“The Bangladesh national team is looking for a head coach – do you want to throw your hat in the ring?”
My agent rang me one fine day and said his company had been given the rights to find a head coach for Bangladesh and asked if I would be interested. I was the assistant coach at Barrow Town – a non-League English club – at the time and had spent the entirety of my playing and managerial career in England.
To be honest, I never really knew where Bangladesh was in the world. I looked it up and the type of place that it was. A couple of weeks later, my agent called again to say the vice-president of the Bangladesh Football Federation was in London. So, I met him, we had a good chat, discussed how he saw Bangladeshi football and where it could go and how we could improve it. About a week later, they rang up and said the job is yours. In a short space of time, it was: get up, leave family, move to Bangladesh. Regardless of where they were in the FIFA rankings, being an international manager was still something I really wanted to do. I wanted to test myself.
The fanfare at times in Bangladesh left me confused. It was very different from England, where no one had a clue who I was. We were on TV in Bangladesh quite a lot, and so I would walk down the streets, and there were people who recognised me. For me, it was a bit surreal sometimes! But I enjoyed it.
I often got asked about my time at Arsenal because it was well documented in the media. I was lucky enough to attend the famous Lilleshall National Sports Centre in England, the FA's School of Excellence, with great players such as Michael Owen and Wes Brown. While I was there, I played for the England national team until Under-18 and went on to sign a professional contract with Arsenal.
As a teenager there, it was an unbelievable experience. Arsene Wenger had recently joined and changed the club and philosophy and obviously made it a much better place. For us, it was good to see new ideas and how things were done by a foreign coach. But obviously, the flip side of it was the players he was bringing in were elite level, and for us younger lads, we were never going to get the opportunity to get into the first team.
But to train with those players and to see them on a daily basis was a great experience as well. Just training with players like Denis Bergkamp was something that a lot of people didn't get the opportunity to do. Denis was miles better than anyone else. I remember Marc Overmars was very good as well, but the things Denis did in training and his vision and awareness were a step up.