Dele Alli exclusive: The coach who created the Tottenham superstar
Karl Robinson played a prominent role in the rise of Dele Alli during his time as MK Dons manager and he has offered Yahoo Sport a unique perspective on a 20-year-old who has emerged as one of the game’s biggest stars since his move to Tottenham.
After his two goals against Chelsea on Wednesday propelled him to the top of the football agenda once again, here is Robinson’s take on a midfielder he worked with for four years before his move to Spurs.
I always knew we had a special talent on our hands with Dele and it was just a question of how special he would become.
I could see he was a great player in the making when he was 16 and what separated him from a lot of kids at that age was that he was willing to put every last ounce of effort into making sure he got to the very top.
Another part of his character that will never change is his down to earth nature. Dele won’t behave differently just because he is a star in the Premier League now. He is a down to earth kid who will always be like that and this is one of the reasons why all of us who had a small part to play in his career as so pleased to see what he has achieved in his time at Tottenham.
When you see someone with such a good heart enjoying success, you have to be delighted for them and I don’t want to take any of the credit for what he has achieved since his move to Spurs.
Dele has made this story a success and those of us who have helped him on his way do not deserve too much credit for making it happen. His hard work has helped him to achieve what he has so far, it’s as simple as that.
To be honest, I’m probably a little bit surprised by the speed of his development. I always knew he was good enough to play in the Premier League and for England, but he has done that well ahead of schedule.
What has never been in doubt is his potential and his enthusiasm for the game. You look at Dele playing football and he reminds me of a kid in the park, just loving the game. Sliding into tackles, trying things most players would not imagine.
He just loves the game and that oozes out of him every time you see him play. The trouble is, a lot of coaches would not allow him to express himself like that and that is what he was allowed to do when he worked with us at MK Dons.
There is a culture of giving too much money too soon to kids that show a little flash of ability and then, with all that money stacking up in the bank, they are told to work on their weaknesses every day.
No one told David Beckham to practice left footed free-kicks when he was a kid, but that would be in the instruction he would probably get now. Some of our kids are not being handled as well as they could be by coaching ‘experts’, but we were determined to get it right with Dele at MK Dons.
He was a kid with talent wanting to escape from him and we never tried to hold that back. Too often in this game, youngsters are not given a chance to express themselves. The demand for results and quick success means managers cannot take a chance on kids, but I had that freedom with Dele and look at the results.
What Dele’s story proves is that there are kids playing in the lower leagues of English football that could do a job for the top clubs, but often they don’t get that chance for one reason or another. The big clubs have got used to bringing in foreign stars and they often do deals through the same agents, which means English kids can be overlooked.
It is the same with Jamie Vardy. He was playing at the bottom end of the Football League not so long ago and look at what he achieved with Leicester last season.
Hopefully the success stories of Vardy and Dele will remind the big Premier League clubs that giving talented English players a chance to show what they can do is not such a big gamble after all.