What is going to happen tomorrow, I don't know, but I will always tell you 'football is football.' Football will put you in your place always.
A lot of the things that I put before football, was really not fun anymore without football.
My generation put in a lot more hours playing football after school than kids today. These days, all the football these kids play, they play at their clubs, so the clubs need to work seriously on the basic skills.
Faith is the most important thing in the world to me. It's the greatest strength I've had. It's helped me get through the hard times. You're not going to win every one of your football games. I've always said I'm not going to make football my god. A lot of coaches put so much into coaching football games that they have nothing left.
If you go out once a week, they can blast on you that you're always out all the time, but I always put work first, and people sometimes don't see the side of going into the weight room, behind-the-scenes-type stuff with football.
I wanted to play football. It was what I did best at school and I'm pretty sporty, so that was the idea. Music was always a hobby, innit. I was more ahead with football.
English football is different: always on the attack. Although one thing is clear. The best football is the Italian.
Football was a wonderful experience for me. It was a means of, oh, I don't know, sustaining for much of my youth. In times of trouble, I've always had football. I always knew I was a football player. And that was a comfort on many occasions.
I learned to play football in the streets. Every day of school, everyone came and played football. The street is a good school, and you learn many things there - resiliency, how to play against older players, and how to put up with or dodge kicks.
When I was three or four, only football was in my head. I went 10 years, and nothing changed - only football, football, football. The strange thing is, nobody played football in my family before.
There's a window in my life which is football. I try to remember that it's not going to be there forever. That's why staying humble is important; knowing who I am and the message I'm sending out. I always try to be a person first, before I'm No. 55 on the football field.
Football is always going to be a means to an end. The physicality of the game - your body can't hold up. There's life after football, and I do worry. I don't want to put myself in jeopardy. I probably need to be more cautious, but this is me. It still isn't going to change the way I play.
Dennis is something special. We are talking a lot about exciting football, and Dennis Bergkamp, I think, started with attractive football a long time ago. He was one of these players. A lot of the things he did as a football player you can compare to art.
From the start, all I did was play football. I briefly played badminton and won a tournament when I was 12, but really, it was always football.
I've always been quite an active person especially when I was younger. When I was in primary school, I used to play lots of sports. I was a sprinter and I did basketball and swimming and Gaelic football and things like that. So I always thought, I guess, that it would be fun to incorporate that much physical activity and work into a dramatic piece.
My brother was always going to go in the direction of football. With me, it was more between school and football. Eventually, it worked out for both of us. We're pleased to have gone down that path. I'm proud that my parents always supported us, in good and in bad times. You need that.