Victor Wanyama is casting his mind back to more innocent times — falling in love with the game as a child growing up on the outskirts of Nairobi, winning a pair of football boots — “Puma, bright yellow” — and, because he was used to playing in bare feet, finding them so unfamiliar and so heavy that initially, “I could not run”. He soon got used to them.

It was not all sweetness and light, though. “As kids, we used to see a lot of brutal things,” the Tottenham Hotspur midfielder says. “You would see thieves stealing, being chased by police, running to where we were playing, running among the kids. It was dangerous, growing up and seeing these things. Some people would look at