‘Very happy’ – Jose Mourinho answers question on Dele Alli’s fitness

Jose Mourinho has revealed that he is very happy with Dele Alli’s progress in recent weeks since the midfielder returned from injury.

Dele has only played a total of 113 minutes in the Premier League this season, with 45 of those coming back in the opening match of the campaign against Everton.

However, Mourinho has been handing Alli minutes in the Europa League this past week, with the 24-year-old playing 78 minutes and 81 minutes respectively in the first and second legs against Wolfsberger.

In the match at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Dele managed to rack up two assists and opened the scoring with an incredible bicycle kick (TransferMarkt).

Mourinho has now claimed that he and Alli had a good conversation after the midfielder returned from injury and his condition is improving.

While he pointed out that Dele’s appearances had been climbing in terms of minutes, he was also keen to highlight that he is yet to play a full 90 minutes.

Mourinho said (Football London): “One of my players, Eric Dier told me something like ‘individual performances are not very good when the collective performance is not good’. He’s right, that goes in both directions.

“When the team plays well it’s easier for players to perform well and when players perform well the team plays well collectively.

“So I agree with Eric and in relation to Dele, when you have players performing like he did, it’s easier for the team to play well and when the team plays well it’s easier for players to perform well individually.

“I’m happy with him. Difficult period. Sometimes small injuries in accumulation are more difficult than a big injury where after a few weeks or months you are back.

“Small injuries are mentally not good, players getting disappointed, lack of motivation, frustration. He went through all that.

“He came back. We had good conversations, training well, playing minutes or part of matches. Not yet a 90-minute match but he went through periods and basically now 75 or 80 minutes.

“Condition also improving. His feelings after matches always is better. For example in the first match in Budapest, he played 60 minutes or something like that and he super, super tired after the game.

“This time he played more and two days later, and basically second day of recovery and he’s good.

“We need him, we need them all and today in a long, long time, we didn’t have every player on the pitch and today we had, of course, Gio is not ready to play football yet but he’s training with the team and that is great news for us because we have so many matches.

“Now it is Sunday and then Zagrab and then Palace and then Zagreb and Arsenal and never stop so we need everybody and in the particular case of Dele Alli I’m very happy.”

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