The only thing I want to be able to do is come in and learn the offense, go out there and compete, show what I am capable of doing and try to get better as a football player.
Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.
People talk about loyalty of players to clubs. But in the everyday world, you don't see people being loyal to their company when they're getting offered considerably better deals elsewhere.
If a player won’t shoulder responsibility, he won’t work on his weaknesses, which means he won’t improve. He’ll be constantly on the prowl for a fall guy or a scapegoat, and his teammates becomes epidemic.
You can't let players do what they wish and be professional. That's a fact. As for the team, Boro had two internationals when I got there in 1995. Now they have more than 15. And they didn't cost the fortune some suggest.
I played the mini-tours for a lot of years, and man, you see some weird things out there. There are a lot of desperate people, strange personalities and marginal players, and with that you're going to see some cheating.
...the player who looks least engaged may be the most committed member of the group. A cynic, after all, is a passionate person who does not want to be disappointed again.
Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor.
As a horn player, the greatest compliment one can get is when a person comes to you and says, 'I heard this saxophone on the radio the other day and I knew it was you. I don't know the song, but I know it was you on sax.'
My saddest decision in football was leaving Paul Gascoigne out of the 1998 World Cup finals. But he wasn't fit enough and once that decision is made, as a manager and a group of players, you forget about who isn't there and focus on the job.
There was no such thing as production at Starday. We'd go in with the band, we'd go over the song, I'd look over and tell the steel player to take a break or kick it off, and I'd get the fiddle to play a turnaround in the middle.
In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it's the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what's available, what somebody happens to play for you.
As football gets more globalised, it's probably more important than ever to have one or two players in your team who have grown up in the same streets or been to the same schools as the hard-core fans.
Something interesting has happened over the last 10 years in the Premier League. Players who once would have been discarded as expensive and too old have become important parts of title-winning squads.
A deliberate choice on my part was for the player to continue to find new possibilities in the early Attic rooms far into the game. I think this builds atmosphere, though it means there's no neat division of the prologue from the middle game.
We are about creating a new wave of talent. We are the Manchester United of kitchens now. Am I playing full-time in the kitchen? I am a player-coach.
We do the majority of what most athletes do. For example, as a badminton player, you have to be able to run a long distance and sprint. We do weights three times a week.
'Metal Gear Solid' is, for the most part, an infiltration game. You go somewhere, you execute your mission, then you go back. Those are your actions as the player.
With a movie, it's probably easier to sustain intensity and seriousness over the 90-minute duration. But in an open-world game it becomes exhausting, demotivating and even uninteresting for the player.
Basketball's eras are defined by teams - Celtics, Lakers, Bulls - and baseball's epochs are defined by players - Ruth, Robinson, Mantle - but with football, it's the sideline strategists, the nutty professors and top coated Lears.
The biggest rival I had in my career was me. I couldn't control Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Tom Watson or Lee Trevino. The only person I could control was me.
