He arrives for the interview twenty minutes early, which he explains is not discipline but anxiety.

The armband, he says, changed the texture of his week more than the substance of his football.

The season that broke the routine

An injury in October removed the one thing that had organised his life since he was fourteen: a fixed training schedule.

He filled the gap with coaching badges and, unexpectedly, with a reading habit that he describes with some embarrassment.

Learning to lead people who are not like him

The dressing room contains four languages and a twelve-year age range. His first instinct, he admits, was to lead loudly.

It did not work. What worked was a weekly conversation with each of the younger players, held away from the training ground.

What comes after

He is thirty-one. He talks about management in the conditional tense and about his children in the present.

The second act, he suspects, will look nothing like the first, and that appears to be the point.