Nottingham Forest cult hero on how close he was to leaving, cooking spinach in a hotel room and his latte art hobby

When Nottingham Forest announced Ryan Yates had extended his 19-year association with the club in the summer, they released a video clip of their captain pootling past the City Ground on the waters of the River Trent, on board the Nottingham Princess, an 80ft double-decker cruiser. After all, he is the unofficial prince of Nottingham, Mr Forest to so many. But Yates, constantly trying to improve his game, always wants more. “I genuinely wanted to get in, go underwater, there would be a piece of paper floating on top,” he says, bowing his head, grabbing my pen and notepad, “and then come up with a snorkel on and sign it. But they wouldn’t let me, they were pretty worried.”

Not for the first time, laughter fills the boardroom at Forest’s training base and it is a story that offers a snapshot of Yates’s warm, down-to-earth persona. This is his third season as a Premier League midfielder but he carries fond memories of his journey to this point, including his professional debut for Barrow, a non-league trip to North Ferriby in August 2016. “I stayed at my mum and dad’s the night before, I was quite nervous and they drove me to the game. The club put my shirt up in the dressing room, No 22 … they ripped the name and number off a shirt from someone who had left and stuck mine on, so you could see the outline of someone else’s name and number. The shirt was huge … it must have been an XL. It was ginormous. I watched my clips from that game about six months ago for a laugh; I was running around like a headless chicken.”