Chelsea ace Frank Lampard is grateful to Swansea City for the "grounding" they gave him as a teenager.

Whenever life gets difficult, he looks back to when he was on loan at Swansea as a 17-year-old, sharing a cramped hotel room with an ageing pro more than twice his age and wondering what the future had in store.

Lamps told The Sun: "It was a great learning curve for me. It was a real 'boy chucked into a man's world' and without the privileges I had even at West Ham at that time.

"I stayed in a hotel on an industrial estate and was rooming with Robbie Dennison, the winger who was on loan from Wolves.

"We had two single beds. He was 35 and I was 17 - at opposite ends of our careers and it was certainly character building.

"I didn't really know what to say to him when I lay in bed at night. He had two kids and I wanted to go out!

"It was a stage of growing up and I like to think I have kept that ethic throughout my career.

"That grounding certainly helped me and that was the whole point of Harry Redknapp sending me there."