Miroslav Klose: "I said stop playing football because I no longer recognised it. Today, young players think about other things. As a child, I only thought about training and becoming someone in this sport that I always loved. At Lazio and in the national team, after each training session, I put myself in a bathtub full of ice to avoid injuries. But the young players on the team systematically refused.
When they saw me picking up the bags of balls to put them away at the end of training, they said to me ‘But who tells you to do that?’.
At that moment, I said to myself: ‘You’re 20 years old and you can’t help a 60-year-old worker?’
They care more about whether their boots go with their socks. That’s why I said stop. The football I knew no longer exists.
Today’s young players think first of cars, contracts with their sponsors, and their new boots. It is only after all these things that football comes. For them, their image is the most important thing. Whereas for me, all that mattered was football in its purest form.”
Rick Astley
And he knows how lucky he is. “I’ve had a very easy stress-free life because I sang some Stock Aitken Waterman pop songs,” he reflects. “I still to this day think that is a bizarre thing. The Sliding Doors kind of scenario. It almost terrifies me that I’m gonna wake up one morning to hear, ‘That didn’t happen. This is what you do for a living. And it’s really f—ing hard.’”
He played two gigs at the Picnic. One on the main stage and he was top notch. Nothing too edgy, but a brilliant entertainer who knew how to work a crowd and gave the punters what they wanted.
A few hours later the word went around that he was the secret act on The Salty Dog. Up we roamed and there he was, nicely flaming, singing pretty much anything the crowd shouted out at him, forgetting words, and generally just acting the fuck. He knows how fucking lucky he is (lucky lucky lucky), and especially to get this second coming in the autumn of his career.
He’s some fucking drummer too, turns out he started out as a drummer. Just a good sort you’d imagine.