Karl Robinson interview: The pied piper of MK Dons is on a mission to find the next Dele Alli

After taking on Chelsea in the FA Cup on Sunday, the manager who discovered Spurs’ brilliant midfielder will go back to nurturing young local talent for the club he loves

(GETTY IMAGES)

We might still be there now, inexhaustible trigger points setting off a fresh starburst of enlightened thought. Karl Robinson is so awash with ideas and anecdotes he needs a caddie to keep the ball rolling in the right direction.

All manner of things bounce around the coffee table in the suite overlooking Stadium MK, from the prodigious Dele Alli to his wife’s dress shop in Buckingham to his love of Woburn Golf Club, where he is often seen on summer nights shaving his handicap of nine ever deeper into single figures. Oh, and there was a bit of chat about an FA Cup fourth-round tie with Chelsea tomorrow.

The arrival of the Premier League champions represents serious football exotica in this precinct, no matter the degree of dysfunction at Stamford Bridge this season, and a diversion from the unremitting toil involved in retaining Championship status following promotion from League One last May.

Robinson, still only 35, has one of the smaller budgets in the second tier and, being the enthusiast he is, embraces that impediment as part of the greater managerial experience. Indeed, so locked in is he to the idea of testing himself against financial constraint, he declined the chairman’s offer of an advance on next year’s spreadsheet to roll the dice in the transfer window.

Another way of putting it is this: Robinson is backing his instinctive feel for a footballer, and his commitment to coaching rigour, to steer his team clear of the Championship dead zone. And the way Alli is shaping at White Hart Lane after last year’s £5m move from MK, you have to believe there is substance in his method.

All roads in this football chat room lead necessarily to Alli, whose radical upgrade with Tottenham and England reinforces the Robinson doctrine. “I took my dad to watch Dele. He was 15 I think. I said: ‘Dad, I have got a couple of kids here, top drawer. See if you can spot them.’ We sat behind the goal. Within three minutes Dele had got into a bit of [disciplinary] trouble with a tackle, nut-megged three of them and scored a goal. ‘Is it him?’ Dad said, laughing.

“These kids just have an amazing ability to be in the middle of everything. Our job is to take the pressure off them, and support that talent. And that, at a young age, is often the difference between making it and not. We put them under so much pressure. The demand on young players is so great. I lost everything [to injury] at 18, 19 through no fault of my own. I don’t want to be the reason they don’t develop. It’s not about me. I’m just the person who builds the stage for them. I just ask them to trust me.

“We seem bent on telling kids how not to do things instead of telling them how good they are at things. I hear a lot of people saying work on this weakness. That’s fine, but David Beckham was brilliant at free-kicks because he practised them, so focus on what you can do, not what you can’t.”

Mauricio Pochettino has Robinson’s admiration for his handling of Alli, but that should not carry more weight than the nurturing he received at MK, a club proud of its connectivity within the locale. “I’m from Liverpool. In the catchment area we lost players to Man United, Everton, Bolton, Blackburn, Wigan, City etc. In MK there is nothing within half an hour radius. When I first came, that is something that I had to home in on. There are so many good players around here. And as a club we like to think we can bring them on.”

Alli, who still lives in the town with the guardians who took him in as a child, is a regular presence at the club, and still uses the agency of Robinson to process his game. “Dele is loving it, but he is still here all the time. I bumped into him on New Year’s Eve. It was six o’clock and I was running into town. We were in a coffee shop. He was reminding me of [when we played at] Carlisle and what he did wrong up there. It just shows you what an amazing individual he is.

“He has to contend with a lot in his life and should be proud of what he has achieved. I know we get judged as footballers but I like to talk about the individual, and he deserves all the success he is getting because of the way he is as a person. Tottenham were very good about the way they did the deal. There was talk of Liverpool coming in. At that stage there was lots of clubs in for Dele. People have highlighted Liverpool, and they wanted to meet him, but to be fair to Spurs, David Pleat [who scouts for the club] had a residency in my office before every game. Paul Mitchell, who worked here as well and moved from Southampton to Spurs, knew a lot about him. And they have brought him on brilliantly.”

Some leave Robinson’s care early. Sheyi Ojo, another plucked from the MK junior leagues, left the club for Liverpool four years ago aged 14. You might have clocked the name when he scored the second goal in Liverpool’s FA Cup replay against Exeter. It was, of course, at Anfield that Robinson developed his eye for a player while coaching at the academy. It is a part of the profession he values most.

“I remember when Sheyi got in one of the England age-group squads against Wales. Joey Muster, who I signed at eight at Liverpool, Harry Wilson, who I signed at the same age, Cameron Branagan, Ryan Kent, were all in that team. Then Sheyi came on. The second we left that stadium the agents were round him. I had never seen anything like it. It was embarrassing. Whenever my young players get international recognition like that it is something I take tremendous pride in.”

As a Scouse contemporary of Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher, local lads successfully harvested by Liverpool, Robinson recognises the significance to any team of the boys from the hood. It remains central to his thinking as a coach. “It has always been my dream to bring young players through. Being a fan of Liverpool as a young boy with a season ticket, the solidarity and excitement a home-grown player brings to the stands is one of the greatest things. We are old-school, new-school here, really, the newest club bringing in local kids. There is nothing better for me. Maybe one day I can field a whole team of local players at MK. That’s the ambition.”

He is helped in that regard by the return from loan this week of George Baldock, who gave a marvellous impression of a right-sided Luke Shaw in Oxford’s dismissal of Swansea in the third round. Baldock came to Robinson from the MK gene pool as a midfielder, but under Robinson’s aegis has converted to a full-back, and on the evidence of his Oxford exposure might yet be the next MK student to graduate to the Premier League.

“Maybe you have to have a natural eye for it. I don’t think I could tell you there is a strength these players have. There is just an aura about them,” Robinson says of the Allis of this world. “It is no coincidence that when all the best things happen on a football pitch they are generally at the heart of it. That is a way of looking at a young player. If he is a defender and heads everything, makes every tackle then obviously he is prominent in that team. A midfielder will be making challenges, getting back, scoring goals, wide players keep going past players on both sides. This is what you are looking for. The strikers are easy to spot. It is when you see these kids at a certain age, it is always them.”

Chelsea’s mercenary troupe will come and go, taking victory with them in all probability. This result is not an end for MK Dons, rather the latest staging post in the development of the club, and the town. At a time when football is losing its connection to the community, the Dons are deeply representative of the town that bore them. Both are institutions brought about by design rather than organically. It tends to be held against them, yet with each passing year they grow more comfortable in their own skins, and increasingly relevant.

Robinson has ambitions to coach in the Premier League and in Spain. His wife, former model and Brookside actress, Anne Marie Davies, is a fluent Spanish speaker as well as the reigning Mrs British Empire. He has turned down a number of offers in order to continue his development where he enjoys a degree of autonomy and the love of his chairman, Pete Winkleman.

Which brings us finally and briefly to tomorrow’s engagement with Chelsea. “They don’t scare me. We respect them, of course. But in our psyche we have to be confident. But if we get beat 5-0 so be it. It’s an experience. Look forward to it. We will be back here working hard on Monday whatever happens.”