If you want to become a professional football player at any level, when you're growing up, you have to make sacrifices, and it's very difficult. It's not easy, but you have to train hard, you have to live right, and you have to rest.

Even when I was growing up as a young boy, when I was playing schoolboy football, there were other guys who were as good as I was, maybe some even better technically. But I was prepared to stick to what was going to make me become a professional football player when I left school, and that was a lot of sacrifice and because my attitude was right.

I've watched parents sometimes on the touchlines at youth games, and they are screaming and shouting, which is not the way to go.

When you talk about professional footballers, rightly or wrongly, people often already have an idea in their head about what they're like; they'll paint a picture before they've met them.

I have always been a movie buff and had no interest in any games and sports. I do not even watch cricket, which is one of the favourite games of most of my friends. However, I have become a wrestling fan after 'Dangal.'

Companies and football teams have become successful precisely because of how diverse they are.

I wasn't like other boys. At any rate, I wasn't like my three elder brothers: they excelled at football and they were like other boys, going up to bed each night hugging annuals filled with stories about the glories of Pele and Danny McGrain.

My plan always was to play college football, hope to get a few snaps in and then go on to medical school. As I went further in my career and got to my junior year, I realized as I looked around, ‘I got a shot here, and I might as well go after it.’"