Dave Edwards: International games can be a minefield – literally!

It’s crazy to see what’s been going on across the globe. You just hope with the scenes in Guinea – the main thing is obviously that Romain Saiss and his Moroccan team get back safe and sound.

In Argentina it’s absolutely bizarre and just beyond me how it can get that far that players of both themselves and Brazil are on are the pitch and the game has started. How that can happen with all of the federations involved I have no idea.

My experience of international football was around the cultural differences in the eastern European countries, they’d live their lives so differently to western Europe and there was military presence everywhere.

I’d say Azerbaijan was the matchday experience that was the strangest. It was the middle of the summer in Baku – which is actually a lovely city – and we won 1-0 but I remember from the moment we got to the stadium there were soldiers with big assault rifles outside the dressing room.

Around the pitch every 15 feet there was a solider with a rifle across his chest. That was a sight!

We played Croatia away in a place called Osijek, it was right on the border with Serbia and was the city where a civil war happened.

We had a nice hotel but it was sat in a war-torn town. It was like a scene from Call Of Duty on the PlayStation!

You’d walk down the street and see all the bullet holes on the buildings, boarded-up windows, buildings collapsed, graffiti everywhere. To be somewhere where a gun-battle had gone on was sobering as a footballer.

Serbia was one of my favourite experiences, we played at Red Star Belgrade’s stadium. Their dressing rooms were portable buildings outside the stadium.

You go through a tunnel that’s a 90-second or two-minute walk through what becomes cage to the pitch.

All of the Red Star ‘Ultras’ have graffitied the walls and at the end the home fans surround the cage and the thing was literally shaking! I really enjoyed the atmosphere, like something you see on the TV.

Then you finish, drive back to the hotel and it’s just streets of corrugated-iron houses, really deprived areas, kids with no shoes living in tin houses. It’s mad for someone from Shropshire to see that. I felt so lucky to have travelled with Wales.

We would feel safe, because of the FA Wales security detail, which was ultra professional.

For Wolves it was a really good thing Raul Jimenez didn’t go on Mexico duty with what’s going on over there. It’ll do him the world of good to get more training in the legs.

Wolves have not got the results they deserve, but they can go to Watford on Saturday and get that first goal and result they need to kick on.