The Reading man is good friends with Swansea City's Darren Pratley and Leon Britton but he says that those friendships will be put to one side as they battle for a place in amongst next season's elite.<\/p>\n
He told GetReading “On the day any friendship goes straight out the window. <\/p>\n
“Darren and Leon are both top guys and as well as playing with them while growing up earlier in my career, I have also been against them many times as well.”<\/p>\n
The 27-year-old midfielder has never made it to a play-off final, despite being involved in previous campaigns at Griffin Park and Madejski Stadium.<\/p>\n
“I lost two semi-finals with Brentford and then another with Reading in my first season here,” said the Londoner.<\/p>\n
“But what happened in the past doesn’t mean anything.<\/p>\n
“I feel good right now, I’m pretty excited about the game, but it’s important not to let it play on your mind too much.<\/p>\n
"We’re just trying to treat it as another game.<\/p>\n
“Brian Howard and Matt Mills have both played at Wembley and for those of us that haven’t – you can only imagine what it must be like.<\/p>\n
“We need to try and stay as relaxed as possible in the build-up as it is quite a long wait until the game.<\/p>\n
“You need to stay focused and make sure you don’t get too carried away with it all.<\/p>\n
“We were talking in training the other day about how everyone else is now off on their holidays, but that doesn’t bother us.<\/p>\n
“I’m sure there will be time to do stuff like play golf if we want to leading up to the game.<\/p>\n
"Nobody has said we can’t do what we would normally do or anything like that.<\/p>\n
“The staff have been great and they will make sure that come Monday we are firing on all cylinders.<\/p>\n
“I think Brendan has done a great job,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Swansea have played the passing game for some time and Brendan is really suited to them.<\/p>\n
“I think he has managed to bring them on even further and make them into a better side and that shows in the fact that they finished third.<\/p>\n
“He’s a good coach and manager and even though it didn’t quite work at Reading, we always knew he would bounce back quickly.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Reading man is good friends with Swansea City's Darren Pratley and Leon Britton but he says that those friendships will be put to one side as they battle for a place in amongst next season's elite. He told GetReading “On the day any friendship goes straight out the window. “Darren and Leon are both […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":453,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/453"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}