Everyone wants to be loved and liked - but you can't be as a manager.

If you look at my past in the Premier League, without going into too many details, I don't think I had much of a chance at any of them, for different reasons.

There's got to be a role for an experienced football person helping the manager; not being a threat to the manager, but helping and sorting out a lot of the hassle he has, you know? Letting him concentrate on managing the football side.

My teams have never been supposed to be able to do the things that they do.

It's easier to sit at your desk and have a bun, but I've been really disciplined because I feel like I have to give myself a chance. You can't let yourself down on that. You have to be mentally sharp in this Premier League.

It's difficult to motivate yourself to do the workouts when you get older but I train hard.

I was fined £20,000 for TV interview where I barely said anything. The FA brought an outside barrister in to do me. A big place like the FA, they don't have their own in-house lawyer?

The chairman, Mehmet Dalman, he was brilliant for me. He helped me left, right and centre, he lives aboard now but he was my shoulder.

That's what you want to do as a manager, finish the game, get in your bath and think about the kids going home, the young kids going home.

Most of the clubs I have had, they have been in a precarious situation when I have taken over and I have had to change it, even going back to Scarborough and all that.

It is a fine line between communicating and being too chummy. My players, when I've been promoted, have been upset by top-flight refs being mates with opposition players.

In the intervening 48 Christmases I have always either been a player, having to watch what I eat and drink, or a manager, worrying about what my players are eating and drinking, plus who is going to cry off tomorrow, who is suspended, who is carrying an injury, and the million-and-one other questions that fill a manager's every waking moment.

A few eyebrows have been raised at Adel Taarabt joining Milan. Having worked with Adel for two years, I am not as surprised as most people seem to be. He is a player of immense ability and, if he is handled right, and motivated himself, he can win games at any level.

Working at Palace was one of the happiest episodes of my football career, even though the ending was one of the most upsetting and traumatic.

I'm glad to see goal-line technology working; we should have had it for years. I do believe we will soon see managers being allowed one, or two, challenges.

As a manager I always trusted my players on Christmas Day. I did not see any point in dragging them into the training ground - a three-hour round-trip for some of them on icy roads - when they could relax with their families instead.

Once, I used to have the local reporter on the team bus and I'd tell him everything, so when he wrote about the club he was informed, even if he couldn't print some things. Those days are long gone.

I tried to download a jazz album this week and ended up getting some tracks four times, some once, some three times; in total I ended up with 50 tracks. I don't know how I did it.

I had a player once whose wife had twins and one of them was in and out of hospital for a year. You just have to give people as much time as they need.

Everyone says teams should work harder when they are losing but sometimes that makes it worse.

Sometimes when I'm watching managers on television and I see all that anxiety I realise that I don't miss the job as much as I thought.

But the art of management has not changed. The art of it is still 80 to 90 per cent man-management. It is just a matter of getting the best out of what you have got.

Ask anyone in the game: if you want a player from France or a French player, 99 per cent of the time, you will have to deal with Willie McKay or someone like him. If you want to get the job done, then you need the Willie McKays of this world.

It's the last question mark against me in my career. Why couldn't I keep a team in the Premier League.