In a way, I've thrived on the competition, perhaps it has made a better player because of it.

Footballers do get a hard time, and there is a lot of generalization going on. When you get to meet players and know them as lads, it's always a bit different.

I was always pretty good at school, but a lot of it was memorising, maybe cheating off your mates, stuff that gets you through.

In international football, you need pace and you need your players up top to create things out of nothing and run at people.

I don't want to be a passenger sitting on the bench not doing much, even in my older years.

I like to go to America. That's where I go for most of my holidays.

Even with the quality of players that we have, they're an extremely hard side to break down and once they get on top of you, you find it difficult to stem the flow of attacks.