“You want the floor to eat you up,” says Dele Alli. “You want to hide and not come out of your room. You want to forget about it and lock yourself away.” It’s a rare moment of genuine desolation in a half-hour interview during which the mood has been as unfailingly upbeat as England’s entire World Cup campaign. But before they set out for Russia, coach Gareth Southgate had something he wanted to show his players. The Iceland game.
Southgate sat the squad down and showed them a video of England’s infamous 2-1 defeat to Iceland at Euro 2016. For many, it was the first time they had watched it back. “It was the first time we relived it,” says Dele, who like many of his team-mates was a helpless passenger as England suffered one of the most ignominious defeats in their history. “You don’t want to watch it back, but we knew how important it was, going into the World Cup, that we had to go back through it to come out stronger.”
The message from Southgate was clear: that you can’t conquer your history until you confront it. The successes of 1966 and 1990 and 1996 may be firmly in the past, but Iceland was very much in the present: a festering sore that needed to be closed. Southgate pointed out various moments in the game that England needed to learn from: mistakes to be rectified, mindsets to be avoided. And that was it. From the moment England stepped onto the plane, it would be positive vibes only.
Four weeks on, they haven’t stopped. England are on the verge of a World Cup final, and whether or not they beat Croatia at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium on Tuesday night, the scenes of jubilation that have spread from the squares of Samara to the pubs of Plymouth are threatening to remake England’s footballing tradition for good. And while England’s players clearly have to maintain a certain focus, and have destroyed a grand total of zero ambulances during their celebrations, it’s reassuring to know they feel it too.
“Yeah, I’d say so,” Dele replies when asked if this is the most exciting time of his life. “It’s weird. You’re in your own little bubble: training camp, coming back, getting ready for the next game. It’s not until you look at social media that you realise how big it is. We’re so focused on the games that you forget what we’ve done so far. It’s important that we stay like that, and hopefully we achieve something even more special: get to the final, and win it.”
Did that feel as surreal to read as it did to type? An England player talking, with an entirely straight face, about winning it. It being the World Cup. Yet somehow, the idea never felt outlandish within the squad itself, even at the outset. “I don’t think anyone expected too much from us at the start,” Dele says. “Coming here, we had to believe. We have some unbelievable players, 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.”
Start small, dream big. And perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of this England squad, apart from its youth, is the humble origins from which many of them sprang. Stockbridge Park Steels. Alfreton Town. Harrow Borough and Welling United. They may all play at big Premier League clubs these days, for some of the best managers in the world, but their roots have never left them. “A lot of the boys have played together in the younger age groups, or played against each other in League One or Championship,” says Dele. “Everyone has had a different journey to get here, and we don’t take anything for granted.
Dele himself began at Milton Keynes Dons, under the tutelage of academy coach Dan Micciche and then first-team manager Karl Robinson. He was much smaller back then, prone to getting muscled off the ball, and with a faintly irritating habit of turning up late for training. But those years were the making of him, and the memories are still rich.
“Bradford away,” he pipes up, when asked about his hardest game. “It’s a beautiful place, but the stadium… it was a night game, the pitch was horrible. It was a horrible game. They had Hanson [6ft 4in tower of terror James Hanson] up front, they were very aggressive and it wasn’t a nice day. Every time I got the ball, people would be kicking, swearing.” It may or may not surprise you to know that the Bradford goalkeeper that day was a promising 21-year-old called Jordan Pickford.
But as his body filled out, and he straightened himself out, English football gradually came to see what the academy staff at MK Dons always had: a prodigious talent with the ball, an instinctive understanding of movement, and a love of the big stage. Dele is the ultimate big-time player, and for all the big games he has performed in - goals against all of the other top six Premier League sides for Tottenham, Real Madrid in the Champions League, France on his international debut, Sweden in the World Cup quarter-final - the most memorable, in many ways, was the first, and a game he didn’t even score in.
For most people, it was Dele’s performance in MK Dons’s shock 4-0 win over Manchester United in the League Cup that announced his talent. And though they weren’t to know it at the time, one of his opponents that night would end up being a World Cup team-mate. “Me and Danny Welbeck have a joke about it, because I asked him for his shirt,” Dele says, burying his face in his hands with embarrassment. “He wouldn’t give it to me. But he was polite about it.”
This all feels like another world, but it wasn’t. Bradford away was only three years ago, Manchester United only four. Perhaps the leap from League One to a World Cup semi-final isn’t as broad as people think. From getting sworn at by Bradford defenders, Dele will now have the job of trying to win a midfield battle on the biggest stage against one of the best in the world.
The good news, for England fans, is that Dele has already made Luka Modric look foolish at least once. It was at a pre-season tournament in Munich in 2015, and a cheeky nutmeg for Tottenham against Real Madrid that would later provoke Modric to call him a “little bugger”. “I don’t know him personally, but all the guys who played with him at Tottenham said he was unbelievable,” Dele says. “He’s a world-class player, but we have a lot of threats as well. He’s not the only player we have to worry about.”
Any chance of a repeat nutmeg for good measure? “It would be nice,” he says. “I always enjoy a good nutmeg.”
Despite opening his account with a goal against Sweden, though, he still believes there is room for improvement. “I didn't feel like I was playing as well as I should have been,” he says. “Defensively I did my job, I felt like my movement was good, but on the ball I wasn’t sharp enough. To score gives you a lift. But I’m my own biggest critic. I know I can play better than that.”
Against Modric and Ivan Rakitic and Marcelo Brozovic, he will need to. But Croatia will also try and play, to a greater extent than any of the teams England have faced so far, with the possible exception of Tunisia during the first 20 minutes. Croatia are the biggest threat England have faced so far, but also their biggest opportunity. An open, flowing game could well play into their hands.
“We started looking into the game this morning,” says Dele, speaking on Monday afternoon. “They’re a team that likes 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. We just have to focus on ourselves, because we haven’t changed our philosophy. And we aren’t going to now.”
No turning back. It’s been the mantra of this England side ever since Southgate got hold of them. And just two years on from the chagrin of Iceland, England are ready to write a new chapter. Footballing immortality is just 180 minutes away; the time for retreat has long since passed. “We know how close we are,” Dele says. “The only pressure we should feel as a team is the pressure we put on ourselves. To try and win it.”
