Top 35 Quotes & Sayings by Roberto Di Matteo

Pierluigi Gollini is a highly-rated goalkeeper in Italy, he's young, a good shot-stopper, he comes for crosses, he's good with his feet.

We want to challenge ourselves against the top teams in the world and are happy to be competing on so many fronts. And, personally, it's great for me to work with the quality of player we have here at Chelsea.

I don't forget my roots. My father was an emigrant from Italy who worked in a steel factory. My mother worked part-time. When my father came home she would go out to work, cleaning offices.

I believe in passing football with a purpose. You have to be physically strong and sometimes, in some games, you have to be more direct because that style requires it. We will prepare our teams to be ready for all situations.

Food was always such an important part of my family life when I was growing up.

Pre-season is a lot of hard work and no player really enjoys it, but you look forward to the start of the season when the competitive games start.

For most players it's hard to accept you've ended your football career and that you have to go out and do something else. But the way it happened to me, so suddenly... I went into depression and had to deal with that, being depressed, something that had never happened to me in my life before.

I'm generally an optimistic person.

I still wish Chelsea and all the players every success. I spent so many years connected to the club. One incident is not going to change that.

Well, I grew up in Switzerland where my parents were immigrant workers, but my whole family are very good cooks - my father also. So I always saw my parents enjoying to cook and prepare the food.

It doesn't matter what country but I need to be challenged by it. I need to feel the ambition of the club. You need to have a good relationship, with the board and with the owner.

There was not much money around, but my sister and I were happy. All the sports facilities were 10 minutes' walk from my house and the school system was very good.

It's a daily plan to solve the problems thrown at us and emerge stronger. You pick things up on the way, and you even learn from the players you work with, but your overall philosophy doesn't change.

I had a great career, to go from a small town in Switzerland to play for the Italian national team was a dream come true. So was playing for Lazio and Chelsea, winning trophies. When I look back I am very grateful for what I had, rather than what I missed.

I still did some things in football, but I needed to get away from the game. I needed closure. And once I felt I'd achieved that, the hunger came back. That fire in your belly, the desire to feel the adrenaline at the weekend. That's when I felt I was able to go again.

But I do love to cook. When I have a dinner party I like to invite loads of people, then I would just do like a salad buffet, with some snacks and cold meat and lots of different salads.

We were under pressure at West Brom to get promoted and to stay up, even if, at a big club like Chelsea, the pressures are more highlighted by the public scrutiny you're under. It's part of our job, that pressure, and I cope with it well.

It's the biggest challenge for any manager to play against the best team in the world, but for every player as well.

Every session we do we try and talk about the way we want to play, I try to organize the sessions in a way that the players can understand the way I want them to play.

I feel responsible. That's the way my personality is.

I wouldn't lie and say it's not disappointing to have reached so many semis and a final and not won the Champions League.

Obviously if there is a Chinese player that has the quality and the ability we will certainly be looking to recruit.

You have to kind of sustain a level of performance in the Championship to be able to come out of it at the end of the season.

My football philosophy is to win as many games as possible. Brand of football? I believe in mixing a bit of everything. You have to.

I've experienced being a manager and I would love one day to do it again.

Some of my worst moments in football have been losing semi-finals, the Barcelona game in 2009 probably more than most. But you have to take it and bounce back.

Every day I become a bit more of a support mechanism. It wasn't difficult at all to make the change. Would I go back to being a manager? It's a good question.

Obviously you do get influenced by former managers. That's normal. You try to build your own coaching philosophies. I've played for Arrigo Saachi, Dino Zoff, Zdenek Zeman, Gullit, Vialli and Ranieri.

I had a very traumatic end to my career so I didn't think I would become a manager then. As the years pass by the fire in you, the hunger, the desire for success comes back.

I simply do not know what the future will hold, but I will accept what it brings me.

What I believe is that we need a united group, people who are willing to fight for the club in the Championship. They need to put their services into the good of the team, for the good of the team.

It was something I always wanted to do, to own a restaurant, because I love food. But particularly when I first moved to London, because I was on my own - I was single, away from my family, so it seemed very important, to have a place where you could go to meet friends and eat.

In all I had 10 operations, nine within six weeks. Then one to remove the rod I had in my tibia a year later. I still have problems. I can do a little bit on the pitch, but the day after I feel it. And it is not going to get better.

You can win the Champions League in the worst season.

In the FA Cup, you always have to expect the unexpectable