Player Quotes

I made a better decision in choosing my team. Sure, I had a bigger choice of players to choose from - but I couldn't have asked for a harder working group of players who did an incredible job.

That's why you bring in a veteran player. You never know when a player goes down, a guy's got to step up and play.

I've already developed trust in my teammates -as a player and as a person.

Everybody I talked to - from my friends to my family and some of the players - really gave me a lot of support from the start. And that certainly made me feel good about trying to come back and be one of the best again.

You see, in sports you have so many things that aren't expected. There's so much uncertainty. So when players find themselves in a situation where management has a great deal of integrity and they can depend on my word or anybody else's word in the organization, they feel secure. And if the players feel secure, they don't want to leave here. And if they don't want to leave here, they're going to do everything they can on the court to stay here.

The situation was, the team I was on when I got injured went down to the lower leagues. In America, they don't have that relegation, so when the team went down to the lower region, every player has his value, and they went off and sold any player who had value.

I've always been optimistic. When things come together and I feel comfortable, I know I can be a productive player with an impact.

Basketball is sort of an interesting sport that, you know, the top player on your team makes so much more of an impact than the top player in any other sport.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.

I think I'm a mama's boy who wanted to be a hockey player, who failed, and had to become a singer. I think that I'm a generous, impatient, kind, jerk.

I'm an absolutely dreadful hockey player.

I find that I've tried to become a better hockey player every year and not just hold on. At the same time, I've also made it a point to increase or grow in some other area of my life. If I were just playing hockey, I would probably be done with the sport.

If Colleen Howe had been a hockey player, she would have been a centremen. I can see her as a centreman because you can do what you want and go wherever you want to go.

Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.

Instead of working hard to keep their share of a shrinking pie, or working even harder to make sure the industry stays as is, I think the most essential thing legacy book industry players can do is set up independent ventures with great people and little interference and work really hard to put themselves out of business by starting at the bottom, not by reinforcing the top.

I'm a pretty easygoing guy. I'm not hard to get along with. I never had anybody that I had trouble with. On the other team, sometimes you don't like players because of the way they act, but then you get to know them and then they're very good people. But I never disliked anybody.

Known as a negative player, Karpov sets up deep traps and creates moves that seem to allow his opponent possibilities - but that really don't. He takes no chances, and he gives his opponents nothing. He's a trench-warfare fighter who keeps the game moving just an inch at a time.

To play well, you need good players, but a good player almost always has the problem of a lack of efficiency. He always wants to do things prettier than strictly necessary.

Netweaver was going to be the number one middleware player in the world. We heard about Netweaver day and night. Oracle became number one. No one talks about Netweaver.

At 13, I was a big, totally uncoordinated, hopeless football player. I responded to somebody elses rules, and I stayed just good enough to get a scholarship to Columbia, which was looking for scholar-athletes.

Coaching is salesmanship. Coaching is winning players over and convincing them they have to play together. It takes a team conviction to play together to make things work.

While I was coaching, I believe the motivation talk I gave my players that achieved the best results was in reference to their present game-day effort. I stressed the fact that today's performance could be the most important of their life. Yesterday's performance was already history. Tomorrow really never comes, so today's performance is what really counts.

I think I'm the only player who looks at each and every center and says to myself, 'That's barbecued chicken down there.'

Only 38 per cent of players in the Premier League are English; that is a damning statistic. Soon, the England manager will have to go scouting for players in the Championship - and when I say 'soon' I mean the next four or five years, perhaps even for the next World Cup.

Ninety-five per cent of my language problems are the fault of that stupid little midget.

But at some point, we've got to have disciplined play and have got to coach better. I'm not putting it on the players. We've got to coach them to tackle and block better. It's as simple as that. If we can do those things, we'll have a chance.

Shevchenko is the best attacker in Europe. He has a great deal of consistency and he just keeps scoring - which in Italian football is very difficult. He is a complete player, someone who can do everything on a football field.

We want players here who are going to be here for the long term. Players who buy houses here, who settle in the area. It's a brilliant club, great supporters but we want players to come here to be part of that community rather than being ships in the night having a last pay day at Ipswich... we want to build for the future rather than do a quick fix because I think it's going to be a long-term job.

This is a game between players from 12 national sides, a game that if you have a friend in China, in Brazil, in Qatar...in half the world he wants to watch. I was thinking of this game when I signed for Chelsea.

As a kid, you obviously dream of being a professional footballer. I would watch players like Ronaldo of Brazil and pretend to be him in the playground. But I don't think about trying to become one of the best in the world or anything like that. I just play football.

I already believe I am the best linebacker in the game. Now, I have to show one more thing ? that I am the most dominating, influential person in the game and the best football player to ever put on a pair of cleats.

And I think they loved me because I loved being part of their team, you know, and I quite often say to kids, that I was the worst player in the world's best football team - and that was good enough for me.

The best football players in the world still earn very little money compared to people who really earn money.

To this day I am not convinced of having brought together with me in Germany the technically best players that could have been. But I was firmly convinced I called the ones that could create a team, and they could play with one another to the best of their possibility. In this day and age you win if you become a team. It doesn't necessarily mean that you've got to have the best football players in the country. It's possible that the best, all together, don't become a team. It's like a mosaic, you have to put all the pieces together.

You have to consistently be successful to be one of the top players in the world, and everything is possible in life.

Sometimes you've got to be a little flexible. For the most part, it's hard to get players to look at the big picture also. I understand that. They're looking at their next start or their next at-bat.

When you heard Jimi Hendrix, you knew it was Jimi Hendrix. He introduced himself with his instrument. His attack to a guitar man, was, oh, something else! You think of one of the great American ball players, or one of the great fighters of the world, you know, that's the way he would attack any note on his guitar.

A ball player has to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer. That's why no boy from a rich family has ever made the big leagues.

When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties - before he died in the early forties. They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since.

We must break out of this mindset in Australia that we are a small nation on the other side of the world from the main, great Western nations. Australia is the twelfth largest economy in the world. We are a not insignificant player in commerce, in geopolitics and we must be in culture as well and we are.

Be a fountain, not a drain.

If we dare to win, we should also dare to lose

If Ashley Cole is ready we have 15 players for the final. I'll have to choose between Hilario, who's not bad playing forward or I'll bring in one of the kids.

I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, like a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history.

Coaching staff: I know there's days you look at that film and you want to kill me. I'm not playing defense, taking bad shots, getting too many techs. But you always believe that I can be the guy. Through the tough times, you guys never left my side... That's something that I really appreciate and I never want to take you guys for granted. I thank you so much for being part of my life. And not just on the basketball court, but giving me talks about growing as a man first, and a basketball player next.

You never had the opportunity to play with some of the great ballplayers, but being that close around them, and being in the same category, was a great feeling, to feel that vibe of all the best players who played the game.

There are too many coming from different countries. When we started, foreign players were in the minority. All the best players from Spain, France, Brazil, Argentina are going to England. And Ireland is bound to suffer.

Footballers today are forced to conform to a bodily aesthetic that in its rigidity and uniformity makes fashion models look as varied as snowflakes. This wasn't always so. Up until the 1980s most teams in all divisions had a couple of fat ones, a couple of little ones, at least one bandy one, one completely covered in hair, two weaklings and a chap with no neck. This was an era when you didn't need names on the backs of shirts in order to tell who's who, you could clearly identify them with your eyes half shut from the other side of the pitch.

That's what I love about acting. There's never a set role. You can be a firefighter, you can be a baseball player, you can be whatever you want in the acting world. I think I've found my calling.

I would rather have a player who showed a bit of heart out there than one who just accepted things.