“ It was me, Hasse Borg and an agent whose name I’ve forgotten, and I shivered a bit under Wenger’s gaze. It was like he was trying to see right through me, or size me up. He’s a bloke who draws up psychological profiles of his players – are they emotionally stable, and stuff like that. He is thorough, like all great coaches, and I didn’t say much at first. I just sat in silence and was bashful, but after a while I lost my patience. Something about Wenger set me off. He would leap up every so often to check who was outside his window. It seemed like he wanted to keep an eye on everything, and he kept going on about one thing all the time. “You can have a trial with us,” he said. “You can give it a try. You can test things out.” No matter how much I wanted to behave, those words set me off. I wanted to show him what I could do. “Give me a pair of boots. I’ll have a trial. I’ll do it right now,” I said. Then Hasse Borg interrupted me, saying, “Stop, stop, we’ll sort this out, you’re not going to have a trial, not at all,” and of course, I understood what he was getting at: either you’re interested, or you’re not. Having a trial means selling yourself short. It puts you in a weak position, so we said no: “We’re sorry, Mr Wenger, but we are not interested,”
- I am Zlatan