A Quote by Frank Rijkaard

As a young centre-back at Ajax, I played with Wim Jansen, and of course you learn a huge amount. I made some mistakes, because we Dutchmen want to solve situations by playing football. So we look at the ball, try to judge where it will come.
I've played under some of the biggest and best managers and achieved almost everything in football. Of course it hurts when people question it, but I've come to the end of my career and can look back and say I've achieved everything with every club that I've played for.
Ian Holloway played wingers higher up and then wanted us to come back and receive the ball; Dougie Freedman didn't want us to come back too much because he wanted us to attack; Tony Pulis made the team sit back so it was literally you against the full-back.
In Holland, I have got the buzz back playing as a centre-forward, which is where I perform best. Ajax always appealed to me from when I was young and they gave me a chance to play in the Champions League too.
You learn by mistakes. When you make those mistakes, you try not to make them the third time or the second time. You learn from them. Sometimes you learn the hard way. In football, if I held on to the ball too long, I got my butt kicked. You better make that decision quicker.
It's tough when you started out as young as I did to look back and see how far I've come. I try to be easy on myself and go 'Look man, you were younger, you were learning; you learn, you grow.' But I'm not my best judge. I always feel like my best work is still ahead of me.
I feel like after my incident, it really made me realize football is not here forever. I'm all the more anxious to come out here and let my teammates know, 'Look, hey, this is the same JPP. Missing fingers aren't going to stop me from playing some ball.'
Part of my job leading the line for Watford is to occupy centre-halves - by that I mean those battles with Huth, say, to try to win headers when the ball is played forward. But I also look to bring centre-halves out of position to the flanks and make space for my team-mates in the middle.
At seven, I played centre-back. When you're so young, though, it's more to enjoy the training and to get a feel for the game. It's not heavy on tactics of a position. We were playing on a half pitch, seven against seven or eight against eight, so they say you're a centre-back, but it's not like the real definition.
I might have made mistakes because of my way of playing but mistakes are part of football. I never let that influence my game.
I needed to learn to be a coach initially. I think if I'd gone into professional football when I stopped playing when I was 30 years old I'd have failed because I'd have made too many mistakes because I had no real idea at that time.
I feel like as a young player you have to play consistently because you're going to make mistakes. If you make mistakes you have to keep playing to learn from mistakes.
I know if I'm playing centre-back, there are certain places where you don't give your full-back the ball - because I've been the full-back!
The decisions I've made have not always been the most popular, but when I look back, I want to know I've played for good football teams.
I am being bombed by questions of all kinds. I will try to be very concise and try to explain to the American people. We had a great number of mistakes in the economic fleld, naturally. I am not the critic. It is Fidel Castro, the one who has criticized repeatedly the mistakes we have made, and he explained why we have made them. We did not have a previous preparation. We made mistakes in agriculture. We made mistakes in industry. All these mistakes are being settled now.
I had many good managers: Wim Jansen, Martin O'Neill, Frank Rijkaard, and Alex Ferguson, to name just a few.
Solve it. Solve it quickly, solve it right or wrong. If you solve it wrong, it will come back and slap you in the face, and then you can solve it right. Lying dead in the water and doing nothing is a comfortable alternative because it is without risk, but it is an absolutely fatal way to manage a business.
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