Soccer Quotes - Page 33

• Sometimes now, when I watch continental games on television, I'm a bit bored. I ask, 'where is the intensity?'

  Arsene Wenger

  Football, Games, Bored

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• In England everything is liberalised. Within certain boundaries and rules everybody can do what he likes. Maybe London's society has a different tempo, a different dynamic. London is fast, productive, creative but it is not England. If you want to transfer that to football, you could say: in the four big English clubs and maybe in the one or two behind them there is a top level. Everything that comes after that rather mirrors English society. It's honest, fair and hard, sometimes also fast, but not always so perfect.

  Jens Lehmann

  Football, Mirrors, Two

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• At the highest level the first two yards are in your head.

  Bob Paisley

  Football, Two, Yards

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• Laddie, that man scored 200 goals in 270 matches - an incredible record - and he has won cup after cup as a manager. When he talks, pin back your ears.

  Bill Shankly

  Football, Men, Goal

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• We've been beaten before but never defeated. Tonight we were defeated.

  Helenio Herrera

  Football, Tonight, Defeated

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• If it is the case that you need just a first 11 and three or four more players, then why did Christopher Columbus sail to India to discover America?

  Claudio Ranieri

  Football, Player, America

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• Damien is Damien. When I don't put him in the squad my mother, who's 84, asks 'why isn't Damien playing?' She kills me about it and that's true

  Claudio Ranieri

  Football, Mother, Squad

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• Jesus Christ said turn the other cheek. Unfortunately Luis Figo is not Jesus Christ.

  Luiz Felipe Scolari

  Football, Jesus, Christ

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• Offside killed my team. They are not God. They made a mistake and I understand. I don't want three points, I just want 'sorry.'

  Luiz Felipe Scolari

  Football, Sorry, Mistake

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• I am in a lot of pain. They say it is more pain than when you have a baby but I don't know as I have not had one. It is not possible.

  Luiz Felipe Scolari

  Football, Baby, Pain

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• This is a game between players from 12 national sides, a game that if you have a friend in China, in Brazil, in Qatar...in half the world he wants to watch. I was thinking of this game when I signed for Chelsea.

  Luiz Felipe Scolari

  Football, Player, Thinking

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• Let slip the dogs of champions.

  Jose Mourinho

  Football, Dog, Champion

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• Faith-healing is peculiar enough at the best of times, but applying it to football merits a special league of barking. Why would God bother to perform a miracle that enabled Sol Campbell to yell Oh holy Jesus, now I can win the ball in the air. It's been five years since I could defend from corners, brothers and sisters, it's a miracle.

  Mark Steel

  Football, Jesus, Brother

  “Spot the balls” by Mark Steel, www.theguardian.com. February 3, 1999.

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• It was a titanic effort.

  Glenn Hoddle

  Football, Effort, Chairman

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• Whichever country you are, if you lose games you are criticised. It's only when it's England it's like a new world war.

  Sven-Goran Eriksson

  Football, Country, War

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• If he'd been English or Swedish, he'd have walked the England job.

  Brian Clough

  Football, Jobs, England

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• Faria Alam whined about the invasion of her privacy in yet another lucrative interview earlier this week. There is very good money to be made out of whining about the invasion of your privacy.

  Rod Liddle

  Football, Invasion, Interviews

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• You know what I wonder about? This - the more details of Sven-Göran Eriksson's love life that appear in the press, the more contempt he attracts for his choice of substitutes in England games. Now, we haven't done the research, but my guess is that Sven's performances in the sack and that of his subs on the pitch are not correlated. So why do we link them?

  Daniel Finkelstein

  Football, Love Life, Games

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• You don't look for jobs. You don't phone up 10 clubs and say, Here I am. You are offered the job. I was in Benfica many years ago. I was leaving the training ground and I had a car after me. It went on for 10 minutes. Anyhow, he stopped and I stopped and he said, I'm from the Italian embassy. Ah yes, and what do you want? I want your phone number because Roma wants you as a manager next season. Three months later I was sitting on the bench in Roma. I don't think the rest of working society works like football.

  Sven-Goran Eriksson

  Football, Jobs, Thinking

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• He shouldn't have resigned over that game. It was not a bad performance; in fact it was quite a good one for England. I would not have resigned under those circumstances.

  Franz Beckenbauer

  Football, Games, Facts

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• He's got great credentials by winning the World Cup, but he did it with Brazil - my granny could probably have managed Brazil to World Cup success.

  Gary Lineker

  Football, Winning, Brazil

  " My granny could have coached Brazil, says Lineker" by Jon Brodkin, www.theguardian.com. April 27, 2006.

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• Sentences I never thought I would write. (1) That John Prescott certainly has a way with the ladies. (2) Give it to Steve McClaren, he seems like the man for the England job. (3) Peter Crouch is the man to replace Rooney.

  Martin Samuel

  Football, Jobs, Writing

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• Sven's actual results on the park were not quite good enough to make him a hero, and not quite bad enough to get him the sack, so he left the gentlemen of the press with something of a void. And they abhor a void. Soon the discovery that Sven was in fact a hammer-man of legendary proportions filled the void, until the media came to realise that Sven was that rare thing, a man whose astonishing success with women somehow didn't make him more interesting.

  Declan Lynch

  Football, Hero, Men

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• The combination of an out-of-control tabloid press and a readership that thrills to the destruction of the England head coach is something no other country can offer. Scolari was driven out; Steve McClaren's personal life made the front pages. Neither of them even held the job. Then there was the fake-sheikhing of Sven-Göran Eriksson. That a newspaper should so brilliantly and deliberately destabilise the national head coach in a World Cup year is something no other sporting nation would consider.

  Simon Barnes

  Football, Country, Jobs

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• There were moments when I wondered at the gossamer veil that stops licence from being libel. I suspect that taking on the job of England manager puts you outside the protection of the courts. It must be part of the job description that you will be held hostage by media speculation and can have your character tortured, molested and finally executed at the public whim, in exchange for a lifetime's supply of money.

  A. A. Gill

  Football, Jobs, Character

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