My guys were going back to war and I was flying home. That sucked. I felt like I was letting them down, shirking my duty. It was a conflict — family and country, family and brothers in arms — that I never really resolved.

You miss them so much when they deploy, and you want them to be home, but then when they are, things aren’t perfect. And you feel as if they should be. Depending on the deployment and what I’d been through, I also had emotions ranging from sadness to anxiety to anger.

How can I play baseball when I'm worried about foreign policy?

Nowadays I hear of the princely comforts provided for national teams traveling overseas, and fuss players raise if they happen to miss even a cup of tea! When we used to travel the name of our country and the game were the only two things that mattered.

Before February, I hadn’t really thought about an international call-up for a number of years, to be quite honest, Not that I didn’t want it to happen, but I just thought maybe that time had been and gone.

For sure, as the captain, it’s something bigger. The expectation is higher. Playing for the national team is a responsibility.

This obligation to move can be a burden to a player without strategic vision.

I have been looking for international roles for the last year. I have been constantly auditioning and sent, like, a million tapes. I went overseas to meet directors. So I have been working. You realise that some roles are not made for you and you move to the next thing. It is not about international recognition. I just want to have fun with my roles. Personally, I just want to act

The way the game is, players come to a football club with baggage. Whether that's positive or negative, they come to a new club with some luggage. Tony's baggage over the last four or five years has been not playing so many games at Tottenham.

We're human at the end of the day and I feel that there is a difference between when you treat players like human beings and you care for them.

You know, if you’re young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam—it’s called the dating game... Dating is like being in Vietnam. You’re the equivalent of a soldier going over to Vietnam.

The major challenge is that some people see you as doing a job meant for men and don’t regard you the way they do to the male footballers.

Sometimes you have to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time as a young player. You need a first team player to get suspended or maybe injured and then once you are in the team, it’s up to you to take your chance.

There have been periods when the country heard with dismay that "the soldier was abroad." That is not the case now. Let the soldier be abroad; in the present age he can do nothing. Let the soldier be abroad if he will, he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage,—a personage less imposing in the eyes of some, perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in full military array, for upholding and extending the liberties of his country.