Staying at a club like Swansea for 10 years, you become a part of it. Yes, Swansea is a city in terms of size, but it’s a town in terms of structure and mentality. When you play for Swansea you live in Swansea. You can’t commute unless you want to do so from Cardiff, which isn’t the greatest idea.

Every day you interact with the community. With the fans. And every time I did so, I couldn’t help but feel how much pride they had in the club. I started to care about it in the same way because I realised what I was doing it for. The longer I stayed, the more that feeling for what the club was and what I was a part of just grew.

I can look back on so many highs from my time as a Swansea player. But one day stands out in my mind above all the others. That’s the day we got promoted to the Premier League in 2011. It just capped off the journey we had been on. The one that everyone had worked so hard for. We knew that we were good enough and now we had the chance to prove it. It was the icing on the cake.

We went through a few managers while I was at the club, but when I found out Michael Laudrup was coming in I was excited. We all were, especially the older ones who knew the type of player he’d been and the career he’d had.

To have someone of his calibre – a legend – coming to Swansea at this stage of my career was perfect. This could be someone I could really learn from.

“I was captain of the club. I’d been there for a long time. And they were asking me to do something to help the club. I felt I had to do it”

And I did. I wasn’t playing as much as I thought I could under him but I was still involved. Still a part of it. I was already watching how managers talked, then. How they trained. How they set up, tactically.

I was doing my coaching qualifications by that stage, so it was fascinating for me to look at how Michael acted in his role as manager. There were some really good things, but there were also things that I thought I would probably do differently. That’s the same as any manager. I just tried to learn as much as I could. Soak it up and put it into my memory bank.

With Michael in charge, we beat Bradford to win the League Cup in 2013. It felt like that last piece of the jigsaw for Swansea. Our first major trophy. We were all so proud of it.

I could never have imagined that, 12 months later, Michael would be sacked.

When it happened, we were two points off the relegation places. Stuck in a bad patch that we couldn’t get out of. The confidence had gone and as hard as we tried we just couldn’t turn it around.