Silva: 'I quit international duty to spend time with my son'

The classy playmaker spent much of last season shuttling between Manchester and the Casa de Salud hospital in Valencia where young Mateo was fighting for survival.

Unable to train properly, Silva insisted that he wanted to play, seeing football as a release, but speaking to 'Sportmail', the experienced midfielder admits that looking back he does not know how he got through the experience.

"I ask myself how did I cope with that?" Silva said. "It was such a tough situation.

"It was obviously the toughest, most difficult period of my life. What’s going on in your private life and then trying to combine that with your working life.

"Being on the road, travelling so much, you’re eating badly, you’re not getting enough sleep, you’re not training and if you are training you are training badly. So I was completely out of my normal routine.

"Football was the thing that helped me the most. For that time I was out on the field, those 90 minutes, that was the only way, the only time I could forget stuff.

"For that short time, you’d enjoy the game for what it was but then, as soon as that is over, you’re back to thinking about everything again.’

"Everyone has an image of a premature child but until you live it and experience it, you just don’t know how bad it is.

"Until you physically go through that situation you can’t appreciate what it would be like."

Unsurprisingly, the 32-year-old believes the experience has changed him as a person.

"You view things from a different perspective. I think you learn to value the important things in life," he explained.

"I don’t waste my time doing my head in about stupid things that don’t really matter and worrying over nothing."

Meanwhile, the former Valencia man revealed that his decision to call time on his Spain career in the summer was in order to spend more time with Mateo.

"My family are still convinced I could be playing now, but having the chance to enjoy some more time with my boy when I'm not travelling away with the national team is a good thing," he insisted.

Silva has always insisted that he will leave Manchester City when his current contract expires in 2020, but he didn't rule out postponing that decision.

"I don’t know. Maybe," he joked.

"In theory, that’s my time – a year-and-a-half I’ve got left to play (at City). But, in football, things change around don’t they? You never know.

"All I’m going to do is concentrate on enjoying every minute between now and then. At that time, I’ll see what I think."