Rafael Nadal

I think when you compete every week, when you play under pressure daily, you find your rituals to be 100 percent focused on what you’re doing.

It’s important for the young players to practice other ball games as well, basketball or table tennis. On the tennis court, you can improve your eye through a kind of overexertion.

Every year I go to Broadway to see a musical – I like the music. I saw ‘Mamma Mia;’ I saw ‘Les Miserables;’ I saw ‘Phantom of the Opera’ like six, seven times.

When one gets beaten by somebody better, one has to know how to lose with humility. Sure, I could have served better. Sure, I could have hit my forehand harder. But the truth was this was like an avalanche, and there was no way to stop it.

It’s important to have people around you with enough confidence to say if you are not acting in a good way. Normally, when you are at the top, people say everything is fantastic. Probably in that moment it is what you want to hear, but it’s best to be reminded how to act properly.

I have lived my whole life with high intensity.

I go to my favourite tournament, I talk about my favourite sport and it’s just a great month of parading.

Honesty, willingness to exert oneself, friendship – all these things shaped me too.

I’m not a God, I make mistakes.

I need to improve, I want to improve, and to be able to stay in London and play on grass before Wimbledon is a very good opportunity for me.

Is more for precaution. You don’t know tomorrow what’s happen, no? But now I am happy because I don’t feel too much pain. But I can finish the match, so that’s a good sign.

When you are thrown onto the stage at 17 in such an enormous way, it becomes living on the edge because every step you take, every word you speak, every action you do becomes headline news. And it became, for me, life or death.

My serve can get better, for sure. It’s not just about serving bombs, but positioning, variation in speed, in spin.

My feeling would be that you lose something of the beauty of the Premiership by joining something not defined at the moment.

I am going to fight for important things.

My motivation is tomorrow, just one day at a time, right?

I was in the tennis bubble. I wasn’t thinking about the big picture. I didn’t notice what they said on television, I wasn’t reading any papers. I had a coach and a manager, and they kept me in the bubble.

I know my serve stinks, but I was a pretty good tennis player.

So this is it. Match point for eternity.

The guy comes up to the plate, there’s always a chance where he can get a grand slam and everybody forgets about all the times he missed.

For me, pressure is bird flu. I’m feeling a lot of pressure with the problem in Scotland. It’s not fun and I’m more scared of it than football.