Rubin Colwill is feeling 10-feet tall as he bounds into the press room at Cardiff City.
He is a little bit later than scheduled, but we will forgive him that after the 24 hours he has just had. The night before Rob Page named Colwill as one of his 26 players who will be on the plane to Qatar next Tuesday as Wales jet to the Middle East for their first World Cup in 64 years.
It's perhaps no surprise that the Cheshire Cat grin shows no sign of retiring when Colwill is asked about being named as one of those special 26.
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"I am buzzing," the 20-year-old beams. "I found out just before (the announcement). It was getting a bit nervy. I haven’t played much, injuries have kept me out. I was hopeful and it went right down to the wire.
"We were told literally just before the announcement. I don't think they'd put us through that – watching it on TV!"
Colwill, however, showed no such mercy to his own grandparents.
"I let my grandparents watch it on TV," he laughs. "I couldn't let my mother do that. She was a bag of nerves. I just showed her the message I got and she teared up a bit and gave me a big cwtch.
"I had phone calls and FaceTimes with my grandparents afterwards. It was a really good moment. I feel I've been incredibly lucky. To be part of such a great team, to be named in the squad, it’s such a great honour."
Colwill, one of the most talented footballers to come out of Cardiff City's academy in a decade or more, was once a shy, retiring speaker when put up, albeit sporadically, for press duties. However, the Bluebirds playmaker is now a bona fide, full-sized man that we see in front of us.
Indeed, the 10-feet tall quip at the top of this article is not too far away from the actual truth. Colwill recently had yet another growth spurt, one Cardiff interim manager Mark Hudson says has seen the player shoot above him in height.
It's caused more than one problem during his relatively short time as a professional footballer so far, that's for sure. The joints and ligaments have struggled to keep up with his rate of growth and has been the primary reason for so many of the niggling injuries he has endured during his burgeoning career.
"I think I need to stop now!" he jokes when asked about his growth spurts. "I'll have to play basketball or something!
"I've grown a little bit again. It's all part of learning and developing. It's about learning to deal with those things and adapting my game technically and mentally. Let everything settle down and I can kick on then."
Because there was a genuine worry that Colwill would lose his race against time to be fit for the World Cup. His minutes on the pitch have been extremely limited this season. He has started only one match, played 65 minutes for Wales and just 269 for Cardiff.
At one stage, he thought it might cost him a spot on the plane.
"Definitely," he says when asked the above question. "Going back to the start of the season, I picked up a hamstring injury in pre-season. I was like, 'Right, obviously this isn't great'.
"I wanted to hit the ground running with Cardiff this season, it was a big year for me and the club in general. We had a lot of new boys coming in here and it was a good chance for us to kick on. Getting that injury, it was always in the back of my mind that the World Cup was coming up.
"Pre-season I had a setback. Slowly built myself into it. Then I started playing, was coming on for 20 or 30 minutes, then I got 35-40 minutes. Then I started against Preston and I really enjoyed it, I couldn't wait to be playing the next week. But the next week I came on against Luton and my knees just weren’t right.
"I went into training the next week and we looked at it and it wasn’t right. I needed time out. I built myself back into it. Went away with Wales, played at home here (against Poland) and I really enjoyed coming on, even though we lost.
"Then picked up a knock in training again. It's been up and down. The closer I got, the more worried I got. The medical staff have been incredible and worked so hard for me. I am really grateful for how much effort they have put into me for this. It was a really big worry.
"But I am really glad to be back and want to stay fit for the rest of the season."
To have such injury struggles when your career is on the precipice of really taking off must be challenging for any young player. While he hasn't been in the professional game long, he says it's the hardest thing he has had to deal with so far.
"At the time it was one of the worst things, struggling with growing when I was in the academy. You always think it will help you in the future, that's how you've got to look at it. Going through that experience before has definitely helped me," he says, now with the benefit of hindsight.
"But you've got to stay calm and relaxed even though I've been frustrated. Since stepping up to the first team, not being able to play has been really frustrating.
"Now I’m raring to go! I’ve been caged up waiting to be let loose! I can’t wait to get on the pitch and get some minutes."
Colwill is a player Wales and Cardiff City fans are rightly excited about. There are very few players as prodigiously talented with the ball at their feet as his age in this country and he will only get better – as long as he stops growing, of course.
Bluebirds supporters have been frustrated by just how little they have seen of him, all things considered, especially last season when he was one of Cardiff's most potent attacking outlets.
Many believe he was Steve Morison's blind spot, for want of a better phrase. The mere utterance of Colwill's name always drew a spiky answer or debate when the former Bluebirds manager was in charge at Cardiff City Stadium.
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Fans wanted to see more vim, vigour and creativity in Cardiff's play and they had a ready-made playmaker available to be the architect of it all in Colwill. But he started just 15 Championship games all season and it soon grew to become a constant talking point among fans.
Morison insisted he would treat Colwill in a similar vein to how Manchester City coaxed through Phil Foden, using him sparingly at first but with a view to him being vitally important in the years which followed. Most supporters believed Cardiff didn't have the luxury of time nor squad Man City had and needed arguably their most talented player on the pitch as often as possible.
While Colwill is at pains to state what a privilege it is to play for his boyhood club, it is unsurprising to hear that there were times the frustration seeped through.
"I loved every minute of it, first and foremost," he says. "To play for Cardiff's first team is unbelievable. I think at times I probably wanted to play a bit more than I was playing. But I think that comes with football.
"Sometimes you get things you think you don't deserve and then sometimes you feel you don't get what you deserve. You just have to take it.
"I just put my head down in training and tried to make myself a better player. That's the only thing you can control: How hard you work. That was my thought process last year – obviously at times I was a bit frustrated but that's just how football is. I've had it since I was a kid, sometimes you are in a team and you don't really play, that's just football really.
"I just got on with it. Obviously it was frustrating at times. I enjoyed it. I could have given more. But I could have maybe got a little bit more out of last season if I was given a bit more game time."
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A fairly balanced and cogent assessment, I think we can all agree. What matters now is how he moves forward under a new manager.
Mark Hudson has revealed he has accepted the job to become Cardiff's manager until the end of the season, with the interim boss hoping it is all wrapped up by the time they play Sheffield United on Saturday afternoon.
Hudson has been far more embracing when hit with the Colwill questions, even if he does afford himself a giggle due to the sheer volume of interest in the player by the Welsh media, but he clearly wants his creator-in-chief to play a far bigger part this season than he did last year, injuries permitting, of course.
"We have had good chats," Colwill says of Hudson. "I had a call this morning, Mark is a really good guy, a really nice guy. Down to earth. You will always get honesty with him.
"I haven't been fit for very long, but he's been great with my injury and we have had great chats. Me and Mark have a good relationship. I just want to get back fit and play under him."
The last topic of conversation surrounds the next Colwill coming through the ranks, younger brother Joel who is gaining a number of admirers among those who regularly watch Cardiff's under-21s.
Joel, 18, was rewarded with a few first-team pre-season appearances and has come on leaps and bounds this term. Many inside and outside the club have earmarked him as one of the more likely players to sprout through the academy and into that senior setup in the not-too-distant future.
Seeing his younger brother's journey reach this point has filled Rubin with pride, he says. Indeed, he was at a similar stage only two years ago. And the older sibling believes Joel has what it takes to make it.
"He has got a lot of ability," Colwill Snr says. "I have played football with him since he was five or six years old, going to the local park and kicking the ball around. So seeing him in the academy, I feel really proud of him, to be honest, he has done really well over the last few years.
"He has definitely got the ability to go all the way – sometimes, you just need that little bit of luck, a lucky break, and hopefully he gets that because he has definitely got all the ability."
And what of the prospect of playing in the Cardiff midfield alongside his little brother in the years to come? "Yeah, definitely," Colwill replies. "That's the dream!"
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