For most football fans around the world, Milton Keynes is best known as the landing ground for the once infamous Wimbledon football club when they were ripped away from their spiritual home.

While much animosity still abounds over the way that move was undertaken and the club that rose to play at Milton Keynes’ Stadium MK, there is a certain level of irony that one of the key players expected to reignite the glory of three Lions past first called the club home.

Dele Alli, mercurial, brash and just good enough to carry the weight of an England shirt that has become tangibly heavier with each failure to relive the heights of 1966, stands as one of Gareth Southgate’s most important figures in Russia for the World Cup.

Now of Tottenham Hotspur and far more well known worldwide than the gangly kid who came through the doors at MK Dons as an 11-year -old, Alli’s chance to create history and plant himself firmly in the folklore of the country that gave the world football comes not much more than a decade later.

22-years-old and with three seasons and 106 Premier League games under his belt, Alli an act as the fulcrum to an England side which has already outlasted a terse encounter with Tunisia and slayed a hapless Panama with efficient ruthlessness.

The English public, so bereft of genuine belief and joy in their national side are starved of the sort of football that makes headlines on the backpages normally reserved for the very best foreign talent the Premier League has to offer.

With the likes of Alli, Harry Kane, Marcus Rashford and Jesse Lingard, there’s every chance that for once, the old lyric might be right. Football, might just be coming home.