As a child, he played football for endless hours on the streets around his home or the asphalt five-a-side pitch behind his house. He played in darkness. He played alone. "You used to do it some days so long your sugar levels would be gone," he says. "But you'd just love playing football. From the minute I woke up, I had the ball until I went to bed." When his ball burst, he played with a pair of rolled-up socks

 He imagined the wall in front of an abandoned nursery as a line of defenders to be dribbled past or beaten with a curled shot. At age 9, he scored 99 goals for his junior league club, and a scout for the local club, Everton, got wise and signed him. (The prevailing attitude at the club was that the boy's gifts were God-given and he couldn't really be improved by teaching.