McTominay: I’ll come back hungrier than ever

“Yeah, so that was Crystal Palace at home. That was my first. I had had a taste of it – being on the bench and stuff like that – but when you actually get to play from the start, it’s completely different. It’s chalk and cheese from being sat on a bench or maybe coming on to actually starting a game and feeling that emotion before it as well. When you are in the Reserves, you don’t really get coached on how to deal with pressure and how to deal with the expectation of fans and stuff like that. So it’s either sink or swim in that respect. You have your own mentality to go out on the pitch and do your best and obviously try to help the team as much as possible, but the emotions are very much stable. I feel like, before games, you have to boost yourself and you have to get mentally ready before physically, and obviously for me it’s about keeping in control. When you do go on the pitch, you’re a little bit aggressive and you’re ready to do absolutely everything on the pitch. But you have to be stable – you can’t go in the middle of a Manchester derby and start steaming into tackles in the first five minutes and get yourself sent off. There’s a fine balance between emotional control and obviously the physical control as well.”