For me, it's a pleasure to play football every three or four days.
The bottom line is I'm a football player, and I played three years of college football, and I produced all three years. I also got better every year, and I just felt like it was time to move on.
I always leave for the stadium on the second bus. Never the first. And I have to have new shoes - brand new shoes - for every game. Same with gloves. But I don't use my gloves in pregame, so the first football I catch with my new gloves each game is the first ball I catch in the game.
I don't get it: they re-package the same shitty football games every year, update a few stats, call it a new game and millions of suckers keep buying them. What's the point? Why not just go outside and play real football instead? Or even better yet, get bent. Nobody likes football.
When you're 18, when you're at college, sports can be your life. You can watch every baseball game, every college basketball game, every football game. Once you have a family and kids, you can't do that anymore.
TV is designed a certain way where you have three, four days on stage and three or four days out. You're basically making a feature every seven days. You have to shoot an hour's worth.
When you call a game, it's almost like you're doing a three-hour movie and the production of it all, living in the moment in real time, the replays, all the intricacies that go into putting a game in a broadcast. It's not just 100 percent football.
It's football all day on Sunday. I wish we had football every day; that would make me way happier. Why can't we have that? You've got all these teams! Why can't we just play a Monday game, a Tuesday game, a Wednesday game?
When you have kids, you instantly feel that you do not want to do them wrong. Those dads that go off to Florida and start a new life, I couldn't imagine that: seeing my kid once every Christmas, every three years. If I'm gone for six days it feels like too much.
When you have kids, you instantly feel that you do not want to do them wrong. Those dads that go off to Florida and start a new life, I couldn’t imagine that: seeing my kid once every Christmas, every three years. If I’m gone for six days it feels like too much.
And I think because of the passion of every English player and every English supporter, and every English journalist for the game, most of the game is played with passion, love for football and instinct, but in football you also have to think.
I procrastinate in spades. In my defence, I also try to have all other distractions solved before I can concentrate on writing. My small theory is that to write for three hours, you need to feel like you have three days. To write for three days, you need to feel like you've got three weeks, and so on.
If you look at football over the last 50 years there has been a gradual decrease in goals, you don't see too many 10-nils these days, but two, three or four goals per game is a good spectacle.
There were days when I was literally running for hours in the forest and then I'd jump on a plane and then I'd be on the 'Nurse Jackie' set. I was going from Vancouver to New York every three days. For me, it was really invigorating.
Every time I make a new game, I put all of my effort completely into that game. It's like putting all your effort into a new child that's being born. Once the project is done, I can step back and look at it objectively, which is when I can see a lot of flaws. That's when I start to make a new game that tries to fix some of those flaws.
War is not game. If you lose, you can be mad or sad two or three days. War makes you sad every day, every minute.