According to ESPN Dele Alli said him and his fellow team mates are not too “soft” for their forthcoming FA Cup challenge at Rochdale after helping us to a Champions League comeback against Juventus.
We follow our 2-2 draw at Juventus, in which we had trailed 2-0 early on, with a trip to the League One side for an FA Cup fifth-round tie on Sunday.
The well publicised situation with Rochdale’s pitch led Mauricio Pochettino to express concern, and the club (Rochdale) said they were having it re-laid after last Saturday’s home match against Fleetwood Town was called off.
The new pitch is not expected to be fully bedded in, meaning we will have to content with a bobbly surface.soft.
Alli said: “We are not soft, A lot of us grew up playing on worse pitches than that. A lot of us grew up playing on concrete, so I don’t think the pitch is a problem.For us, we’ve just got to go there and be professional and ensure a good performance to win the game.”
Newport County held us to a draw in the fourth round before we won the replay at Wembley, and Alli added: “It’s going to be a very difficult night for us. It’s important we don’t go there and think it’ll be an easy game.We know it’s not going to be easy. We saw that against Newport when we played them — it was a difficult game and we had to play them at our place and get the win there.It suits them a lot more being at their place, but for us we want to go there and play well, put on a good performance and win the game.”
We trailed to Gonzalo Higuain’s double inside eight minutes of their round-of-16 first leg in Turin on Tuesday but recovered superbly to take two away goals back to Wembley on March 7 and Alli said the performance illustrated how far Spurs had come but added that they must put the game behind them and focus on the FA Cup.
“I think it shows a lot of improvement,” he said.”Throughout this whole Champions League campaign you’ve seen the great results we’ve had, finishing top of our group — it’s a lot different to last season [when Spurs went out in the group stage].
He added: “We said last season we wanted to learn from it because it was a disappointing campaign for us. I think we have this season.It was an amazing result tonight, but we’ve still got another leg to go against these lot.It’s important we put this fixture behind us now, take the positives from it, try to recover as best we can before the weekend and try to win that game.”
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