The names trip off Eric Dier’s tongue. The list begins with Rui Patrício and Adrien Silva, both still stalwarts at Sporting, and Cédric Soares, now an opponent in the Premier League at Southampton. Then there are his fellow academy graduates William Carvalho and João Mário, who recently moved to Internazionale. All were club-mates in Lisbon, players with whom Dier struck up friendships over his 13 years living in Portugal and colleagues he cheered on from afar as they claimed the summer’s European Championship.
The bond forged with that group remains strong, which begs an obvious question and a reassuringly emphatic response. “If England can’t win anything, then I want Portugal to win and I was very happy for them, but never once did I think, ‘I should be playing for Portugal,’” says Dier. “When I was younger, the Portuguese Football Federation spoke to Sporting about my availability but nothing came of it. I’m 100% English. You see a lot of Brazilians playing for Portugal and I was never a big fan of that. Portugal was my home but I always had the idea I would play for England. My footballing brain is a bit ‘foreign’ because I learned everything I know somewhere else but my parents are English, my grandparents are English, I’m English. And, anyway, it’s a bit late to turn round now.”
That much is very true. Aside from those occasional flirtations with the country where he learned his football, playing seven-a-side from the years of eight to 13 or on dirt pitches once he had progressed into full-sided games, Dier already feels a mainstay of England’s national team.
It is a year since he was summoned from the bench to join Michael Carrick in midfield in Alicante as Roy Hodgson’s team lost 2-0 to Spain in a friendly. The intervening 12 months have seen him quietly effective in the middle, only occasionally drawing the focus whether scoring a last-ditch winner in Berlin or the team’s opening goal at Euro 2016. He has gathered 14 caps while establishing himself as the first-choice central anchor under three different head coaches. It may still be early days in the 22-year-old’s fledgling career but he has already become synonymous with the stability this set-up craves.
Spain will be friendly opponents again on Tuesday, neatly book-ending that first year at this level. “They’re a fantastic side and I loved watching them from the bench, seeing them close up, before I made my debut,” he says. “It’s a good means of gauging progress because they’ve been one of the best for such a long time.
“You always want to measure yourselves against sides like that, both personally and as a team. Obviously results are what count in senior football but performing the right way as well is important. If we defend for 90 minutes and score a last-minute winner on Tuesday, then probably everyone goes home happy. But that’s not my way of assessing whether we’ve done well or not.
“We will have to be aggressive, show character and confidence and be brave. That’s the most important thing to me. That’s what we did in Germany [in March]. That was the perfect performance. You get feelings in games. We were 2-0 down that night but the England fans were still singing and happy because they saw what we were doing, saw we were being aggressive and brave. Even if we had only drawn that game the feeling would have been good because we went about it in the right way. Winning it at the end was the reward for that.
“It’s been quite a year. The Spain game was a massive high for me, making that debut when I hadn’t thought I’d make it so soon. As was last season with Tottenham Hotspur, coming so close. But then there was quite a big low over those last three or four games of the Premier League season and Euro 2016 took a similar massive dip. It went as low as possible. Up until that Iceland game the Euros had probably been the best time of my career but the match in Nice was the worst.”
Every get-together with the national team since has been aimed, in some way, at repairing the damage that was largely self-inflicted that night at the Stade de Nice. That sorry occasion does not need to be revisited. Dier describes the whole performance as “inexplicable” and his shrug hardly needs the words “We were just terrible” as the panic set in. “It’s going to take a long time to apologise properly for that game,” he says. “I don’t think we can repair things in this qualification campaign. The only way to fix a failure at one tournament is by putting things right in another tournament. The World Cup is the time to do that.
“But, when I play for England, I have the feeling that what the fans want is not so much a result. It’s more about them going home thinking: ‘You know what? They gave it their best. They left everything out there. They gave everything. There was nothing more they could have done. And we enjoyed watching them.’”
Tuesday’s friendly against prestigious opposition offers an opportunity to be bold and remind the watching world that, after that choke on the Côte d’Azur and all the recent turmoil off the pitch, this is a team geared towards progress. As Dier points out, his friends in the Portugal set-up had started the summer slowly “but they always believed they were going to achieve something and that’s what counts”.
England would do well to follow suit.
