Consistency is great but it is the magic moments that we all dream about

How do you approach your life?

Are you solid? Do you hope you can be, on the whole, happy and strive for contentment and the simple things in life?

The house is big enough, the car gets you to Tesco and back, and you can scrape together enough spare cash for a half-term trip to the cinema or the zoo.

Or do you go in pursuit of that rush from those electrifying boosts? Those feelings that, for however brief a time, leave you ecstatic and delirious.

As a reader of the Racing Post, the chances are you fall more into the second category. It’s those moments you remember. The big winners and the what-might-have-beens.

It is the story of Dele Alli that has brought all this to my mind.

His fall has been pretty spectacular. From the brightest young footballer in the country to one who is struggling to complete a game while on loan at Turkish side Besiktas.

And this was all predicted by his former Tottenham manager Jose Mourinho during a chat in his office which was filmed in Amazon Prime’s excellent All or Nothing series a couple of years ago.

Mourinho told him: “There is a huge difference between a player that keeps consistency and a player that has moments. That is the difference between a top player and a player with top potential.”

The thing is, where I differ from Mourinho is that I don’t think just having ‘moments’ is a bad thing, if they are memorable.

Take Harry Kane, who is probably the chalk to Alli’s cheese.

When he first played at Tottenham, many Spurs supporters I knew drew comparisons with a striker they had in the 1980s - Mark Falco.

He scored 68 goals but never really established himself in the first team and after about seven years as a professional, he joined Watford.

We anticipated a similar career path for Kane. The thought of him beating the club’s goalscoring record after a host of loan spells was laughable, but fair play to him, he has done it.

He has shown that very consistency Mourinho desired for Alli. He has been the Special One’s role model.

But how many of those 267 Spurs goals were truly memorable? How many of them were great Tottenham moments?

There was the one he curled in while wearing a facemask against Arsenal but consistency, by definition, means they were all pretty much the same.

The fact they were all televised means they have merged into one.

Ruthlessly efficient, yes. But the chances are that as long as Kane plays for Spurs, he will never have a night like Lucas Moura did when he scored that hat-trick in the 2019 Champions League semi-final against Ajax.

One forward showed great consistency, one had a single great night. Yet both will go down in the club’s history.

In 1978, Tottenham signed Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa.

Ardiles will always be regarded as one of the greatest midfielders to have ever put on the white shirt.

Villa would be the first to admit that his friend was a vastly superior player, but he was the one who scored arguably the greatest goal in the club’s history - his mazy dribble in the 1981 FA Cup final replay against Manchester City.

One was super-consistent, one had a moment.

So, to my mind, they are both reasons to look back with pride. Both great careers and brilliant goals create legacies.

When you retire, if you haven’t already, will you sit back and look at your long career in one big lump or will you recall those incidents that made you laugh or cry?

The memorable bits of being a parent are instances - watching first steps, dropping off for first days at school, first dances at weddings. It’s rare to reminisce about the whole picture.

There is nothing to be ashamed about being a footballer who has moments. It’s what we all dreamed about in the playground and hopefully, in Alli’s case, he’ll dust himself down and have some more.

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