Burnley Football Club helped me mature from a boy to a man and I can't thank them everyone from the club enough, from the board to the staff at the training ground and the staff at the club.

I love playing football. I always look at it as there's a lot worse things you can be doing than coming into a training ground in the morning and playing footy and having a laugh with the boys.

Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.

I watched a lot of Spurs games before I signed. It's a massive club, one of the biggest in London. They play good football, the stadium is big, and if you look at the training ground - it's perfect.

Pulp paperbacks have always provided a training ground for men, Some of them went on to become respected authors - Dean Koontz, Nelson DeMille and Martin Cruz Smith, for example. Why couldn't a woman?

So much success from set pieces comes from practice. Maybe fans see a well-worked free-kick and think it looks good, but to get that, there has been hours of work that nobody has seen on the training ground.

When I was young I used to watch the Premier League and of course I knew of Tottenham because of Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa. I speak more with Ossie because I see him more at the training ground than Ricky.

Cologne was my big team, my favourite team. I trained one week in Cologne, and they asked me to sign for Cologne. At 17 or 18, the coach asked me to go the first-team training ground. I was lucky to have that coach.

For ages I thought I'd wasted my career doing visual effects, I wanted to be a filmmaker. And then I've learnt at the end of it all that actually visual effects was probably the best training ground I could have had.

Television is a good training ground for aspiring stars. You can experiment and get away, imbibing the positive and viable aspects. Whereas, in cinema, the stakes are high. If something goes wrong, the film falls flat.

As a manager I always trusted my players on Christmas Day. I did not see any point in dragging them into the training ground - a three-hour round-trip for some of them on icy roads - when they could relax with their families instead.

London is a very big city, Manchester is calmer. I live near the training ground, so I do things around there in the countryside, but I really like Manchester's Northern Quarter, where they have nice coffee shops and live music places.

My upbringing was in the church. We had to attend regularly. And, of course, the church provided a training ground for me, so to speak, as a young vocalist and certainly gave me all of the spiritual values that I needed as a young lady.

My first job was at Alfreton Town and the chairman backed the club. He wanted to win so it made the job easier. I then went to Halifax, where I turned up and there was no balls, no training ground, no players. I had the other side of it.

The soap opera was so long ago - the thing about soap operas, and there's something to be said for doing it, but you do a script a day. I don't want to say it's a training ground; it really isn't, but what it does teach you is discipline.

Television is an excellent training ground for a director. If you work consistently in television, as I did, you have to come in on time and on budget. What you are allowed in feature films are, fortunately, more time and a larger budget.

You know, 'The Golden Girls' was a very unusual show to start on. I was young, and it was a show about old people, and it was a very traditional show, but it was also an amazing training ground for a joke-writer. It forced me to learn those skills.

The Journey of Reconciliation was organized not only to devise techniques for eliminating Jim Crow in travel, but also as a training ground for similar peaceful projects against discrimination in such major areas as employment and in the armed services.

Concentration and focus - they are very important, just as important as in anything, I suppose, if you're going to succeed. I've seen a lot of good players on the training ground, but when it comes to the game, they can't keep the same levels up on a Saturday.

Films like 'Bond' fund training schemes for film technicians of the future, and working on films themselves provides a great training ground for budding directors and cinematographers. If there's no money there for films to be made, it's like a house of cards, it all comes tumbling down.

If you want a measure of how private a place the dressing room was when I was growing up at Manchester United, consider this: even Sir Alex Ferguson would knock before coming into the dressing room at the Cliff, the old training ground. The dressing room is for the players - and the players only.

I played for Middlesbrough's youth team. At the age of 16, I went into a shed at the training ground and was told that they weren't signing me on, so that was the end of that dream. Football was my life. I played football when I got to school, football every break and football as soon as I got home.

The journalism, I was a financial journalist - it's very good training as a writer. You have to write for deadlines; you have a certain economy of phrasing. As a training ground as a writer, it's fantastic. I also think it teaches you to be observant, to listen to people, and gives you an ear of dialogue from doing interviews.

For reasons that are both fair and foul - but mostly for fair reasons - we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And the schools are the training ground to create a population that's easy to manage.

I am endlessly fascinated that playing football is considered a training ground for leadership, but raising children isn't. Hey, it made me a better leader: you have to take a lot of people's needs into account; you have to look down the road. Trying to negotiate getting a couple of kids to watch the same TV show requires serious diplomacy.

I remember having a discussion at some stage and saying a coffee machine would do well in the training ground. Everyone was like, 'No, in England, we drink tea.' I was like, 'OK, I was just saying that I think coffee works as well.' Next thing you know, after the international break, we had this massive coffee machine come in from Nespresso.

We tend to have so many more close shots, which compels an artist to actually put in more effort than it is required otherwise. So, it is the expressions on the face, and how an actor presents his or her character, that really makes a scene. In such ways, Mollywood is a fabulous training ground for actors and actresses from other industries.

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