I came from a rugby school and rugby nation, but I fancied giving football a go, and luckily, it paid off.
Aaron Ramsey
I started off playing rugby league as well as union. I switched between fly-half and wing, but I preferred to play fly-half. I liked to be at the heart of everything. I liked to be involved.
I was a good reader of a rugby match. I could kick, too.
I used to play rugby, polo, tennis, and cricket in school. It was only in the 1990s, when I used to live just opposite Harrods in London, that I started putting on weight. I used to have my breakfast there every day.
Adnan Sami
The scrum and the tackle are the two really contentious areas of the game. If you get those two aspects right, most rugby matches will work in your favour.
Alan Lewis
My senior school didn't play football. It was a rugby and cricket school, and as I was on a sports scholarship, I was forced to play rugby.
Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain
I'm a huge Rugby Union fan, which is a bit like American football - but tougher.
Alexander Hanson
The home of Rugby Union is in Twickenham - just outside London in the suburbs, where I live. I'm mad for it. The trouble with being an actor and being in the theater is that you always miss the games.
I wrestled before rugby league so I always had a pretty good wrestling background, a good base, and that helped with my football. It just meant my balance was always so good; a strong core, good hips and just things like that just really played a factor in how I ran the ball and tackled.
Alexander Volkanovski
I played rugby league, I probably played for about 10 years I think, and I wrestled before then. I did about a year of wrestling, and I think I got a bit tired of the tights, so I started to play football with the mates. I used to be a front rower, the big guys up front. I used to be 97 kilograms, which is like 210 pounds, or something like that.
I used to wrestle when I was younger. It was soccer, wrestling, rugby league and now MMA.
I just loved going fast. I still enjoy go-karting. I was also good at rugby, and my dad wanted me to be a sportsman, but I never thought I could do sports professionally.
Alfie Allen
I've got it all: I'm good-looking, I'm educated, I can sing, and I can play rugby. Ridiculous, isn't it?
Alun Wyn Jones
I never counted on playing rugby: I was just another fat kid chasing an egg. It has gone pretty well.
A bugbear of mine is bragging rights in regional derbies: it would be a lot more worth to the regional game if we did something special in European rugby.
Ultimately, we are professional rugby people, and we focus on the rugby. That's the easy bit. We are not politicians, so we don't have to delve too much into that.
It really gets my back up when people start using business phrases - 'sustainability,' 'the brand,' etc. - about rugby.
I'm thankful for the collaboration between the WRU and Ospreys, which will look after my best interests and enables me to play the best rugby possible.
Welsh rugby has done its dirty washing in public. It's nothing new. We're a tribal bunch. If warring parties want to sway public opinion, they do it in the public arena.
You do not have time in international rugby to stop and think, 'This is tough.' It's more a case of, 'Let's crack on.' Where's your next job? Fill a hole for someone who has just made a tackle?
You're not going to please everyone, but then, it's not about pleasing people: it's about winning rugby games.
I know part of me is going to die when I stop playing rugby.
I don't think you need to go global rugby to save the Lions, but I think you need to go global rugby to save rugby and not lose things like the Lions.
We don't want Welsh rugby to be seen as healthy or upbeat. If we think that, we could become complacent or stagnate.
I find it hard to believe that anyone could be playing regularly and saying they do not have a niggle. It is the nature of the beast, what you get when you play a lot of rugby: you have to get another niggle to forget about the one you already have.
The higher up the rugby ladder you go, the differences between winning and losing games get smaller and smaller.
Ultimately, rugby players are like surfers. You look for the perfect wave, but you don't always find it. And if you did, you'd probably pack up and try something else.
Players want to play a lot of rugby. We're walking contradictions at times in that we want to play a lot of rugby, but we don't want to play too much rugby, and we want to be available for all the big games, yet there are times when you have to sacrifice that because of game limits.
To a point, family does that and a couple of life experiences both positive and negative that have definitely altered my perception on rugby. Whereas my first 28-29 years, rugby was the entire focus, which was not that healthy, now you realise what is really important.
It is very easy to make athletes, and it is very difficult to make rugby players with that rugby instinct. I would like to think I have got a bit of rugby instinct and have become more of a rugby athlete along the way.
When I was younger, I played football and table tennis for local teams. I also played mini-rugby at primary school - I was tall for my age - and Preston Grasshoppers wanted me, but I wasn't that interested in rugby. It was always going to be cricket for me.
Rugby has surprisingly helped me a lot as an astronaut and when I'm training in the space suit.
I had just been promoted to the first rugby team. It was a perfect, wonderful coming of age. My brother was already in the team, and my father had come to watch us. We went home, and my father died in front of me. Horribly, in about half an hour. He had a heart attack.
I played rugby from the age of 10 until my late twenties; an unlikely player - small, quiet, long-haired and 'wiry.'
So I was in football, athletics doing shot put and sprinting, and rugby all at the same time. Ultimately, I didn't know how serious you had to take one of them and I was just a kid wanting to do everything at once.
When I was growing up Harlequins were interested in signing me because I was very fast and strong at an early age, but I wasn't interested in rugby at the time.
I've spent my whole life playing football. My father didn't want me to play rugby because he felt it was very hard on the body, so at school, I was encouraged to play football, and that's where everything started.
I take a laid-back approach to a lot of things in life and, at the end of the day, rugby's just a game.
I think New Zealand Rugby do an exceptional job, the way it's set up from the All Blacks, right down to grassroots. There's a clear path young players can take if they want to be an All Black, if they're talented, or if they get opportunities.
I basically sat around unemployed in Sydney for three years straight, and the two things that saved me were the rugby league and my dog.
I played number 6 in rugby league so I had the ball quite a lot. I tried to make the plays, so you are in the action.
I've been a professional rugby player all my life; I don't really know anything different.
I was a football fan before I became a rugby fan.
There's ego in all of us rugby players.
I've got my head fixed on the next part of life. I know there will be an adjusting period of just not being a rugby player for a while, and over that period I'll get my head around what the next challenge involves.
Rugby gave me a confidence. I was quite shy and relatively timid, but it gave me the confidence to be a little bit more out-going and back myself a bit more.
I'm not privy to the English set-up, but at the academies in Ireland, there is a huge focus on the weights room as opposed to whether they can throw a 10-metre pass on the run. They should be rugby players becoming athletes, not athletes becoming rugby players.
Before there was any chance to go to England, I changed schools, and it was rugby from there on in.
Rugby takes its toll.
I just want to concentrate on my rugby and enjoy it and live in the moment.
