My job's about the accumulation of points over a 10-month season. And if you're with a team expected to be in the bottom half of the Premier League it's always going to be tough. There's going to be periods when you go up and down.
It's a league that you really have to get used to. If you're coming from another one, it's a tough league. Getting the experience playing in a Premier League team and getting hopefully consistent games will be huge for me.
It's such a crazy league, the Championship. People used to say that to me, and when you are in the Premier League, you don't really take notice. It's a good league; it's tough, and I like it. But the Premier League is where I want to be, with Villa.
Of course the Premier League is the most difficult league in the world because it's so even. I think you can't really compare other leagues with the Premier League. In the Premier League, every team can beat every team, and in football, that's something where you can have surprises.
I have to remind Arsene about his team, which used to win the league, that was the dirtiest team in the league. If you cast your mind back to when they were winning the league, they had more seedings-off and bookings than anyone else.
Alan Hutton and I are always fighting the corner for Scottish football. It's a really tough league down here with a lot of quality players trying to get into the Premier League.
When I was younger, I could never have imagined that me at 24 would have already won a league in Portugal, a league in France, a league in England, and playing for the national team.
The Premier League is tough because, as soon as you lose a couple of games, you're out of the race for the league.
Tottenham set a points and victories record in my first season, missed out on the Champions League by one point and had a great run in the Europa League. In the second season, at the time I left we had more points than in the previous campaign.
I'm absolutely enjoying the Premier League, as you can imagine. I knew it was going to be tough. It's the best league in the world and you are up against players who have been in it for years so they know it inside out.
For a big club, you can accept that the team does not win the league because it is in transition, but you cannot afford to slip out of the Champions League spot.
Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.
You can take a sidewards step in the Premier League, go to a team in the Championship or come to a team in League One.
I grew up in Rochester, New York, where we had the North American Soccer League. Rochester were at the time the worst team in the whole league, but week in week out I was there to support my team.
I'm not in this league to be an All-Star. I'm not in this league to make the Hall of Fame. I'm not in this league to make the all-defensive team.
I would not want to be the Europa League in the current format, that's for sure. Thursday night games are difficult to contend with given the level of physicality we deal with in the Premier League. We struggled with it at Newcastle and we were not alone in that among the English clubs. Until that issue is addressed, no Premier League team wants to be in the Europa League. That's the reality, even if some don't want to admit it.