“i was working as a pe teacher and considered leaving football – then i ended up at man united”

Who were your heroes, growing up? Being a footballer is the dream for many boys and girls – I was no different. My dad used to work near Loftus Road, so despite having Arsenal and Palace fans in the f

How did your move to Southampton come about in 1996? I was scoring loads of goals in Norway and I went to Southampton on trial for a few days. They liked what they saw. It was a dream come true: every

O wen Hargreaves is one of English football’s most curious cases. The son of a Welsh mother and an English father, he was born in Canada before moving to Bayern Munich as a teenager. There, he broke i

So, you made your professional debut for George Graham’s Arsenal in 1990... I went down there as a 16-year-old, having just scored for Scotland in the 1989 Youth World Cup Final in front of 50,000 peo

You recently retired aged 40 after playing over 900 games. Why now? I’d been thinking about it for close to two years and had become quite comfortable with calling it a day. But as soon as I actually

When the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened in April 1986, I was nine years old. I’d just had a trial with Dynamo Kyiv, and it had gone well, but everything changed. In the first few days following t