Laura Woods and Gabby Agbonlahor send message to Everton outcast Dele Alli live on talkSPORT
Laura Woods and Gabby Agbonlahor have sent Everton outcast Dele Alli messages after the 27-year-old hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons once again this week.
The former England international was caught in a picture on social media where he was surrounded by laughing gas canisters after returning home from his unsuccessful loan spell at Besiktas this season.
Speaking live on talkSPORT Breakfast (12 April), Agbonlahor pleaded with Alli to seek advice to revive his footballing career, with the former Aston Villa striker saying he would happily speak to him after going through similar incidents during his career.
“It’s just another chapter in the sad story of Dele Alli and his career and the way that it has just seems to be spiralling downwards constantly at every turn,” Woods started off by saying.
“Every time he gets a new opportunity, every time he gets a new manager and we think that this is the one to get this kid back to the levels we saw him when he burst onto the scene, and he was just one of the most impressive things we had seen in English football.”
Agbonlahor replied: “I just feel sorry for him, Laura, but is there something else going on off the field because when I got caught doing those things, I was going through problems in my personal life that I didn’t tell anyone that people didn’t know about.
“He shouldn’t be at this stage of his career. He’s probably close to retirement because when you have this many problems that Dele Alli has had, clubs won’t want to touch you, managers won’t want to touch you, they will be like, ‘no, I’m not having you, I’m not having that problem’, so I think someone really needs to sit down with Dele Alli.
“I would love to speak to him and say, ‘you’re a long time from being retired, you’re only 27, you could be retired in the next six months because of a lack of offer, because of how bad you’re careers ended up’.
“He’s going to look back in two or three years and think, ‘I’m not even 30 yet, I’m retired, and my mate Jack Grealish, who is the same age, look what he’s doing now’.”
From bad to worse
It is such a shame to see Alli’s fall from grace over the last few years.
The Everton player was one of the brightest stars English football has seen in decades, and see his game, but more notably, his mind, drift away from the game in such circumstances if tough to see.
When Everton signed Alli, many thought that Frank Lampard was going to be the manager to get his career back on track, but this, unfortunately, didn’t happen.
Ever since falling out of Lampard’s side and moving to Besiktas, Alli has been catching the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Agbonlahor is correct in his assessment that if the Englishman doesn’t change things up swiftly, he could quite easily be retiring from football within the next year.
Where Alli goes from here, who knows, but there seem to be far more pressing issues right now than getting him back on the football pitch and trying to reignite his faltering career.