CALLUM WILSON interview: West Ham star on why he snubbed Saudi Arabia for a pay-as-you-play deal, the phone app that helped him through injury hell - and why he refuses to rule out another World Cup with England at 33

Callum Wilson, like many other blokes in their thirties, spent the last fortnight, with no Premier League football to keep them busy, at another of life’s great sanctuaries: he took some rubbish to the tip.

They used to notice him down there. ‘You’re the first footballer we’ve had here,’ the dump guy once told him. They don’t bother with such niceties now. They barely even give him a smile. They just leave him to sort through his bits, make sure the cardboard goes in the cardboard bay, and be on his way. That suits him just fine.

‘You’re just one of them, you know,’ says Wilson with a smile.

Therapeutic trips to the local tip is not exactly where one expects an interview with a Premier League striker to begin but, in some ways, it sets a fitting tone for an hour in the company of a man who many have often seemed ready to consign to the scrap heap.

Sat in his West Ham training kit at the club’s Rush Green training ground, Wilson takes us through it all. The injuries and the fightbacks. The doubters and the self-belief. The dedication to staying fit. The cryotherapy chambers and the red light therapy. Almost falling asleep in a yin yoga class at his local gym. His burgeoning art collection filled with works by Banksy and Damien Hirst. His love of motivational quotes, the goals he scribbles down in his journal, and the small matter of a World Cup and a man’s lingering hopes and dreams.

But first to the present. After leaving Newcastle when his contract expired after five years at St James’ Park, he joined West Ham on a free transfer where he is starting to feel at home.

He’s scored two goals now, has started the last two matches against Newcastle and Burnley, provided a much-needed focal point, and helped West Ham secure back-to-back Premier League wins for the first time since February. They remain in the relegation zone but now only on goal difference. Amid continued protests against the club’s ownership, little shoots of survival hope are starting to break through.

‘When you go through a difficult spell, you can often think where's your next result going to come from,’ says Wilson. ‘Thankfully, it came and then we were able to build on that and get a bit of momentum. There’s a lot of positivity around the place.’

When he returns to face former side Bournemouth on Saturday, a club he helped win promotion to the Premier League for the first time, it will, remarkably, be the first time he has visited the Vitality Stadium since leaving to join Newcastle five years ago. One of the team doctors has already text him for his shirt.

Things could well have been different. The 33-year-old received interest from Saudi Arabia in the summer but instead of making a late-career cash grab in the Middle East, he chose a pay-as-you-play deal in East London instead.

‘I had a tricky few years with injuries and then Alexander Isak hit great form and I basically found myself playing second fiddle,’ says Wilson. ‘It wasn't how I saw my last few years in the Premier League going. I'm a fighter. I didn't want to just give up and say, OK, it's easy for me to just go to a different country and collect a little bit of money. That's not my motivation. Motivation for me is getting into the 100 Club. That’s the elite players in the league. There’s only 34 players to do it. That is why I wanted to stay in the Premier League. That’s why I’m here at West Ham.’

He needs 10 more goals to get there. His finish against Burnley took him level with Olivier Giroud on 90. Another against Bournemouth, the club he helped fire to promotion, would put him alongside Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Chris Wood and James Beattie.

‘I would have loved to have done it years ago and, playing the games I’ve missed out on, I easily would have done,’ he adds. ‘It will be a nice moment when it happens for the journey that it’s taken me to get there and the adversity that’s been along the way.’

There’s been much of it. Injury has dogged Wilson’s career, rupturing the anterior cruciate ligaments in both knees at Bournemouth. Hamstring injuries and a long-term back issue curtailed his time at Newcastle. He’s spoken bravely about his mental health struggles, his suicidal thoughts during a childhood spent in and out of foster care and seeing his mother suffer domestic abuse, and his decision to seek therapy after a bust-up with a Newcastle physio who saw changes in his behaviour.

Many continue to write him off. His arrival at West Ham was initially met by a furious online fan backlash to the club signing an injury-prone front man in his 30s, even if it was one who had long been the scourge of the Hammers with 12 goals in 16 games against his new club.

‘I don’t walk around with my eyes or ears closed,’ says Wilson. ‘Of course you hear things. You might have Sky Sports News on, your name pops up and then all of a sudden you listen to someone's opinion or you might see something down your Instagram feed.

‘You hear a lot of outside noise, people talking about injuries. For me, that's always been a motivation, in proving people wrong, even proving myself wrong sometimes.

‘I'm 33. Mo Salah's the same age as me. It's almost like saying about Mo Salah retiring. It's the same thing. No one would ever even think that.

‘You can look at people differently because of their injury record. If anything, I feel that I probably could have more longevity because I've not got as much miles on the tank because I've missed games over the years.

‘Of course, you have a few dark moments when you have an injury after injury and you think, is it time (to retire)? But the fighter in me was never going to give up. I was always going to continue fighting back and prove people wrong. And that's why I'm here now doing that.’

For a man who spends most of his time smiling, you cannot help but hear the steel in his words. That fight to prove others wrong. He’s still annoyed about the time Eddie Howe left him on the bench for Newcastle’s first game of the season two years ago.

Wilson takes strength in motivational quotes. During his injury rehabs, he watched videos by American motivational speaker Eric Thomas. He sometimes plays them to his children in the car and gets them to remember their favourite quote and use it in their day. That’s what he used to do when he needed to pick himself up for another day of getting fit.

It’s why of all the art pieces he’s collected, it’s ones by French street artist Mr Brainwash, with his big pop-art collages daubed with slogans like ‘follow your heart’ and ‘never give up’, that resonate most with him. 

He has an app on his phone that shows a different quote each day. He picks his phone up. ‘Right now it says: “You are the best!”’. He laughs. ‘That can’t be right!’

Wilson screenshotted one the other day that read: ‘You never forget three types of people in your life: who helped you in difficult times, who left you in difficult times and who put you in difficult times.’ He has another on one of his shin pads with a picture of his family on the other. ‘What defines us is how well we rise after falling.’

‘It’s a quote I used through many times of adversity,’ says Wilson. ‘It was on the front of my phone screen when I was going through an ACL injury. That is me in a nutshell. Everyone has setbacks in life but it’s about how you come out of them. I got written off when I did my first ACL, came back, did another one, got written off again. It’s about when that does happen to you, how well do you come back? Every time I’ve come back from a setback, I’ve hit some crazy form.’

Wilson’s been keen to inject some of that resilience into his team-mates. In a squad so sorely lacking in leadership, it’s already been noted in training how eagerly the younger players turn to Wilson.

On the morning of our interview, highly-rated midfielder Freddie Potts, son of Hammers legend and first-team coach Steve, who was named man of the match in the victory over Newcastle, misplaced a pass.

‘He gave one ball away that, by his standards, he shouldn't give away,’ says Wilson. ‘He got mad at himself. I just said: “You've played unbelievable, relax, that's one pass. Everyone makes mistakes”.’

For a while now, Wilson has kept a journal. Every day, he jots down his thoughts and feelings, the odd inspirational quote he’s found, but also where he lists his goals. What, then, has he got written at the moment?

‘Obviously, I have 100 goals. With what’s happened over the last few years, not playing as much as I’d like, the games I want to be involved in. And...there’s a World Cup coming up.’

Four years ago, Wilson circled the winter World Cup in his diary. He wrote: ‘Pack for Qatar’. When friends asked what plans he had for the winter break he replied: ‘My journal says I’m going to the World Cup.’ They all thought he’d gone mad. He’d not played an international game in three years. He’d missed chunks of the season through injury already but he came back, scored four goals in eight games, and got on the plane.

‘When you believe in yourself so much, people think you're borderline delusional,’ says Wilson. ‘But there's people that have been with me throughout my career that have seen me say something and I've then done it time and time again.’

What about this time? Wilson has not featured in a squad for nearly two years. Thomas Tuchel is yet to reach out to him. And yet no one has seized the opportunity to be Harry Kane’s nailed-on deputy come the summer.

‘I still, in my head, will believe until the final squad that if I have a run of games, I can put my best foot forward,’ he says. ‘It might seem so far-fetched but football changes so quickly. As I've experienced in my career so many times, anything can happens. A few weeks is a long time in football, let alone six months.’