I’ve been lucky enough to play for the Spanish national team and Barcelona, two sides who’ve shown that you can play good, attractive possession football and win major titles.
You can play anyone if you’re open enough. It’s a form of possession. Each time you work on something, you allow yourself to be possessed by creating the environment for it. Then you allow the possession to happen – but not at the expense of your sanity or of your identity.
Bizarrely, someone involved in the children’s show ‘Sarah and Duck,’ which I narrate, recently found a coat with my name on it in a secondhand shop. It’s the coat I wore as Theseus in the ‘Dream.’ So it’s back in my possession after all these years, which is rather strange and wonderful.
Everyone wants to play like Spurs. We want to play attractive football, get the ball forward, and create chances with good possession.
You have to stay disciplined from the start of the game to the end of the game, from the start of the possession to the end of the possession.
Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion.
I don’t really have a treasured possession, but I do love my family’s proper old photo album. We all have hundreds of photos on our phones now, but you can’t beat the old albums stuffed with black-and-white wedding photographs and 1970s Polaroids.
Every time I took a long leave from home, I felt as if I were going to conquer the world. Or rather, take possession of what is my birthright, my inheritance.
I have a statue of Superman. It’s actually a big one… It’s a collectible statue of Superman, which the DC guys very kindly gave to me. So that’s a little prized possession of mine.
If the guys up front don’t get possession, they can’t score.
I’m always bragging, always laughing with my Spain team-mates at Barcelona, saying I’ll take 30 per cent possession and two goals – a win is a win. It’s football.
When we are in possession, tactically, he is the best coach in the world for me. He works hard, watches a lot of games, and prepares us really well. Guardiola has the feeling for gaping spaces, and he already had that as a player.
The possession of anything begins in the mind.
The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a regular income in exchange for those goods.
It’s modern football – having the ball, controlling the game, and being well positioned when you lose possession.
To be successful you have to find a good balance between offence and defence, to work without the ball, but our main tactic is to work with the ball, to be in possession.
My most precious possession is a 13.5-feet-long fishing rod, made by an American firm called Loomis.
When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my ‘museum’. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.
I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.
The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.
We have to stay focused on every possession.
Man should not consider his material possession his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need.
Every possession matters, and everything goes down to the wire.
In all worldly things that a man pursues with the greatest eagerness he finds not half the pleasure in the possession that he proposed to himself in the expectation.
Freedom of choice is more to be treasured than any possession earth can give.
God saw fit, for wise reasons to allow the people of Israel thus to make and possess slaves; but is this any license to us to enslave any of our fellow-men, to kill any of our fellow-men whom we please and are able to destroy, and take possession of their estates?
The fame that goes with wealth and beauty is fleeting and fragile; intellectual superiority is a possession glorious and eternal.
My desire was not to pass any island without taking possession, so that, one having been taken, the same may be said of all.
Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.
I have come slowly into possession of such powers as I have. I receive the opinions of my day. I do not conceive them. But I receive them into a vivid mind.
Painfully to attain possession of what we do not want, and then painfully to waste our days in attempting to rid ourselves of it, seems to be a part of our discipline here below.
Regarding my coaching philosophy, I think it is important to adapt to the team/players and the culture in the country where you are coaching, but to keep possession is a key issue wherever you are.
It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.
One of the things that I try to do when I have a tough time with anything – whatever it may be – is just look at someone else’s situation. Here in Staten Island, look, I have people that have children that haven’t been back in their home for 18 months after Sandy. They lost every worldly possession.
Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession – a property entirely our own.
At no time during the period intervening between the ratification of the Constitution and the inauguration of the new government were the leaders in Federalism certain that the agrarian party, which had opposed the Constitution, might not render the instrument ineffectual by securing possession of Congress.
My religion is my most precious possession. Except for it, I could easily have become excessively occupied with industry. Sharing responsibility for church work has been a vital counterbalance in my life.
Clothes should look as if a woman was born into them. It is a form of possession, this belonging to one another.
It may be, for one reason or another, if I’m not able to work, that would be a cause for distress. But I’m still pitching. Thank God, I’m still in possession of my gift. And I have the love of my family.
Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.
There is no knowledge, no light, no wisdom that you are in possession of, but what you have received it from some source.
The thing that I’ve always been slightly frustrated with, was that the idea of a CD is kind of confined to a material possession that you can put on a shelf. And the idea of music, for me, is always about both the communication and the sharing of content. And so the interactive part is missing.
The shoot-and-chase approach had become big in hockey. Teams would come up to the blue line and shoot the puck around our boards deep in our zone, then swarm in after it forechecking, trying to regain possession.
The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world.
My Helmut Lang leather pants are my most treasured possession – I’ve worn them almost every day for two years, and they look good with everything.
Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.
It’s the heart that I play with on every single possession. And that’s all that it is.
True generosity is an offering; given freely and out of pure love. No strings attached. No expectations. Time and love are the most valuable possession you can share.
When resources become skimpy, human beings don’t suddenly cooperate to conserve what’s left. They fight to the last scrap for possession of a diminishing resource.
It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.
This is the most intimate relationship between literature and its readers: they treat the text as a part of themselves, as a possession.
The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Possession isn’t nine-tenths of the law. It’s nine-tenths of the problem.
