Aaron Ramsey: ‘I was just a baby when I came to Arsenal. I’m a man now’

As Aaron Ramsey picks up the microphone and the room falls silent, it is safe to assume that the majority of the 120 people taking part in his charity golf day were not expecting the Arsenal midfielder to talk so passionately about the importance of conserving rainforests and saving endangered animals. The clues were there with the World Wildlife Fund leaflets dotted around the tables but it is one thing to be seen to be doing the right thing and quite another to speak from the heart about supporting a cause.
Ramsey is not putting his name to the charity for some positive PR and when he pulls up a chair a couple of hours later, full of apologies for not starting the interview earlier, the panda logo and everything that it stands for sound almost as important to the Welshman as his football career.
“I’ve always been passionate about animals,” Ramsey says. “And with the way things are going at the moment, with all of these helpless animals being killed for their ivory and for what people think are for medicinal reasons, it’s just beyond me. We need to really take a look at ourselves and do something about it before it’s too late because if we don’t, it will quickly be a case of: ‘Do you remember these animals?’”
It is a measure of how seriously Ramsey views the subject that he was considering going to Africa during the close season to make a documentary with the WWF. “I went on safari a couple of years ago and I’d love to do it again,” he says. “It’s brilliant, you have hyenas running around, elephants trampling – it’s crazy. It’s just an amazing experience being out in the wild, in the bush, with all these different animals, the stars, no light pollution or anything.”
In the end the not-so-small matter of helping Wales to beat Belgium in Cardiff in the middle of June – a game that Ramsey describes as the most special he has ever been involved in with his country – followed by a short break before returning for pre-season with Arsenal, made it impossible to squeeze in a trip to Africa.