Wanyama relives his Premier League peak

Speaking to Pulse Sports, the former Southampton and Tottenham Hotspur midfielder looked back on the period he rates as the high point of his English football career, using one blunt phrase to describe it: "we were a nightmare."

Wanyama doesn't mean that his team struggled. He means the opposite: that for a stretch under Mauricio Pochettino, his sides were the ones causing problems, not absorbing them. Wanyama followed Pochettino from Southampton to Tottenham in a reported £11m move in 2016, reuniting with the manager who had first built his reputation on England's south coast as a ball-winning, press-resistant holding midfielder.

That Pochettino identity, aggressive, high-pressing, suffocating teams out of possession, is the throughline of Wanyama's best Premier League years. At Southampton, he was part of a side that regularly took points off bigger clubs and made St Mary's an uncomfortable away day. At Spurs, he slotted into a midfield that helped the club push for the title and finish above Arsenal in the table, with Harry Kane, Dele Alli and Christian Eriksen doing the damage further forward while Wanyama did the unglamorous work behind them.

For a Kenyan footballer who came through Nairobi before moving to Belgium and then Celtic, reaching that level of competitiveness in the Premier League is the kind of marker East African fans still point to when the conversation turns to who's actually made it. Wanyama never won a Premier League title or lifted a major trophy with Southampton or Spurs, but he played a real role in sides that genuinely mattered during a period when the league's traditional hierarchy was being shaken up.

His comments to Pulse Sports read as a player taking stock rather than chasing headlines: a reminder, mostly for himself, of a spell when the team he was part of made life difficult for everyone else.