The Manchester City captain talks frankly about the wrong path he nearly took as a teenager, `lunatic´ politicians and life after footballIt is 10am on an early spring day when I pull up at the electric gates of Vincent Kompany´s home. In the drizzle, the Manchester sprawl has given way to the leafy streets of Cheshire, where long driveways announce the grand houses of the affluent. Kompany answers the door in a black T-shirt and jeans, having just finished a workout. It´s March, and Manchester City´s battle-hardened captain and central defender is only now returning to fitness after a six-week layoff for a calf injury. `I wasn´t feeling great today, so an extra session in the gym is the way to get through it,` he says, a towel draped around his neck, his gentle Belgian accent blending with Manc vowels.At 6ft 4in, Kompany´s stature is reassuring rather than intimidating. He makes green juice in a whizzy little machine that the players are testing. `Sometimes I have a berry one as a treat,` he says, tidying up. We take them into his home office, where we talk for the next two hours. A whiteboard marked out with a football pitch stands against one wall. On the top row of his bookshelves, trophies line up like toy soldiers; below them are biographies of Mandela, Gandhi, Obama; histories of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the country that Kompany´s father, Pierre, left as a political refugee in 1975; biographies of Sir Alex Ferguson and Kompany´s teammate Sergio Agüero. Continue reading...
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