignment will probably be Sunday’s FA Cup tie away at non-League Marine. It’s perhaps unlikely, given how long the window still has to run, but that — a match against an eighth-tier side alongside the rest of Tottenham’s fringe players in front of no fans — could even be his final Spurs appearance.

It would be an incongruous send-off for a player who has achieved so much and, less than two years ago, provided the world-class assist for Moura’s third goal that sent Tottenham into the Champions League final. Even this time a year ago, Dele looked revitalised under Mourinho and scored four times in the new head coach’s first four matches. Mourinho was asked at the time whether Dele could one day win the Ballon d’Or.

He’s gradually fallen out of favour since and now finds himself on the brink of a move. As countless players have done under countless managers over the years.

But this is why Dele’s situation feels like it matters.

While spending months working on a big read last year trying to explain the Dele phenomenon, one of the big themes that emerged was his relatability.

Yes, he’s a world-class athlete, but he has imperfections too. He has an edge.

Pochettino captured it well when he described Dele as “a little bit naughty — in a good way”. He scored wonderful goals but he also made mistakes that most could identify with: the occasional losses of cool, like punching West Bromwich Albion’s Claudio Yacob in 2016 or the dreadful tackle that got him sent off against Gent a year later. His manager at MK Dons, Karl Robinson, explained to The Athletic that Dele has always had this edge. As a youngster, he would be sin-binned if he lost his cool during games.

There have, of course, also been more serious mistakes, like the Snapchat video that appeared to be mocking the COVID-19 outbreak and led to accusations of racism and a one-match suspension from the FA.

Generally, though, Dele was someone who stayed the right side of the line and gave that Pochettino team its swagger. He was a maverick in a side that was relentlessly well-drilled while also regularly scoring goals — many of them spectacular. Kane is another symbol of that team but perhaps his unstinting efficiency and otherworldly dedication is a touch harder to identify with.

Dele, the rough diamond signed from the third division, had a fearlessness and played with the kind of edge often smoothed out by a couple of years in an elite academy. When he captained Spurs in a League Cup tie against Watford played in his hometown of Milton Keynes during the construction of the club’s new stadium, Pochettino said admiringly afterwards that: “Dele spoke from the heart in his team-talk and I like that.”

He was a bit different. He came up with bespoke celebrations. He had a glint in his eye. He teased Harry Winks about his eyebrows…

Nowadays, Dele increasingly feels like an anachronism — someone who plays on instinct in a sport increasingly defined by systems and data. “Everything I do is completely instinctive in football,” he told The Athletic in May. It was in response to a question about his flicked assist for that famous Moura goal in Amsterdam, and the example is telling. It was the kind of improvised, off-the-cuff pass that went against Mourinho’s instructions against Stoke and so enraged him. But that’s what you get with Dele, for better or worse — and the same is true of many elite creative players who like to take risks. These are things that thrill supporters and are often very effective but can infuriate coaches more focused on patterns of play and avoiding turnovers of possession.

Dele admits that pulling off skills still gives him a buzz. “When I was young, I lived off street or cage football and nutmegs, for example, were one of the trademarks — the thing you were desperate to pull off,” he said in an interview with Joe.co.uk in 2018.

“Obviously, you can’t just try to execute nutmegs in the Premier League all the time but there’s still that spark when I manage to do one.”

At MK Dons, he was similarly enamoured with nutmegs. “There would be many times when I’d be coaching when I’d see the ball go through my legs, and I’d just hear a chuckle from five yards away and it’d be him trying to nutmeg me,” Robinson told The Athletic last year. He also recalled, along with others, that above all, Dele just loved playing football. “In training, he just played on instinct,” he said. “It was so refreshing to see a young man really enjoying his trade and literally playing the game that we love, not the industry that we hate.”

Inevitably, Dele is in a far more serious environment now and even in the last few years, his preferred position off the striker has fallen out of fashion.

These things are cyclical, so shouldn’t be overstated, but most sides nowadays, including Mourinho’s Spurs, prefer a front three with two inside forwards playing off a nominally more central striker. This is partly why the England international has fallen out of favour under Mourinho, as he moved away from the 4-2-3-1 that he initially used and that played to Dele’s strengths, and why it’s now harder to imagine him at a club like Real Madrid than it was a few years ago.

Dele was also unfortunate that Kane and Son’s injuries last season meant he had to fill in as an emergency striker. One former player also suggested to The Athletic that Dele needs world-class players around him and suffered without the likes of Kane to play off. It might also explain why he has struggled at times in the Europa League this season when playing in what is essentially a second-string side.

Another ex-player put forward the view that Dele is someone who, if not scoring or assisting, can appear inconspicuous and not influence the game as much as others. Again, this is at odds with how Mourinho likes his attackers to operate and goes against an orthodoxy of modern football that is more preoccupied with output and tangible contributions than ever before.

Returning to Dele’s relatability, there is also a layer of vulnerability. Yes, he is very self-confident and happy to put himself out there but he is also someone who had to endure an extremely challenging childhood and has come through adversity to be where he is today. As his adoptive mother, Sally Hickford, put it in the documentary Phenoms: Dele Alli, his apparent confidence has often been misunderstood: “He was lively (as a child). He walked around like a cockerel that was seven-foot tall but he wasn’t. He was just a normal little boy.”

Even now, he is someone who doesn’t like to open up unless it’s within his trusted circle.

All of this is relevant context when trying to explain why fans might feel a connection with a certain player, but back to the initial point: these are not typically major considerations of a manager or chairman when considering a player’s value.

Mourinho is likely to be more swayed by Dele’s more measurable output, like the fact he has scored just one non-penalty goal in 30 games since the start of 2020. Or whether he misplaces passes that lead to turnovers and/or the opposition scoring. As well as against Stoke, Mourinho could be heard raging at Dele for giving the ball away against Shkendija in the Europa League qualifiers in September, eventually taking him off after an hour.

Maybe Dele will yet turn things around at Spurs and have a part to play this season. Perhaps it will be like 2009-10, when the likes of David Bentley, Roman Pavlyuchenko and the previously out-of-favour Bale stepped up in the second half of the campaign to help Tottenham qualify for the Champions League.

Either way, it’s clear Dele, who turns 25 in April and is almost sure to miss out on England’s squad for the European Championship this summer, is approaching something of a career crossroads. It’s strange now looking back on a prophetic Steven Gerrard column for The Daily Telegraph five years ago where he warned Dele about the challenge of graduating from Next Big Thing to established superstar.

“There will come a time when he finds it far more challenging,” Gerrard wrote. “Where he feels he is being singled-out for harsh treatment; where the carefree attitude of being a teenager with nothing to lose is replaced with a sense of responsibility he has to deliver every week; and where he feels he’s done well in a match but not quite performed as spectacularly as many wanted, and is fending off criticism.”

Dele himself said in 2018: “The biggest learning curves and points of development for a player is when things don’t go well.”

Whether Dele will manage to turn things around will only become clearer in the coming weeks, months and years, but whatever happens, there will always be the memories, the ones that electrified Spurs fans and made it feel like anything was possible.

His wonder goal at Crystal Palace, scoring twice to end Tottenham’s Stamford Bridge hoodoo, two more to beat European champions Real Madrid at Wembley — it’s moments like that which explain why, whatever the current reality, Dele feels to many like a lot more than a useful squad player who may be held onto in case of injuries.