I’ve seen it all in football. I know what it means to walk out at Wembley with the Three Lions on your chest and take your place in a Legends XI versus the likes of Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Theakston and that bloke who is mates with Robbie Williams.

I got on with Steve McClaren at Boro, and I was confident I’d get the nod once he got the England job. It was known Steve wanted to move on from your Beckhams and your Big Sols, and when I made the squad for an important 2007 clash I was over the moon. Even the sneering in the press – Sad Steve’s wRONg Turning, Ronnie Matt-WHOs?, Sir Bobby: Matthews Selection Devalues International Football etc – couldn’t dampen my spirits. The potential Faroe Islands banana skin certainly wasn’t a meaningless friendly to THIS Three Lion.

As it turned out, I unfortunately became the first England player to be sent off on debut for propositioning a female linesperson, but I told myself: they can’t take that cap away from me. And until an unprecedented decision by Sepp and his FIFA Europrats to retrospectively strip the match of its full international status on account of my so-called ‘disgraceful actions’, that was true.

Happy memories of booing the Faroe Islands national anthem aside, I’ve been in no doubt as to where I stand on the old club v country debate ever since.

When I was a Portsmouth I got a four-game ban for trying to sell what turned out to be pirated Premier League merchandise (shirts, DVDs, Gary Neville duvet covers) on eBay as a sideline. They done me for bringing the game into disrepute and I got a letter saying I was banned for four games. In those four games I lost my place (in the reserves; to be fair I was not really in serious first-team contention at the time), drifted out of favour and Harry Redknapp used it as an excuse to drum me out of the club in the transfer window.

It was only years later that I found out from a very good contact at the FA (my cousin was having it away a friend of Faria Alarms) that it was all total bull. The Premier League and FA don’t have the authority to ban someone for anything like that. Turned out that Portsmouth themselves had told me I was banned because Milan Mandaric was sick of the sight of me, done a letter on forged paper and basically used it as Trojan Horse to force me out of my Fratton Park dream. I’m not saying that Chelsea have set JT up because he’s got a load of moody training tops from a bloke in China, but on the other hand if I was John I’d be keeping a very close eye on things for them four games and definitely not buying anything without getting a receipt.

But tonight I caught a bit of a programme about Liverpool, one of those fly on the wall jobs. Brendan Rodgers has got a well nice pad. Like Bren, I also have a portrait of myself in the sitting room and I find it really gives you a lift when you are feeling low, looking at your wall and saying “Look how far I have come. Look at all that I have achieved. I have got a picture of myself on my wall and I deserve it”. Tonette says you could get the same effect with a mirror but I prefer to talk to myself when I am looking my best not like how I look on a day to day basis.

The thing I liked best about the documentary was the title. It’s called Being:Liverpool. Yeah, with the two dots in the middle. I liked it so much that I phoned the lawyer to see if he could set it in motion for me to change my name to Ronnie:Matthews.

UPDATE: Spoke to one of the Sams at the book publishers and she said that apparently the two dots thing is called a colon. That’s effing brilliant. Only now do I find out that I have changed my name by deed poll to Ronnie Colon Matthews. The lads are going to rip the mickey out of me something rotten. I’d only just shaken off the name “Sh1t Boots” after one of the lads left a little present in my shoe preseason and I put it on without checking; this is going to set me back ten years.

So we were having a drink after our round (I needed it after my putting!!!!!!!!!!!) and Elena’s gone: “Alright, I’ve got a good one. Would you rather fight a duck that was the size of a lion or three lions that was the size of a duck?”

Tough one, isn’t it? Razor reckoned he’d go for the duck that was the size of a lion and try to overpower it with his physical bulk. To be fair to Razor he could probably pull that off if his back was to the wall. Elena said she would kick one of the duck size lions in the face early doors and then try and get on a table or whatever. The bloke from the radio said what if they could fly though, and that would be a big ask, I grant you.

Razor reckoned you could probably roast them after, or stuff them into a lion and get it on the BBQ. I don’t agree with that, I could never eat a lion, even one that was really a duck. It’s an interesting philosophical debate

Berba’s been and left saying “thanks very much, respect to all at Old Trafford” but has not passed up the opportunity to settle a few scores with Ferrguson. Schoolboy error there from the Big Bulgarian. You want to save a bit of that for your first autobiography, that would set the cat among the pigeons. To be fair though I suppose your Bulgarians are not big readers. When I left Peterborough the second time I got a tattoo saying “Eff You Barry Fry” in Chinese but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t regret it in later life. Especially when I found out that my tattooist, Wang, had actually gone and wrote “I want bum-bum Barry Fry” on it in revenge for me having given him a bounced cheque when I paid him for my dorsal three lions.

For a while it seemed like hardly a transfer window went past without me being either bought or sold by Harry Redknapp and still to this day if I see Harry sticking that big old face through his car window to talk to a reporter I get an involuntary twitch in the wallet region. To anyone that never got their dream move this weekend I will just say: stay focused, chin up, keep doing the simple things well and start really making an effort come December time to hopefully put yourself in the shop window for January.

This is a book. My book. My thoughts, my hopes, my dreams, my life in football, my loves, my dogs, my fears, my run-ins with Barry Fry. I Kick Therefore I Am is a book by a footballer who sees beyond football. I am very proud of it, and I hope you are proud of it too.

I have a book. Whatever happens, they cannot take that away from me (unless it got recalled because it had poisonous ink or sharp edges that were not suitable for kiddies etc.) But that is not very likely, to be fair.

In my own career I have had the indignity of getting all hyped up for a transfer and then having the rug whipped out from underneath you and raining  on your parade at the eleventh hour. It was like when I was at Watford and they told me they was sending me on loan to Barcelona. They actually ended up sending me to work in the night-club Barcelona, which is in Rickmansworth and to be fair more known for it’s four-for-one WKD Thursdays than it is for its Tika Taka. They said if i wasn’t getting in the team I might as well make myself useful and clean up some of the vomit by the ladies loos and to be honest as a young player it takes a lot of strenght of character to come back from that sort of a disappointment.