Dele is ready for mighty Modric
Dele has cheeky history with master Modric ...and he wants more of the same tomorrow
FOR Dele Alli the pre-match routine for tomorrow night’s World Cup semi-final will go way beyond using the same pair of shin pads he has worn since he was 11 years old.
He will have an eight-minute ice bath this evening, make a point of dressing his right leg before his left in the England changing room and then whisper the same prayer as always to himself, requesting that he scores and his team win.
Then there is the surgical tape he actually left off for the opening game of England’s World Cup campaign. ‘You might have noticed I have it on my knee,’ he said. ‘I don’t like taking it off. I left it off for the Tunisia game, the first game in ages I hadn’t used it and I got injured. So I’m keeping it on again now. It’s a bit crazy but I’m superstitious like that.’
Yesterday here in Repino, Alli was also quite the raconteur, regaling his audience with some amusing stories of his rise from the English Football League to the World Cup — something of a recurring theme with these England players at this tournament.
Alli revealed how Danny Welbeck had once refused a request to swap shirts with him when he was a teenager at MK Dons, recalled a particularly grim encounter at Bradford and reflected with a wry smile on the day he nutmegged the finest member of the Croatia side England will meet in Moscow, a certain Luka Modric.
The four-goal League Cup defeat of Manchester United four years ago was a particular highlight from Alli’s time at MK Dons. But he still remembers how someone who is now a valued team-mate and friend here in Russia rejected the request of a young footballer in awe of his opponents.
‘Me and Danny Welbeck have a joke about it now but I asked him for his shirt and he wouldn’t give it to me,’ he said. ‘To be fair, he was polite about it, he was really nice. But I’ve still got my shirt from the game. I wasn’t going to give him mine.’
Alli almost winces with pain when he recalls a bruising contest he had one night in Bradford, having signed for Tottenham only to return to Milton Keynes on loan for the rest of the season.
Asked to recall a low point in his time at his first club, he immediately says ‘ Bradford away’ — a defeat that denied his side the chance to move top of League One.
‘It was a night game, the pitch was horrible, it was a horrible game,’ he said. ‘They had James Hanson up front, they were very aggressive. Every time I got the ball people would be kicking, swearing. Tottenham were telling me they’d watched the game and I was thinking, “Oh no”.’
He has clearly forgotten the goal he scored that night — a close-range effort that actually slipped between the legs of Jordan Pickford.
But he does recall a pre-season friendly against Real Madrid in 2015 and a moment when Modric reportedly called him ‘ a little bugger’.
‘He said something but I don’t know him personally,’ said Alli. ‘All the guys who played with him at Tottenham said he was an unbelievable person as well as a great player. I do remember it. I always enjoy a good nutmeg. It would be nice to do it again.’
Modric, he nevertheless accepts, is a major threat to England in Moscow. ‘I think he’s a worry for
any team who come up against him,’ said Alli. ‘He’s a world-class player and someone you enjoy watching. But we are confident, we have threats of our own.
‘They are a team who like to have possession of the ball and so do we. They like to press and win the ball back and so do we. So I think it’s going to be an interesting game.’
Alli very much hopes to be at his best, having delivered what he considered a slightly below par performance against Sweden despite scoring the goal that doubled England’s lead and put Gareth Southgate’s side beyond reach.
It was not big-match nerves. That, he says, is something he never suffers from. But he was not happy.
‘I spoke to the manager and some of my team-mates,’ he said. ‘I didn’t feel like I was playing as well as I should have been. Even speaking to my family, I didn’t feel like I was playing well, especially in the first half.
‘Defensively I did my job, did what I needed to do, and my movement was good. But I felt in possession, on the ball, I wasn’t sharp enough.
‘I didn’t keep it as much as I should have. I’m my own biggest critic and I know I can play better than that.’
He described those post-game talks with Southgate as positive, stressing that the England manager is only looking forward now they are in this position.
‘Before we came out here we were doing a lot of preparation, like looking back on the Iceland game at Euro 2016 and things like that,’ he said. ‘When Gareth came in it was the first time we had relived that defeat. You don’t want to watch it back but we know how important it was, going into the World Cup, to go back through it so we could come out stronger.
‘Straight after that Iceland game you wanted the floor to eat you up. You wanted to hide and not come out of your room. But now we are out here, it’s all about maintaining a good energy.’