We arrived in Argentina with a lot of injured players, including our goalkeeper. Also we were unlucky to be drawn in the same group as the two tournament favourites Italy and Argentina.

For me, football is just a game, not a drama.

I gave everything in my career so I have no regrets at all.

I was the classic midfield organiser who could also score goals.

During such a competition players are there for a long time as well as all the people around them. They need to train, to eat, to go out. There ought to be something in it for everyone. On that particular point, my experience has been a bonus.

The team which I led to the 1992 European Championship Finals is the only one in the history of the entire competition to have won every single one of its qualifying matches.

Some games you win, some you lose, and some you draw.

Consequently, I won just about everything I set out to win, everything bar the World Cup, of course. But even now, I don't regret that, because I was part of a team which twice reached the semi-finals.

We arrived in Argentina with a lot of injured players, including our goalkeeper. Also we were unlucky to be drawn in the same group as the two tournament favourites Italy and Argentina.

At times like that it's difficult to remember what's at stake, that history is in the making. As a player you feel so cut off sometimes, it can be tough... Which is why it is an enormous advantage to play at home.

The match against Brazil was football at its best. Both sides had opportunities to win the game.

What differences were there between Maradona and Platini?

We were the best team in the world: European champions in 1984, we qualified without a hitch and 86 was to be the swan song for a very experienced side.

In any case, you can't turn back the clock.

The 1984 European Championships were held in France and that was something important. I felt on form then, even though I was practically always injured at all the World Cups. It's a great memory. But in any case, the past is past.

I was never a prisoner to my footballing status.

For me football is more about making the right pass at the right time.

At Euro '92 itself, we bowed out to the eventual winners, Denmark, in our final group match.

When I follow the finals of the European Cups, I look at all the aspects surrounding protocol, to get some ideas. I am interested in personalities, sponsors and the stands. But as soon as the whistle goes, it's all on the pitch.

There would probably be less of a frenzy among the French public.

In 1986, we gave it our best shot but we didn't get the run of the ball.

Whenever I was on the pitch, I always tried to win.

You know, my role as Vice Chairman is a lot less tiring than playing matches every three days.

I was playing the best football of my career at the time, finishing top scorer in Italy three year's running. There were other good players around but I think I was the best at that time.

A football team represents a way of being a culture.

When they were small and my wife really had no other responsibilities, except taking care of the family and all of us, it wasn't that big a deal. It was fun. Hey, we're going to Moscow. We're going to Italy. We're going to Toronto. We're going to New York.

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

Moving from Wales to Italy is like moving to a different country.

Italy in the first years got food, for the first year or the first periods got food. Then we got raw materials and then we got tool machines, let's say, instruments for working.

When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well.

The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it.

In Holland and Spain and France, where so many of us come from, people aren't interested in the sex lives of their players. We don't hear these stories - even in Italy where the media is right on top of football.

I was a star in Italy, Austrailia, Germany and Japan before the American stations ever paid attention at all.

The role of Italy and of Austria has diminished as has that of France and Britain; Germany and Japan have suffered catastrophically.

You may have the universe if I may have Italy.

It is important to remember that some of the most serious thinkers once thought that democracy was not compatible with the cultures of Germany, Italy, Japan, Latin America and Russia.

During my first month in Italy I lived a nomadic life.

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.

Italy will always have the best food.

But we did the Pink Panther not in Hollywood, in Italy.

I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.

The political tradition of ancient thought, filtered in Italy by Machiavelli, says one thing clearly: every prince needs allies, and the bigger the responsibility, the more allies he needs.

I have had the problem of seeing my male model go to Italy and... stay there.

You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.

Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is finished.

Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.

In 1917 - as we have seen, - Italy suffered a great reverse, losing 200,000 soldiers and immense supplies.

The individual couldn't find any attention in Italy.