Pochettino must stop making excuses for ‘naughty’ Alli
In a world of happy outcomes, Dele Alli will sit in a room full of club trophies and England caps five years from now and look back on the “naughty” phase of his career, when he dived and dived-in with equal gusto.
The reformed, mature Alli will wince when the interviewer reminds him of his early volatility, and squirm at the thought of him throwing himself over in the box for Spurs against Swansea against in December 2016. The “naughty” label, affixed to him by Mauricio Pochettino, the Tottenham manager, will long since have been snipped off his shirt.
Glorious promise will have prevailed over destructive urges. Alli, chased without success by Real Madrid, will be the darling of English football.
In a world of less happy outcomes, Alli will carry on down the road he is on, reacting to perceived injustice by launching himself, airborne, at the shins of opponents, and looking for contact in the opposition’s penalty box to justify falls.
This narrative is far more likely if Spurs and Pochettino continue to make excuses for him, blame it all on his youth and protect him from the consequences of the kind of nasty challenge he inflicted on Gent’s Brecht Dejaegere in the Europa League on Thursday night, which appalled even pundits who might be sympathetic to young hotheads, especially ones from Spurs.
Harry Redknapp, a former Tottenham manager, said on BT Sport: “[Alli] could have finished a fella’s career. He could have finished a boy’s career. There’s no doubt. It was that bad. He could have broken the lad’s leg, snapped his leg, and that would have been the end. I rave about the boy but that tackle is horrendous.”
Glenn Hoddle, another former Tottenham manager, was also in no mood to protect his old club. “It’s undefendable,” Hoddle said. “You can’t defend that. It was a reaction, a poor reaction, to losing the ball, not getting the foul. You can’t do that on a football pitch. Not nowadays.”
“Not nowadays” is better expressed as “not ever.” As with many of Alli’s worst challenges, the lunge follows a grievance. In this case, a foul not given, which brings him to his feet quickly in search of revenge.
Dejaegere’s leg takes the full force of Alli’s foot, which flies in far above the ball, and there is that queasy moment when no one can know whether the leg will withstand the force of such an impact.
It did, and Gent were remarkably sanguine about the challenge, which earned Alli a straight red card (“I don’t think he did it on purpose but it was a red card, it was really dangerous,” said Hein Vanhaezebrouck, the Gent manager).
The context he lacked however was Alli’s tendency to retaliate in this manner, his loss of self-control, which is the recidivism that Pochettino and Gareth Southgate (with England) are going to have to manage. Nobody can know what Pochettino said to him privately before this weekend’s game against Stoke, but you can only hope it was less solicitous than his public comments at Wembley, where the Tottenham manager said: “He is very disappointed and sad. He knows he made a mistake. It’s only 1½ years he is playing for Tottenham in the Premier League, all that he achieved in a very short period is because he is special and a special boy.” A special boy, but not a special case with special exemptions. On Alli’s rap sheet already were a kick at Fiorentina’s Nenad Tomovic in the last season’s Europa League and a three-match ban in April for punching West Brom’s Claudio Yacob. So Pochettino will have to find a way of showing him that actions have consequences, not just for him but those around him. If he keeps tackling like that, one of his victims is going to end up needing a change of career.