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It is a testament to the fundamental honesty of football that Israel, with nothing to play for, overcame Russia in Tel Aviv on Saturday. The sport has its faults, but this basic trust is the reason Wembley holds 80,000 and could take more and the track and field venue for the London Olympics will be reduced after the event to the same capacity as the home of Wigan Athletic.
Nights were hard during my staying at the TV show because while my Playmate friends got to go out and party, I would have to be home by 9 p.m. I'd get a text message from a girl that read, 'Having so much fun in Vegas. Wish you were here! Partying with all these football players,' and that was devastating. I felt so trapped and angry when I was missing out on something good.
Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!
I've not had to ask permission from Geraldine to take the job. I'm one of the few men in this life who are not under the thumb. I'm stronger than that. Did she want me out of the house? Listen, she's wanted me out of the house for the past 27 years and has often asked me not to come back again. But I always show up, and really, she can't do without me, because I'm brilliant.
Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.
I think the kids always they look forward to be always the big stars. Not only football, any profession. They want to be the best, singer, they want to be the best political, only the stars. But I think sometime the life give you opportunity, and long to be a big star, but you don't need to be a big star, you need to be beautiful, excellent man. Human being. This is the first.
I don't play anymore because I can't play anymore and I retired when I was playing for Chelsea because the doctor had to cut my leg in two parts so this is why I retired. I started going to the gym recently and my knee started to hurt again, so you can imagine what it would be like if I tried to play! I play football on the beach with my daughters and my friends but that's it.
Everybody thinks that you go to Africa and you build a school, or you teach English, or you build a hospital. But actually all you need to do is play football with kids for six months and then after they've trusted you, you tell them about the truth of Aids, and that their grandmother didn't die from witchcraft, she died from Aids. And that's the biggest difference you can make.
This is football from the 19th century. It's very difficult to play a football match when only one team wants to play. A football match is about two teams playing. I told Big Sam, they need points. To come here the way they did, is that acceptable? Maybe it is, they need points. The only thing I could bring more was Black & Decker - a Black & Decker to destroy the West Ham wall.
For some reason as a kid growing up in Lubbock, Texas, I always thought I was going to go to UCLA. I think it was because they had such great sports teams, and it was in California, where the actors were. But even though I was talking about being an actor when I was young, I was first going to be a football player. My dream was "I'm going to go to UCLA and be a football player."
I really gave up being passionate about politics 10, 15, 20 years ago, because I think finally that there were forces in the country that are larger than politics itself. And so I find it a fascinating game, this wonderful stuff goes on in terms of watching the game. But If you get to down it, look, I`m going to root for someone, I`ll root at a football game, not for politicians.
One thing you can't beat in this world is time. I learnt that the hard way. You can't play basketball forever. You can't play football forever. You can't bodybuild forever. I mean you CAN do it, but not at a high level against younger guys who have more time and have not reached their peaks yet. There's only so much the body can do and once you're done, you can't go back in time.
Doing the right thing is important, which is where strategy comes in. But doing that thing well—execution—is what sets companies apart. After all, every football play is designed to go for a huge gain. The reason it doesn’t is because of execution—people drop balls, miss blocks, go to the wrong place, and so forth. So, success depends on execution—on the ability to get things done.
When it's all over I won't miss the bruises he gave me to impress girls, or the occasional scar which will give me a story to tell my grandchildren, but I'll definitely miss the pranks and the laughing and all the making fun of each other. I'll miss the funky advice he gives me about everything - football, girls, video games, clothes. Most of all, I'll miss having an older brother.
Whatever fighting words you hear from the bargaining table, the reality is that with the new TV contract about to take effect and the incredibly lucrative ancillary revenue streams, both sides know we are on the verge of ushering in the most lucrative payday in the history of professional sports. The history of professional football is that nothing happens until the very last moment.
The socialism I believe in isn't really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day. That might be asking a lot, but it's the way I see football and the way I see life.
I grew up watching my Dad, Uncles Ciaran Murray and Brendan Murray, and cousin, Aedin Murray, who were all national caliber Gaelic football players in Ireland. I try to watch as much Gaelic football as I can, it is my first love. I bleed Green, White, and Orange. Gaelic football players don’t get paid to play, you play to represent your county that is more important than earning money.
The beginning of my love for football goes back to when I was seven years old. I was spending time with my grandmother, Caletha Vick. I never knew anything about the game until one Sunday afternoon when she turned on the television because the Redskins were playing. They were my Uncle Casey's favorite team-and my grandmother's favorite too. After watching the game with them, I was hooked.
I could barely speak after I was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers. I was going to play for the defending Super Bowl champions.... I immediately thought of all the great players on the team. I was in awe, as I had watched these soon-to-be legends play on television. They epitomized for me what football was all about: the love of the game, the professional approach, and the desire to win.
I don't get what's happening to Jose Mourinho of late. He's lapsing into the kind of Portuguese moroseness you get from staring at the Atlantic horizon and imagining you're the last place in the world, while listening to endless renditions of the fado. His latest line about 'everyone hates us and we don't care' sounds like vintage Joe Kinnear in the great days of the Wimbledon Crazy Gang.
I love my country, and the mental and physical demands of the Navy SEALs was what I had been training for my whole life growing up in Montana. There's a reason Montana produces more SEALs than any other state. As a collegiate athlete, I enjoyed the mental and physical challenges Division I football presented. When a recruiter first told me about the Navy SEALs, I knew it was the right fit.
You don't realize how long that NFL season is. It's a long season, especially in your first year. Not only do you spend a lot of time preparing for the draft and working out, but they you have OTAs, minicamps, training camp, preseason games. By the time you get to week six you've already had one of the longest years of your football life and you still have 11 weeks to go, plus the playoffs.
My parents didn't raise me to be religious. The closest we come to worship is the Trinity of Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. I think the Merryweather cheerleaders confuse me because I missed out on Sunday School. It has to be a miracle. There is no other explanation. How else could they sleep with the football team on Saturday night and be reincarnated as virginal goddesses on Monday?
It's the character identification people remember, it's not so much remembering the movie; they just know that I'm a badass. I was a badass in Chicago before the movies ever came out. I was a badass on the football field - that's why they call me "the Hammer." I don't lean back on one particular picture, because I've done so many of them. But they all have the same common thing: I'm a badass.
Cristiano Ronaldo is the best player in the Premier League and in the whole of Europe. The things I have seen him do since I have been in Manchester have been incredible, amazing. It is just like a total show in training and even in the matches. This kid will one day arrive at the very top in the world of football - if he isn't there already - because he makes the most difficult plays look easy.
Hey Deion, Bubbelah - maybe you'd better pay a little less attention to those unfairly Draconian salary caps that only allowed you to acquire four of the five remaining 1932 Aston Martins still in road-worthy condition after you'd paid for life's little necessities like hookers and weed, get your medulla oblongata out of your duodenum for a few milliseconds, and make a tackle or two, okay, Babe?
Talking about success in society, no one can complain, because today everyone can choose what he or she wants. They don't just have to choose between being proletarian or middle-class. Those kinds of things do not exist anymore. Today working class boys can play football and become multimillionaires. On football! There are no longer classes, who say that we are poor, we are suppressed by you etc.
In our blessed and mostly peaceful society we're not as familiar with courage as we once were. We ascribe the virtue to all manner of endeavors that only really require skill, fortitude and a little daring, the qualities Pat Tillman showed on the football field. Pat's best service to his country was to remind us all what courage really looks like, and that the purpose of all good courage is love.
Have we become a cupcake league? We already have better helmets and gear. Wonder how the old school players feel about this. Not in the back of minds when talking about 18 game season so let's play football please... Even guys using shoulders to hit are getting flagged for helmet-to-helmet. Defense is getting sloppy because guys are avoiding fines and will get worse if suspending comes into play.
Even a hundred and fifty years ago, football was popular because it provided a manly spectacle that lots of men needed, after the industrial revolution. We went from a culture that lived out doors and expanded the frontier and fought the Indians to a bunch of guys in offices. So football provided this jolt, a kind of exalted cult of masculinity. And it still does that. Perhaps even more so today.
High national emotions are permissible when a soccer team is playing precisely because they are impermissible at most other times. There aren't, simply, many other places where you can sing your national anthem until you lose your voice without causing a riot. In the context of soccer, flag-waving nationalism - even chauvinistic, anti-foreigner, flag-waving nationalism - is acceptable in Britain.
He lived in a fantasy world. There was not a day when he didn't add some Mickey Mouse story about a club that wanted him. First of all, he came in and told me that Arsenal wanted to buy him, then the next week it was Manchester Utd, then the next week it was Real Madrid. He made it clear that he did not want to be at the club so, in the end, there was only one thing I could do - send him to Wigan.
It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.
I feel that Im not losing the game for our team. Im trying to give us the best opportunity to win the football game. I did everything I could to lose the Jets game but we won. And the Patriots game, I didnt play well. I think that this year, I just come out and play smart football. I got some good advice the other day (from CBS Sports Dan Dierdorf): Every drive that ends in a kick is a good drive.
It's easy to keep score at a football game because it's just how many times you get the ball over the goal. But, when you ask an audience to tell us how many times the invisible ball got over the invisible goal, and they go, "Well, it was 46," they're just making it up. So, if you're listening to that, as though you're actually listening to the score of a football game, you're misleading yourself.
The poor Geordies are in the process of being rebuffed by every sentient human being whose ambition in life is more than simply to pocket six million quid for having been a failure and run for the hills. They want beautiful, flowing football and tangible success, at St James' Park. Fine. I, meanwhile, want Jessica Alba and the Nobel prize for literature. I make my prospects slightly more realistic.
Chess is a very positive way to exercise your mind. It makes you look at the whole picture...what are your options and what is the best thing to do? In football, you are mostly reacting from a defensive point of view...but you always want to be counterattacking...a similarity with chess strategy. Chess and offensive football are quite similar; you sacrifice something now to get something back later.
I am not a man of many words, but I can honestly say that playing football is all I have ever wanted to do and to have had such a long and successful career at Manchester United has been a real honour. This was not a decision that I have taken lightly but I feel now is the right time for me to stop playing. To have been part of the team that helped the Club reach that 19th title is a great privilege.
In all of nature structure determines function. Yet many people consider the marathoner and football linebacker all to be just one composite human being, an athlete. The body must be used to determine its role in sport. 'My aim is to develop every individual according to his best potential, protect him from false ambition, the desire to be someone he never can be and, more important, never should be.'
I'm not saying that people shouldn't go out to football games and drink beer and have a good time, I do it myself. But, at the same time, people are so apathetic and that shows me that they don't care about themselves. They have no self-image. Their image is projected to them via the television and that is where they make decisions about who they are according to what the public says they ought to be.
One day or another every athlete feels like taking it easy. He stops trying to exceed his limits, and thinks he can keep winning because of his lucky star, or the bad luck of his opponents. You must overcome this negative instinct, which affects all of us, and which is the only difference between the person who wins a race, and those who lose. This is the battle you have to fight every day of your life.
I did come up with the term "sack" to describe the devastation I was bringing on the poor, cringing quarterbacks in the NFL. "Sack the quarterback." That was nice. I thought it was lots better than saying, "Jones tackles the QB behind the line for another loss of yardage ..." It had a ring to it, and it caught on with the sports writers. But I tell you, doing it was a lot more fun than talking about it.
I knew very little about Rugby. But, I think it helps in terms of an American audience the game is enough like football in that it's a battle for field position and you score by running into what looks a lot like an end zone. I think in terms the nuance of the game, Americans won't get that stuff. I think in terms of the peanut butter and jelly version of what you need to know, I think it's pretty clear.
When I went to college, I wanted to major in kinesiology. That's what I wanted to do, but just the way our schedule matched up - our football schedule and the college of kinesiology - all the classes were in the morning and football practice was in the morning. So there was no way for me to take all the classes that I needed to. Once I got into those core classes, it would have been hard for me to do it.
When I then went to Welling I had to think about the possibility of getting another job outside of football. If that hadn't worked out then I would probably have joined the family building firm, working as a ‘brickie’ or something like that. It is a big leap to be playing in the Champions League final - the biggest game of my career - but after what I've been through to get here, it holds no fears for me.
In the end, the game is the same. Football is still football. Now, they may play with different formations, they may have a different idea of training, but the game doesn't alter. I don't mind how any performer - indeed, why should I? How arrogant of me if I did? - manages to get to what they have to get to. It doesn't matter how you get there, as long as it isn't going to destroy other people on the way.
I find it embarrassing when people compare me to Maradona. How can they? There is only one Maradona. People who say this just have no idea, they don't know what they are talking about. Diego was a complete one-off who will never have an equal on the football pitch. No-one, I repeat no-one, could have transformed teams like he did. Maradona was the world's greatest-ever player while I'm just an apprentice.
Whether we meditate individually or collectively, there is one thing we absolutely must do: we have to meditate consciously. Making an unconscious effort is like forcing oneself to play football in spite of one's utmost unwillingness. One plays, but gets no joy. Conscious effort is like playing football most willingly. One gets real joy. Similarly, conscious meditation gives us inner Delight from the soul.
In my career there's many things I've won and many things I've achieved. But my greatest achievement is my family. What matters is being a good father and a good husband-just being connected to family as much as possible. Being a dad is more important than football, more important than anything. I adore children. I love the fact our children are part of both of us. It's one of the most amazing things ever.
Football is one side of me. Art is another. Travel is another. As I mature, I can organize it so that when I'm done with football, whether it be travel, or becoming a doctor, or going off on a farm and raising chickens, which I'd also like to do, or climbing ten of the most difficult peaks in the world, or spending time backpacking in a flannel shirt and big boots, I'll know how to take off into the world.