Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think my biggest strength is that I always keep doing exactly the same thing. There are forwards who go crazy with euphoria, but after a goal, I let myself fall back to the midfield, recharge. Keeping yourself cool and concentrated on your mission.
Obviously when you grow up in the area you love playing on the street, and to go from playing on the street with my mates to playing at Upton Park is a bit surreal, and 15 years on to still be in the heart of the West Ham midfield is quite good going!
People can say I've not scored enough goals, but you see the best strikers on the wing in a four-man midfield and see if they score goals. Nobody can really criticise my finishing because they don't really see me playing in a forward position too often.
I have fans rooting for me, all the other drivers in the midfield have fans rooting for them, and they never get to see that driver fighting for wins. Of course it would be a lot better if you had a broader range of drivers who were in the fight for wins.
They wanted to play me central midfield when I was at Aston Villa, so that's why we left. Things were going good at Coventry, but then scouts from Manchester United and different clubs around England were watching me, and I don't think Coventry liked that.
As I'm growing up, going into holding midfield, I'm watching Busquets quite a lot for Barcelona. The way he controls the game, his reading of it, technically, defensively - everything about him cuts him out above the rest. I'm really enjoying watching him.
I played fly-half in rugby, so I could influence the game, and midfield in hockey too. So it is part of my sporting DNA to want to be in the game at all times, to affect what is going on. That's down to genetics and being ginger, I reckon. We're special specimens.
A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.
As England manager I always felt we needed an extra man in midfield to retain the ball, but that was more as an attacking ploy to help create opportunities. It came from my experience playing international football in a 4-4-2 and spending half my time chasing the ball.
If you win the midfield, you probably win the game. But that doesn't mean the players in the midfield are the ones alone who determine that, because now we have strikers who drop into midfield and defenders who move up into the midfield. It is the area you must dominate.
I would say I am more comfortable in the centre of midfield. But when you are at a big club like Liverpool, you maybe get played in positions with which you might not be so familiar. But you have got to learn the different roles, because it gives you a better opportunity to play.
Busquets is a sitting midfield player who breaks up play, intercepts, passes it very quickly and is intelligent. That's what he is. He's not much more than that, but he gets a lot of praise for it. Whereas Eric Dier does a similar job, but sometimes gets loads of criticism for it.
The cap is a discussion about competitiveness, not about money. It's about trying to bring the top teams down to a level where the midfield teams feel they can compete. The reality is that whatever the level of spend there will always be teams that run at the front and teams that run at the back.
At Under-11/12, I was playing as a right-back. The manager then was Cyril Helstone, and he said to me, 'No, you're not a defender. You should be in midfield.' That was the big change in my career because from that moment until I made my debut in the first-team at Feyenoord, that was the position I played.
In the 1970s you would have had lots of black goalkeepers and defensive midfield players but never made it professionally because the perception was, 'You don't think too much, you can't play in positions of responsibility so you play on the wing or up front.' Lots were lost to the game because of the perception.
I think Barcelona and the Spanish national team have been good for soccer because there are a lot of teams that come up playing from the back: with the goalie, the defense, moving up a defender to midfield, playing attacking soccer. I think fans want to see that. They want to see beautiful soccer, a spectacle, and Barcelona does that.
I changed my position when I was 16 or 17. I started in midfield or further forward as a number 10, and then in one tournament, we lost two defenders to injury in the same game, and we didn't have any on the bench. So I played at the back, and the manager of the first team saw me, and he said, 'I want this guy in the first team,' and that was that!
