Henrikh Mkhitaryan Quotes

Chess is a lot of fun for me. Football is a physical game, and in chess you can just beat someone mentally - you outwit somebody, outmaneuver them, think ahead of them.

I play football like chess. You have to think a lot and anticipate what could happen after you make your move.

When you play the top sides you cannot afford to be as open as 4-4-2 can leave you. Consequently teams adapt their formation.

It's all about being sharp and not taking too much damage. That's always the game plan.

When you play against a top side, you know they will have more possession, and they will be in more control, and you have to find one or two counterattacks.

I think you have to go deep into the bag of tricks, so to speak, to try and slow down the quarterback.

At the end of the day, I'm a good defensive football coach.

Obviously, in football you can study somebody, but at the same time, once you get out there, I think there's just a natural kind of feel for where you think guys might be or where they're going to go and knowing beforehand what's going to happen. It's just like chess.

Never throw into double coverage.

I played tournament chess from fifth grade up into high school.

Never having played Chess before, it was most interesting to be playing the game with no pieces in front of me. But I still knew how to stroke my hair when I won.

The name of the game is 'kill the quarterback.' Every football team tries to knock the guy out of the game that's handling the ball.

The Berlin Defence suited my strategy for the match. I had a defensive strategy - Actually, I had in my pocket some other sharper stuff to fall back on - but first I wanted to try the defensive strategy with Black and it worked so well.

I'm a pretty good chess player.

Having marshalled the men in battle order, as shown in the first diagram, you will observe that each party has two ranks of men, on the first of which stand the superior Pieces, and on the next the eight Pawns.

The Bears treat offense as if it's bubonic plague.

The Pawn moves only one square at a time, and that straight forward, except in the act of capturing, when it takes one step diagonally to the right or left file on to the square occupied by the man taken, and continues on that file until it captures another man.

When I'm lined up in the middle, it's a lot of freelancing and blitzing.

I am a firm believer that if you score one goal the other team have to score two to win.

It's good to be good at playing defence, but the best defence is a strong offence.

Rex Ryan does a lot of the same kind of stuff that we do in terms of how they play in the secondary and what they do.

Any team, if you can rattle the quarterback you have an opportunity to win the game.

We want to create a problem for the defense, a moment of indecision as they figure out how they want to play against whatever formation we may show. We get a slight edge this way. Also, we create the opportunity for a defense to make more mistakes.

Go back through football, and you will see that the team with the best defense wins.

You can talk about systems until you're blue in the face but that's secondary - if you're closing down, if you're first to the ball, it doesn't really matter what system you've got.