James Milner

So yeah, I suppose you're checking that it's the right move for you, I suppose.

Yeah, I think so.

I think obviously, you know, when you're going to Liverpool at that age, you're a senior player.

But I think I was fortunate because I came through at 16, so young.

If you come through at 21, by the time you've played five or six years, you're 27 and you're seen as a senior player.

I was five or six, seven years in and I was 21, 22.

So by the time I got to 30, I had all these years where I felt like more of a senior player than I actually was.

I think obviously going there and you know your role and you're going into a team that was desperate to achieve and I just remember the first getting there and it was the year we nearly won the league and I'd been on the other side of that and we had won the league and it was a bit of a hangover and that was the first thing for me that I thought we have to get rid of this talk like we didn't, like we need to get on and do it and that was quite an eye-opener for me when I first got there and

I saw it as coming in and I was an experienced player and I'd been part of something that we'd gone from not winning in for a while to winning something and I'd seen incredible characters that I'd mentioned before, like Vinnie coming in as captain and stuff like that and how he'd gone about stuff and just tried to help, you know, get the club moving on that way and then obviously Jurgen came in and then it took off again.

Yeah, incredible.

I mean, you can't really understand the magnitude of the club until you really... I think when you travel away, you see it.

I mean, you sell out 100,000 fans at a game, two opposite ends of the world, one in Australia, one in America.

You travel, the fans who are there in the city, people watching training and how much it means to people.

And then...

You know, the success, the dream was to achieve pretty much what we did achieve and, you know, what are the odds on that happening?

Pretty low, I suppose, in football.

So to be able to go there and do it and then what we did achieve was a dream, really, in terms of...

you know, things panning out, what's the best case scenario here, and probably stayed, obviously, a lot longer than I thought I would when I signed at 30 or whatever.

I think they gave me a five-year contract at that point, which was obviously a big confidence from them and what they thought I could bring and how my body would hold up.

It was an incredible time with incredible people.