England ex-international, Gary Neville, has urged Tottenham Hotspurs midfielder, Bamidele Alli, to brace up and get his mind back.
“I think he’s the classic case of someone who has got himself in his armchair. They give him a four or five-year contract they gave him last year (it was actually a six-year deal) and look what it’s done to him.”
Of course, these were the moments for which Roy Keane was hired, and he didn’t pass up the opportunity to put the boot in: “He’s lost that hunger, and when you lose that it’s hard to get it back. He’s had a few injuries, I’ll give him that, but from what I hear, off the field stuff, basically he thought he was a player, he thought he had achieved something.
“Today, he was non-existent,” the Irishman added, before needlessly claiming that the Spurs player acts as if he’s a “male model”.
That’s how you get broadcasts like Sunday, when a single player is focused on and essentially scapegoated for a bad result. Alli wasn’t the only one who came in for criticism, as Serge Aurier and Danny Rose were also shat on, but the midfielder took the brunt of it. The match felt more like an excuse for three men to have a go at a young player, instead of informing us all about what actually went on out on the pitch.
It can make for semi-interesting television, but we’re offered no real insight. How could someone possibly see into a player’s head and know they’ve “lost that hunger”? Or what their mental state of mind is? It’s all conjecture, but advances a spurious narrative nonetheless.
“He basically thought he was a player, thought he’d achieved something, but today, non-existent.”
When he said Alli was “non-existent”, what did he mean by that? Judging by the statistics, no one on the Spurs side was involved more than him. In a team that only made 290 passes compared to Liverpool’s 627, he made 31. That’s not an impressive number at all for a team with top-six aspirations, but he still completed more than any of his teammates. On top of that, only one other Spurs player had more than his 50 touches of the ball, while he also covered more distance (12.2km) than any other player on the field.
Given the resources of the company for which he’s working, he would have had all that information and more available to him. Those stats don’t mean Alli should automatically be considered their man of the match, but it paints a different picture from the one that was presented to us last week. Not that we should have expected any different, considering we’re only a couple of months removed from his unnecessarily personal comments about Jon Walters.
One of the complaints about Alli’s game is his risky ball play, that willingness to gamble with possession by taking a man on and try and beat them with a flick or trick. This yet again brings confusion as to why he has been placed in a deeper role, however.
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When he’s in the final third, the reward when it pays off could be a goal scoring opportunity or a chance to create something, and the risk is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the ball winner still has two thirds of the pitch to go. In a deeper role they would be much closer to goal.