Quotes About Off-pitch

You have a personality inside the pitch and off the pitch and in the changing room, too. The most important thing is to be respected by your teammates, and that's the case at Tottenham.

That has always been my character - on the pitch I have a strong temperament, but off the pitch I'm more serene, reflective. I manage to separate out those two things.

I think people don't really understand how much footballers are affected by the people in their lives. When we're interviewed, people always ask about managers and tactics and training, but they almost never ask about what's going on off the pitch, and to me, that's just as important to your career.

I developed a mechanism so that whatever mistakes I made, I would bounce straight back. Whatever was happening off the pitch, I could put it to one side and maintain my form. Call it mental resilience or a strong mind, but that is what we mean when we talk about experience in a football team.