KYLE WALKER: SORRY GARETH, I’M NOT A CENTRE HALF

IN AN ABSORBING INTERVIEW, KYLE WALKER OPENS UP ON PEP, THE WORLD CUP AND HIS SPURS EXIT

THE recent Manchester City documentary showed Pep Guardiola to be a man of many words, especially in the dressing room. Kyle Walker admits he doesn’t always understand all of them.

‘I am nudging John Stones next to me and he has no clue so we are stuck,’ laughed the City right back this week. ‘We are straight on our phones after to look them up. Pep is highly intelligent.’

But after Wednesday night’s surprise Champions League defeat by Lyon, the City manager was straight to the point.

‘He said he was embarrassed by us and that hurt me,’ Walker told

Sportsmail. ‘To know the guy who put faith in me was embarrassed by me was really bad. But he was right. We were going through the motions in the first half. That’s unacceptable.’

During Walker’s year or so at the club, City have not lost many games. When they do, their new elevated status means every detail is examined from outside.

This time, Guardiola’s absence from the touchline — he was serving a UEFA ban — and City’s failure to fill their stadium for another European game have been advanced as factors.

Both seem a little spurious. How much influence, for example, can a coach really have from the technical area? Can Guardiola’s players even hear him?

‘Oh you can hear him,’ smiles Walker. ‘But you have to take only selective bits in because if you took too much in you could confuse yourself.

‘I try to listen to key bits, but he is emotional and sometimes he is shouting and I try to block some of it out. But you can’t blame defeat on the fact that he was in the stands. It’s a big miss but it can’t be an excuse.

‘We have to go out and handle a game of football. It’s up to us. It’s the same with the crowd thing. It’s not as full and as bouncing, we notice that. So it’s up to us to get people to come.

‘We need to make history for this club and part of that is in the Champions League. The owner has made it his dream to win it so it’s down to the players to get this place rocking. We need to set the lead for the fans. It isn’t going to rock if we play like we did against Lyon is it?’ TODAY opportunity for recovery arrives at Cardiff City. Last season Guardiola’s team won there in the FA Cup but Cardiff’s football bordered on lawless, enraging the City manager. Afterwards Cardiff manager Neil Warnock said: ‘He is in England, what does he expect?’

Walker knows Warnock well. Born two minutes from Bramall Lane, the England defender grew up watching Warnock’s Sheffield United then served under him as an apprentice and spent six months with him at QPR on loan from Tottenham.

‘Neil will defend his players to the end of the earth but he is not stupid and will know that some naughty things happened in that game,’ said Walker.

‘He is funny, a character but enjoyable. People at Sheffield United — past and present — are proud of what I have achieved and I owe them a lot. But Neil will say things in the dressing room to get you firing and believe me it does work. We will have to be ready.’ Walker’s years in Sheffield were formative. He used to go to Bramall Lane with his grandad — always fish and chips beforehand — and was picked up by the club when he was just six.

His stories are relevant to the time, tales of washing balls and cones ( Warnock’s idea) and dashing into nettles to retrieve footballs kicked there by subsequent manager Kevin Blackwell.

‘Once one of the lads didn’t do the boot room correctly so Blackwell interrupted our lunch to get us all running on a full stomach until the first one was sick,’ recalled Walker. ‘ That wouldn’t be allowed now.’

A centre forward as a kid, Walker was the 14th of 14 young players picked up as a trainee at Bramall Lane. He rarely played and was ready to quit. ‘I just didn’t think I was good enough,’ he said.

But one day Walker was asked to fill in as an emergency right back and from there he has rarely looked back. I ask if he ever thinks back to those difficult days now that he has played in a World Cup semi-final. ‘You do pinch yourself,’ he nodded. ‘I am listening to a book by the guy who founded Nike and I can relate to it. He struggled. He borrowed $15 from his dad and now has a turn-over of $8.4bn. It just shows you.

‘ But on the other hand in football you can get lost in the day-to- day. I went into football straight from school and am still here now at 28. Each day of my life has kind of been the same.’

The days of summer, of course, were not the same. Walker was an integral part of England’s run to the last four of the World Cup and knows he was part of something important.

‘It will be with me for ever,’ he said. ‘It was incredible and the fact we made people fall back in love with England again was probably the biggest reward.’

But it appears that his current relationship with the national team is complicated. Walker played well as a central defender in Russia but was overlooked this month when Liverpool’s Joe Gomez was picked to play against Spain.

‘It’s something I have to deal with,’ he said. ‘Joe Gomez is probably a better centre half than me. It’s not my position is it?

‘I have to pick it up really quickly when I go back to England because it’s not something I’m doing week in, week out. I have to put all the work I have done with Pep to the side and listen to something else.

‘I am starting from scratch again and it’s a lot to take in for just three or four days. I have to readjust myself.’

So from that do we presume he does not see Gomez as the obstacle with England but former Spurs team-mate Kieran Trippier?

‘Yes,’ he said, without pause. ‘I want to play right back for England. I think that’s my spot. I have played there for nine years.

‘In the World Cup I was happy to play anywhere. Gareth Southgate felt that would help the team so I was happy to sacrifice the chance to prove that I am one of the best right backs in the world. But I don’t see myself as a centre half.

‘When I am 30 and I haven’t got the legs then maybe I could learn that position, but I would still have to be playing it at club level to do that.

‘It was a bit awkward in Russia, I won’t lie. I am a right back playing right centre half when we have Gary Cahill and Phil Jones sitting on the bench.

‘I felt bad for them, but it wasn’t my decision. I just had to play to the best of my ability wherever the manager picked me.’ WALKER will always be in debt to Mauricio Pochettino, his manager while he was at Tottenham. It was under Pochettino that he grew from boy to man in football terms.

The Argentine tweaked the young defender’s lifestyle — the occasional McDonald’s had to go, for example — and eventually handed him over to Guardiola for

I thought it was a private meeting but then Pochettino wrote about it, or his version. If he was going to do that, he might as well have called a press conference

£45m as just about the perfect modern Premier League player.

‘Maurico was fantastic for me,’ Walker said. ‘I was young, needed to improve and he improved me.

‘ He taught me to look after myself, eat right and rest. I will never forget how much he did.’

In life even the best relationships can fracture and the weapon that has done the damage in this case is the written word, namely some of those written by Pochettino in a book published last year.

Pochettino accused Walker of showing an ‘ alarming lack of respect to his team-mates’ by asking to leave the club towards the end of the 2016-17 season. The Spurs manager maintains that was the only reason a star asset was sold.

Walker disputes this, claiming for the first time this week that he only chose to go after Pochettino began to leave him out of the team.

‘He told me I wasn’t in his plans,’ said Walker.

But it isn’t this difference in the telling of the story that has upset Walker, rather that Pochettino chose to detail their private conversations in the book.

‘I was hurt a lot by that,’ he said. ‘He said his door was always open and I thought it was a private meeting we had. So I kept quiet but then he went and wrote about it... or his version of it.

‘If he was going to do that he might as well have called a press conference and told everyone. He told one side of the story, but it’s a side of a story I don’t agree with.

‘He said he had a witness in there, but he didn’t tell the correct story, no way. Up until now I have never said my part. I have stayed quiet and showed a level of respect to Tottenham and I always will.

‘The manager gave me my chance to showcase my talent. But people don’t know the ins and outs of everything and it is about time I told people what happened from my side.’

When the topic was raised during our conversation this week, it triggered some pent-up emotion.

Walker still cares for Tottenham and Pochettino.

‘I have had a few people calling me a snake and stuff,’ he said. ‘It hurts because I gave everything to that club. And Everything I am now I owe to that club. So yes, it hurts when I go back there now, but I guess it’s just a part of football. ‘I have justified why I wanted to come to Manchester City because I have won trophies and improved. When I first signed I wondered if I had made the right decision. Tottenham had finished above Manchester City two years on the bounce and were going places. But because I wasn’t playing I needed to go. ‘So I am happy now and happy back in the north. I am my mum’s only child and she missed me down south. ‘ It’s not the main reason to be here but this was an opportunity to head back north, get my hunger back and to discover something different. I did want to prove I could do this somewhere else. I think I have done that.’

It feels as though Walker’s relationship with Pochettino will recover and we hope so. In the wake of our interview, he briefly considered retracting his quotes on the topic.

As for Walker and Guardiola, that is a relationship that still continues to flourish. Walker texted his manager to thank him for winning the Premier League last May and again when he beat him in the longest drive competition at the club’s summer golf day.

‘He is very good, but I can hit it a long way,’ Walker smiled. ‘It just doesn’t always go in the right direction.

‘But my football has improved dramatically under Pep from a tactical point of view. There are some little things Pep does in his training sessions make me think, “Why don’t other managers do that?” It has made a huge difference.

‘Mauricio was fantastic. He took me a step further and got me at a good time. Pep is just so detailed technically. He doesn’t sit me down and hammer me with it for an hour, but he gets me on the field and teaches me. That’s how I learn best.

‘One day when I retire and look back I hope I will think, “You know what? You had a decent career Kyle. You did OK”.’

Oh, I can hear Pep on the pitch but he’s emotional and sometimes shouting so I block some of it out