Scoring a goal is an explosion of feelings. It's there immediately - bam! Before you kick the ball, you feel like you're 200 kilos. Then the ball leaves your foot, goes through the air and ripples the net. And for that moment, you're weightless.

As a striker, your job is mostly to forget. When you have someone like Vidic marking you, and it's misery for 89 minutes, all you have to do is forget everything. Forget the 89 minutes. Because in the 90th minute, you might finally get your chance. I have been pretty good at this in my career.

As a young player, national duty always felt kind of like... a duty. It was always there, it was normal, it was part of the job.

I just stand there up front and score the goals, because that's my job.

I was never really a model. That somehow is in my bio. The whole thing is I was tall since I was a child - you're either a model or you play basketball.

I wasn't a jock in school, and by the 10th grade, when I was in boarding school I was carrying water buckets for the girls' hockey team. I was the kid with long hair and glasses and acne trying to learn how to play guitar and piano in the music center. I was not an athlete past the age of 13 or 14 when they start throwing the ball really fast.

Wrestling, football, basketball, and baseball were the four things I was obsessed with as a kid.

The aura of soccer is very different from other sports.