Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
CROATIA v ENGLAND
FORTY-EIGHT hours before the biggest game of his life and Dele Alli is holding court. He’s talking about nutmegging Luka Modric, playing against bruisers on a bitter Bradford night, having one foot bigger than the other and being snubbed by Danny Welbeck after asking for his shirt.
It is knockabout stuff, a reflection of how he is taking the enormity of a looming World Cup semi-final in his stride, just like his squad-mates.
Because while his journey from Milton Keynes to Moscow might be a slightly unusual one, Alli feels he belongs on the grand stage he is about to do battle on.
This entire England team feels they belong here.
“I don’t think we are surprised. Coming here, we had to believe and we know how talented we are as a squad,” he said. “We have some unbelievable players and a great manager and everyone is clear on what we want to do.
“When you have such a solid foundation, it’s not a surprise that it’s going well for us. We are in the semi-final now and, as a team, we think we should be in the final.”
Which would be a remarkable contrast to the summer of two years’ ago when Alli wanted to go into hibernation after the shame of the Iceland defeat at Euro 2016.
He recalled: “Straight after that game you want the floor to eat you up.
“You want to hide and not come out of your room. You want to forget about it and lock yourself away.”
It is not a phase of his career that Alli, one of four players from the starting line-up against Iceland who will be on from the off against Croatia tomorrow night, wants to dwell on.
But ahead of this tournament, Gareth Southgate made Alli and the others sit down, watch the debacle in Nice, get it out of their system and learn from it.
He admitted: “When
Gareth came in it was the first time we relived it. You don’t want to watch it back but we know how important it was, going into the World Cup, that we had to go back through it to come out stronger.”
They have certainly come out stronger, just one step away from a World Cup final.
Alli’s header against Sweden rubber-stamped England’s progress to the last four but his joy was tinged with a touch of concern about his own form. He said: “I spoke to the manager and some of my teammates because I didn’t feel like I was playing as well as I should have been. I even spoke to my family. 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. I know I can play better than that.” That is an attitude that characterises this entire squad. Confident but always striving to improve, ambitious but grounded and looking at the showdown with Croatia as the START of a journey, not the possible end.
“We are so focused that you forget what we have done so far,” he added.
“It is important we stay like that, keep going and hopefully we achieve something to make it even more special… get to the final and win it.”