If this can be termed the century of the common man, then soccer, of all sports, is surely his game. . . . In a world haunted by the hydrogen and napalm bomb, the football field is a place where sanity and hope are still left unmolested.
My daughter loves horses. My other daughter loves soccer.
In my time at Anfield we always said we had the best two teams on Merseyside - Liverpool and Liverpool reserves.
Soccer is a feast for the eyes that watch it and a joy for the body that plays it
I feel that right from the start the players were prepared to experience catastrophic results with comments like: 'It's going to be tough and we are going to need time'.
Football is a game based on emotion and intelligence. Anyone can be clever, the trick is not to think the other guy is stupid.
Excellent Sheep is likely to makea lasting mark for three reasons. One, Mr. Deresiewicz spent twenty-four years in the Ivy League, graduating from Columbia and teaching for a decade at Yale. He brings the gory details. Two, the author is a striker, to put it in soccer terms. He's a vivid writer, a literary critic whose headers tend to land in the back corner of the net. Three, his indictment arrives on wheels: He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America. Mr. Deresiewicz's book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness.
At the end of the day, the Arsenal fans demand that we put eleven players on the pitch
You need teamwork to achieve real success, and that attitude comes straight from soccer.
Kaka beat Fletcher to the ball, and headed it past Heinze as the Argentine sought to close him down. Heinze could still have dealt with the problem, but, inexplicably, Patrice Evra came flying in like a runaway TGV. Heinze was flattened, Fletcher was so shocked that he stopped to rubber-neck, and Kaka strolled on and rolled the ball past Van der Sar. Evra's nightmare of a half continued when he crazily got himself cautioned for dissent, so removing Ferguson's one remaining first-choice defender from the away leg. Madness.
Why lie? I'm not going to be a hypocrite and say the opposite of what I think, like some others do.
In a manner akin to the influence of Tiger Woods on the other side of the Atlantic, Thierry Henry has helped kick down a few of the remaining bigoted stereotypes. Through his undisputable class and dignity, Henry has made a deep-seated difference to race relations in this country. Racism will flounder whenever white children grow up with a black man as their hero. That so few comment on Henry's colour is a silent tribute to his impact.
Once again it was Gough who stood firm for Scotland in the air
There's the beauty of the stage. I don't like filmed theater or opera because you're kind of playing soccer in a hockey game. Either or, they don't do justice to the media and you end up with a hybrid that is purely sensationalistic. Opera is a very theatrical medium that should be seen on a stage with the musicians in the pit in the audience.
I'm going to tell you the story about the geese which fly 5,000 miles from Canada to France. They fly in V-formation but the second ones don't fly. They're the subs for the first ones. And then the second ones take over - so it's teamwork.
Music and soccer. They would be my two major passions.
Football is based on desperation. All clubs are desperate in one form or another - desperate to succeed, desperate to survive, desperate to stay where they are, desperate that things get no worse, desperate to arrest the slide.
Polls are now even more meaningless than ever. . . there was the case of Ronnie O'Brien, the young footballer who incredibly found himself at Juventus, and even more incredibly found himself in the running to win an internet poll of the great club's greatest ever player. The curse ironically struck O'Brien a second time when he was at one point leading Time magazine's list of the Greatest People Of The 20th Century. The error in the polling was soon rectified and O'Brien, happily, is leading a highly successful career playing pro-football with FC Dallas in the American soccer league.
One of the things I discovered in Japan was from watching sumo wrestling. At the end you can never tell who has won the fight, and who has lost, because they do not show their emotion because it could embarrass the loser. It is unbelievable. That is why I try to teach my team politeness. It is only here in England that everybody pokes their tongue out when they win.
The function of football, soccer, basketball and other passion-sports in modern industrial society is the transference of boredom, frustration, anger and rage into socially acceptable forms of combat. A temporary substitute for war; for nationalism; identification with something bigger than the self.