The defender turned midfielder talks about his long education at Sporting Lisbon, his difficult loan at Everton, his eye-catching form for Spurs and his desire to play for England after unfairly being called a refusenik

Eric Dier can see where the situation is leading, a trait that has underpinned his eye-catching rise on the field but, for once, the Tottenham Hotspur defender turned midfielder has got it wrong. “You’re going to talk about the picture, aren’t you?” Dier says. “The one where he’s having a go at me. No? Oh, I thought you were. There was this picture of us and he’s pulled me over and he’s just having a go at me on the sidelines. It was because I was like a headless chicken in the first 10 minutes.”

Dier is remembering his baptism as a defensive midfielder and the manager who gave it to him at Sporting Lisbon on 2 March 2013. Jesualdo Ferreira is known as the Professor in Portugal and it was he who saw his young centre-half could be a fit for the screening role in front of the back four. And so he plunged the player in against Porto at Sporting’s Estádio José Alvalade, in one of the biggest matches on the Portuguese calendar.

Ferreira has a fiery streak. “He wasn’t your typical Portuguese, he could get very angry,” Dier says. And when things did not start well for Dier, Ferreira made his feelings plain. But things got better and, by the end of the 0-0 draw, Dier had excelled. “It was probably one of my best games for Sporting,” he says. Dier, who was 19, kept his place in defensive midfield until an injury ended his season in late April.

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Dier is one of those guys with the temperament to adapt and rise to the biggest of challenges. On his professional debut for Sporting four months earlier, under the club’s previous manager Franky Vercauteren, he had answered a crisis call at right-back. Four minutes in, he set up what proved to be the winning goal , and in his next appearance he scored the equaliser at Moreirense.

Spool forward to Tottenham, for whom he signed from Sporting in the summer of 2014. He marked his debut at West Ham United with the injury-time winner and his first game at White Hart Lane featured another goal against Queens Park Rangers.

Then there was the Capital One Cup final against Chelsea in March in which he impressed so many people, most importantly his manager, Mauricio Pochettino. Given the nod in central defence he refused to be cowed by Diego Costa, the Chelsea striker. He gave a defining performance, albeit in defeat, and Pochettino would enthuse about it in private. He knew then he could trust him.

“I think I handled Costa well,” Dier says. “He is the kind of guy that you need to be nice to. I see all these people trying to fight him. I’m not sure that’s the way to go. At the beginning, I wanted to make sure he knew I wasn’t going to roll over but after that he seemed fine to me. Obviously we both speak Portuguese and we spoke a lot during the game. It was all good-humoured. There wasn’t any malice from either side.”

Dier has emerged as an emblem of Pochettino’s tenure – ego-free, hungry and tactically flexible. There were calls over the summer for Pochettino to plug the gap in defensive midfield in his team with a major signing but he knew that in Dier, who had played at centre-half and right-back last season, he had the internal solution.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eric Dier visits young unemployed people working on a renovation project at a community centre in Tottenham as part of the Volunteer It Yourself (VIY) project which helps people gain qualifications and boost their job prospects. Photograph: Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty

Pochettino, like Ferreira at Sporting, could see that Dier had the qualities – the efficiency and decision-making – and the scepticism that initially clung to the positional switch has been overtaken by admiration. In the transfer-obsessed world of top-level English football, it was not the glamour move but that has only added to the satisfaction.

Dier’s shielding of the back four has helped Tottenham to the joint-best defensive record in the Premier League; his passing has been sound, he has helped to bring out the best in others and he is getting better each week. He has been tipped for an England call-up and, to many Tottenham supporters, he has been the player of the season so far.

“I like to think that I have proved a lot of people, who were doubting it, wrong,” Dier says. “Because I know that a lot of people did. People will say: ‘Ah, I know nothing about this kind of stuff.’ Some people try to play it cool but you are going to know. But it didn’t bother me. I looked at it like I had nothing to lose. Now it’s just a question of maintaining it.”

Dier speaks with a maturity that belies his 21 years but it is the product of his life experiences. At seven he emigrated with his parents and five siblings from England to Portugal, partly because his mother, Louise, had got the job of running the hospitality programme for the 2004 European Championship. After a year in the Algarve they moved to Lisbon and Dier was scouted and taken into Sporting’s youth setup – the one that produced Luís Figo, Cristiano Ronaldo and all the rest.

Dier played seven-a-side football at Sporting from the age of eight to 13. In the 2-3-1 formations, he started out on the right of the midfield three before dropping back to become one of the two defenders who, he says, “would play as wingers really”. He was a centre-half when he graduated to 11-a-side games and he would routinely play on dirt pitches, which sharpened his technique and attitude.

“It’s a very relaxed approach at Sporting in terms of football,” Dier says. “They pride themselves on bringing you up as a polite and respectful person. They would never get angry with you if you missed a pass but they would do if you were disrespectful to someone. There was no shouting. I hear a lot that that is the case in England.

“A good player for them was someone who could understand when they made a mistake and correct it for themselves. When I first came to England to play I saw coaches having a go at players when they made mistakes and they would literally be talking them through the game.

“In Portugal the coach would sit on the bench and not say a word. We’d just play. It was a matter of us making mistakes and learning from them by ourselves. You understand the game a lot better that way. For me, the sign of a bad player is someone who makes the same mistake twice.”

Dier was assailed by culture shock when he came back to England to play. It was January 2011, he was turning 17 and because Sporting did not have a B team there was no obvious springboard for him to first-team level. On the advice of his father, Jeremy, a former professional tennis player, he joined Everton on a six‑month loan. There had also been discussions with Manchester United.

The idea was to add English steel to his Portuguese technique. After all, it had worked for that boy Ronaldo. “I am doing it on a much lower level than him,” Dier laughs. “But for me, if you get 50% Portuguese and 50% English it really is the perfect mix. My dad basically said I needed a kick up the backside. So I went to Merseyside, and you can never get a bigger kick up the backside than there, coming from Portugal!”

The six months were a nightmare. “If I am completely honest, I absolutely … I didn’t hate it but, at the time, I just thought: ‘Get me out of here.’ It was so different to what I was used to. The lifestyle, the weather, the place, the people … even the language was a factor. The scouse accent was tough for me. And, in football terms, it was a lot more aggressive.”

Everton, though, offered Dier another 12 months and he signed. He knew it could help to make him as a player and so it proved. Alan Irvine’s arrival that summer as the club’s academy director was, perhaps, the turning point, and Dier featured for the reserves and had a few training sessions with David Moyes’s first team.

He describes Irvine as someone who “could go to Portugal to coach, that’s his mentality, he’s in tune with everything” and, when Dier returned to Sporting he found himself ahead of his peers. He did not have to wait long for his first-team debut and although he struggled in 2013-14 after Leonardo Jardim had replaced Ferreira he got his Premier League move when Tottenham met his £4m buy-out clause.

“This time around in England it hasn’t been too much of a culture shock,” Dier says. “But I do think some people forget that I am essentially a foreign player – certainly they did last season. I’m English but, for me, it was like any other foreign player coming to the Premier League for the first time.

“It was hard for me and I had a massive dip at around this time last year. Because the transfer was going on until August I didn’t have as good a pre-season. I was becoming tired at around now whereas this year I feel fine.”

Dier’s dip saw him take the decision to opt out of the England Under-21 friendlies against Portugal and France last November in favour of working at Tottenham.

He had just arrived at a new club in an unfamiliar league, he was struggling for form and running on adrenaline, and the feeling was that if the Under-21 manager, Gareth Southgate, was not going to play him – as expected – Dier would benefit in the long run from catching his breath at Tottenham.

There were talks with Southgate and it was made clear to him that if he was going to use Dier, the player would report without hesitation. Southgate appeared to agree it would be best to omit him. Yet there are rarely any shades of grey in these matters and Dier, briefly, was labelled in some quarters as an England refusenik.

“It was never a case of me saying I don’t want to play for England or me turning my back on my country,” Dier says. “I want to play for England and this year I have continued to play for the 21s. There is a lot of Portuguese in me but I am English.

“The whole situation was completely misinterpreted. I don’t think it was dealt with in the right way from both sides, it could have been handled better and you learn from that. But if you look now, I think it was the right decision. I knew that if I stayed at Tottenham I could train well and get back to a good level.”

Dier has immersed himself in life at the club, down to the detail of their community programmes. He even tried his hand at tiling and painting last week at a renovation project run in partnership with the club’s Foundation, which is helping to regenerate the area. Dier has taken an unusual path to get to this point but when he looks ahead there is only excitement and optimism.

“We were the youngest XI every weekend last season when we finished fifth and it’s obvious this is a team that is going to grow,” he says. “That’s the only thing that can happen when you are that young and you gain experience every week. Naturally you are going to get better and better.”