golazombie

golazo m (pl. golazos): (soccer) spectacular goal, scorcher Passionate about football. I have my favourite clubs and players, but I appreciate good footy from anyone when I see it.

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Cesc Fàbregas in La Masia

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He is one of the players who ran the most [in the Bayern game]. He's a very offensive player and he's not used to doing so much dirty work but he did it and I'm very proud of him because he gave everything until the last minute. Everyone is behind him and, like I said before, he's one of my closest team-mates. We do everything together here and I feel close to him. On the pitch and outside the pitch. Everyone is very happy to have him here because he's such a talented player and I don't understand why people are hard on him.

Mathieu Flamini on Mesut Özil (x)

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He is very much appreciated by his team-mates. That's a real compliment you can get when you are a football player. For me it is a bit like Zidane when he played for Madrid, all the other players said he was the best. You want first to be recognised by people who do the same job as you, and I think that is the biggest compliment that you can get. You would speak with everybody who plays in this team, they always rate him very highly.

Arsene Wenger on Mesut Özil (x)

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Mesut and the evolution of the other players can transform ­Arsenal into champions. Mesut is a phenomenal player. He's one of these players that you buy to complete the puzzle of your team. You don't need time, you need nothing. The player just arrives. His quality and his maturity and his leadership …You have an empty space waiting for him, you put him there and you know automatically that your team becomes better. He arrived, Arsene gave him the shirt, he immediately started playing and immediately the team became better. It's impossible to stop him for the entire game as these kinds of players always have a ­moment, or couple of moments, where you cannot stop them and they end up showing why they are so good. To stop him completely, I don't believe we can.

José Mourinho

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"Invisible" Mesut Özil?

Incredibly good assessment of Özil's style of play, which a lot of people simply misunderstand and consequently judge as "too quiet" or "invisible":

It is Özil that makes the side play, and his appreciation of space is incredible. He has a phenomenal ability to drift between the lines and find himself free. So often you could pause the game and draw a triangle or a square around the three or four players closest to him; Özil would be precisely in the center. It's a difficult thing to quantify, difficult to outline why being five yards from the midfield and five yards from the defense is significantly better to being, say, seven yards from the midfield and three yards from the defence, but at this level, margins like that matter. [...]

Few other players in football give the impression of always thinking. Özil is always glancing around him, always looking over his shoulder to see where the space is. He's so concerned with making sure defenders don't track him that he occasionally does something Thierry Henry used to do in his Arsenal days, drifting out wide to the touchline and standing still, as if disinterested from the game, before bursting into life.

Michael Cox, espn.com (x)

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A Team of 11 Kevin Grosskreutzes - What would happen?

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He wants to play every single game. Like every single game. Like, cup game, first round, second round. In training he wants to beat everybody. You know, the typical one, where he gets fouled. But they don’t call the foul on him. Next thing you know, he will go and ask the keeper to give him the ball, and run past everyone and score. He will take it from you, wherever you are, and score again. Until he gets a bit more relaxed. So then you end up losing the game. I've never seen that before.

Thierry Henry on Lionel Messi

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I would have loved to have played with him. He reminds me in a different way of Robert Pires. He is the type of guy who if you give him the ball he will give it back to you. He plays like he's playing at home in his garden and nobody is around him. It's weird, but that's the kind of player you want. You need to be composed on the ball and I think he's brought that to Arsenal FC. As a striker you need to pass the line of being a killer. He has that in his eyes now. When he first arrived it was like he wanted to see what it was like in England, but now he doesn't want to miss a game. He wants to be the guy that makes his team win or the guy that sets up a goal. He wants to be the guy and that is what you need if you want to be the guy. You need that attitude.

Thierry Henry on Mesut Özil

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I like Arsene Wenger a lot, because he stays true to his ideas and has been loyal to the same club for such a long time. With him, young players become stars. That's worth having a title or two fewer.

Joachim Löw

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It's not just now - in the last five years it's always been the same. What am I going to do, how can I change that? I don't work in the press, I don't work in television. I cannot control that. And they love to do that. So what am I going to do? I have to do my work, I have to train, I have to score, I have to play, try to help my team all the time. And not think about that. He's a great player. It's a professional relationship, like I have with other players. I'm not friends with him because we don't share the same dressing room, we don't go out for dinner, you know, but I respect him as a professional. Friends, we are not friends as in real friends, but we are friends from profession. Why not? No problem. If he comes here, we can play together.

Cristiano Ronaldo on his relationship with Lionel Messi

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Mesut Özil v. Everton