Football is about so much more than talent.
Being Welsh means you sometimes get exposed to international football earlier. Again, that helps player development, speeds up their thought process in a different kind of environment.
Look, we all make mistakes. That is no problem. But you have to be willing to make up for your mistakes and to help yourself.
Certain players need twice the recovery time of others because they run much more - not because they put in more effort but because they're playing different positions.
I see myself as a different sort of Welsh. Because we are from Cardiff, we see Wales as Cardiff. This is Wales; outside Cardiff is beyond. It's a strange one. You are really Welsh, but you're not, if you know what I mean.
John Hartson, he speaks fluent Welsh and has the tattoos all over him to prove his Welshness. But in my own world, no one is more Welsh than myself.
I started to realise I am not as strong as others, and I can't muscle someone off the ball who is twice the size of me. So I have altered my game, playing on the half-turn, for example, and it's made me a much better player.
My image is not the greatest, I imagine. You need to know me and understand me, see some of the things I do away from football. Maybe you have to be a fan of me to like me.
I felt bad for Newcastle when they lost their 2005 FA Cup semi-final to Manchester United. They had loaned me out to Celtic, but I still had a lot of affection for them.
If you are going to say something, then be as honest as you can.
I let football drive me crazy. If we lost, I would shut myself away for two or three days, not sleeping, torturing myself about what I did.
It's up to people to judge whether I'm a good fella.
I played on anger for the first 15 years of my career.
I joined Norwich when I was 15 and moved away from a life living on an estate in Cardiff and everything I knew. I moved away from my girlfriend, who is my wife now, and my nan, who has now passed away. I missed a lot.
I knew I needed to move away when I was 15, but when I got to Norwich, I spent nights crying myself to sleep with homesickness. For any young kid moving away from home, that is the biggest thing you have to deal with.
I was a troubled young kid, and I would try to break every rule.
So much of my career was affected by injuries. Not just the well documented surgery, but the hamstring pulls and other things. Injuries hit me hard, and they always seemed to come at key times.
Of course I want to keep playing; that's the best thing for any footballer. But I'm looking forward to not having to put my body through the pain, I have to say.
As a professional, you're taught from a young age to despise losing. But I began to accept that, in football, you will win some games, and you will lose some games, with draws here and there, too. That's just the nature of the game.
That's what makes the Premier League the best in the world: the competitiveness and the ability each team possesses can hurt you on their day.
