Nothing improves your confidence and brings a team together more than winning a cup.

As football gets more globalized, it's probably more important than ever to have one or two players in your team who have grown up in the same streets or been to the same schools as the hard-core fans.

There are some agents who do a good job looking after players but there are others who stifle and mollycoddle them.

It will be a difficult couple of days. It's difficult now and it will be difficult tomorrow.

In my 20 years in football, I was fortunate enough never to have experienced relegation. And while there is the pressure of expectations at the top of the league, at the bottom it comes in fear and trepidation, which is almost worse.

The best managers out there at the moment are Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho but they are at other clubs - Real Madrid and Barcelona.

I would have been about seven years old when the formative years of my competitive football education began. I was playing in the local leagues around Manchester, playing against lads from tough areas who had been taught they had to fight for everything.