Quotes from Jonjo Shelvey

I loved the Swansea fans but towards the end there were things being written about me and a lot of rumours when nobody actually knew the full extent of what was going on behind the cenes. I'll leave it at that.

If there's a problem and you want to do something after then we'll go and talk about it after, but for me you shake hands at the end of the game and get on with it.

I've got alopecia so I've got bald patches all over my head and I grew up with that, so obviously I've become accustomed to it, but it's still not nice when people are saying it in your industry when they know you've got a condition.

I get labelled lazy maybe because of my body language; I'm quite laid-back.

I want to be competitive but I need to smooth some of the edges or I will be the one who suffers.

I have tactics that calm me down and mellow me out so I go in to the game calm and ready instead of punching the walls.

Don't get me wrong, by the time I finish I will have had a fantastic career. But you do sit there sometimes and think, 'could I have gone higher? Could I have been playing in the Champions League?'

I had a year out playing local football before I went to Charlton at 12. West Ham was the club I supported so it was a hard decision to leave.

I'd gone very quickly from playing in a park with my mates to sitting next to Wayne Rooney at dinner. It was a bit weird.

I've always known I could play football. I went to Arsenal and West Ham as a kid, but I took a year out because I wanted to play with my mates and get that competitiveness back. I got that fighting spirit and I never want to lose that.

I welcome the responsibility of being a key player. I want to put on a show every week. I want to be a leader.

When you die, I think you re-live your life in a different dimension, in a different world but I don't believe in aliens.

People I played with at Swansea will tell you that I wasn't laid-back when I was there. I just wanted to win so much on the training pitch that I'd end up falling out with people.

When you're playing once and then not playing for six games, I don't care what any footballer says, you don't feel involved. You don't feel part of the team.

I understand football's changing and I'm evolving with it but stats are stats. You can run 15km if you like but I'm a footballer.

I'm a winner and I've had that instilled in me since I was a kid and sometimes it goes over the edge.

If I'm not playing well, or I'm trying things and they're not coming off, the one thing I will always do is work hard. And I think, as a fan, that's the least you can ask for.

The way I see it is, the better you play, the more money you're going to earn. It's like working in a car garage, the more cars you sell, the more money you're going to earn at the end of the day. It's how life works.

It doesn't matter who you play against in midfield, you need to try to come out on top and more often than not when a team wins a midfield battle they normally have a good chance of winning the game because that's where a lot of the play goes through.

I was at Arsenal but I didn't like the manager of the under-10s at the time so I went to West Ham where my brother played.

Where I grew up, in Harold Hill, it was rough and it still is now. I used to live in a little council flat, next to the shops, and there was always trouble, people getting stabbed.

Every decision I've made in my career was just to play, to try and get as much game-time as possible. I can't say I've got too many regrets.

I hate getting the ball and passing it sideways or backwards. I hate it.

When I was eight or nine, we had a goal in the back yard of our council flat. We used to flip it over the back fence and take it out onto the estate. Everyone would come out and we'd play for hours, there were cars screeching to a halt when the ball went on the road.