Landon Donovan exclusive: Run, tackle and fight

It was more than 10 years ago in a city 5,315 miles away but Landon Donovan remembers his heady first week at Everton like it was yesterday. “I’ll never forget my first time at Goodison,” he says. “I didn’t know about guys like Phil Neville,” says Donovan. At the same time, I had this pull on me because I said to Bruce, to his face, ‘This is just a loan and no matter what, I will come back.’ “The hardest was the last week when Moyes brought me into his office and he said, ‘We would love to have you and we’ll do whatever we need to if you’ll stay’ but he was also respectful and he said, ‘We understand if you can’t but I feel like I won’t be doing my job if I don’t ask’, so it was a really hard conversation to tell him I couldn’t do that.” There was not even time for a farewell with the players who, over such a short period, had become close friends. “A part of me thought I needed to be careful because it couldn’t get any better than the first time,” he says.