THE TRAINING GROUND!

“Some of the squad have kids, so they’re used to being up earlier than others. Me, I’m waiting until about 8.30am before I’m out of bed!”

“We’ve got to do a medical check-in at 9am. You go down, see the doctor and say how you’re feeling. Let them know if you have any soreness in your legs, things like that – there’s a little questionnaire to do!”

“Then it’s breakfast time. I have beans, scrambled egg and toast. There are so many things for us to choose, but I’m scrambled eggs, beans and toast!”

“We always have a meeting before training, then it’s off to the dressing room to get ready for training!”

“First we go to the gym and do pre-activation in there. This is a little warm-up where we do a few leg exercises, then we head outside to the pitch!”

“Training lasts for about one-and-a-half hours and we’re usually back inside for 1pm!”

“There’s a golf simulator in there, but I don’t play golf so it doesn’t really interest me! There’s a basketball arcade machine, table tennis, a few of the lads play cards. There’s a Playstation in there, but I haven't had time to play World Cup mode yet – we’ve been so busy!”

“There’s no boredom – there’s so much to do! As players you travel a lot. We have laptops, TV series to watch, Playstations to play – there’s all sorts of stuff that the FA have sorted out!”

“It’s about teamwork – you’re holding hands and you have to trap the person that’s trying to touch you and get away! Sometimes we chuck around an NFL ball, and there was a chicken that came out once! I don’t know what that was about. It was down to the fitness coach – they’re all different. It was definitely not a live chicken. It’s been fun!”

“We’ve had a few different penalty practice sessions, after training normally. We’ve all done the walk from the halfway line – that’s very much part of it!”

“So it was sent to pens! We did it properly – one team went wild at the end and the other was fuming! There were a lot of good pens so that’s a good sign!”

Nizhny Novgorod is one of Russia’s most beautiful cities – 1.2 million people live there. That’s about the same population as Birmingham! It will have hosted Sweden v South Korea and Argentina v Croatia before England arrive on Sunday. There’s room for 45,000 screaming fans at each game!