Carl Froch

“I don't want to be the country's best-kept boxing secret. I want to cross over from being a boxer on the back pages to the front pages and become the big superstar I deserve to be.”

“You can improve your punching power, but only to an extent. If you can punch hard, then it's just god-given, that's just nature, not nurture and there's not much you can do to develop punching power.”

“I've kept improving in many ways. Boxers evolve with experience.”

“The fans want to see a conclusive finish. It's quite a brutal, barbaric sport and the people who watch it want to see someone out. That's what I do for a living.”

“You are never going to top boxing at Wembley stadium.”

“I'm quite a ruthless, cold-hearted bastard. I always have been.”

“I'm a very proud warrior and with that mentality comes great fights: especially when I'm in with opponents that mean business.”

“People have been upset in the past about pay-per-view fights because they got sold a lie or an illusion that was not real.”

“My mum and dad split up when I was five years old, and that was quite upsetting. But ever since then, I've been very hard.”

“There's weaknesses in every fighter.”

“Sometimes big boxing matches should take place on the cobbles. That's really where Mikkel Kessler and me ought to have sorted it out.”

“I had a lot of rematches in the amateurs. You don't always know what an opponent's going to do. I do find that I beat them more easily second time around.”

“You don't want to be going into any fight thinking you've got to get a knockout, or force a stoppage, because it takes you out of your gameplan.”

“When I won the title against Jean Pascal it also won me fight of the year.”

“You are either genetically tough or you're not.”

“I'm not in this for superstardom. I do it purely for the love of the sport. I just love fighting.”

“When good fighters fight, they often make predictions. It's all part of the media hype beforehand.”

“I don't think I'll be fighting when I'm 40.”

“Boxing's a bit like the Army, nine out of 10 people come out as pretty nice people. It taught me self-worth, to respect my elders and what the right thing was to do. As a result, I don't think I even got a single detention at school. It helped me to be good.”

“I never cheated on nutrition, I always had a really good diet and I always supplemented well - that's a massive factor in any sport. Even in everyday life, if people are just going to the gym recreationally, they'll have targets in mind and if you're not supplementing correctly or concentrating on your diet, you're wasting your time.”