"I always felt I would be on my way sooner rather than later from United.
"It wasn't as if I was at Burnley to gain first-team experience. My time was up but, as a United fan since I was a kid, I was happy to see them getting stronger even if the players they bought would inevitably take my place.
"You have to be realistic. People like Cristiano Ronaldo have real quality. It was frustrating but a club like United are always going to bring in wonderful world-class players, even into the academy. They're the biggest club in the world so you can't complain. They're going to play in front of you.
"There was a generation of lads there who didn't make as much of a mark as we'd have liked but look at the players at United at the time. The Nevilles, David Beckham, Paul Scholes and that crop were at their prime. How could you ever leave them out? The knock-on effect was that we didn't play and then got overtaken in the pecking order by younger lads like Darren Fletcher and Kieran Richardson. I'm just grateful to have had the chances I did to play for United.
"When you're a kid it's great to say 'I'm a United player' but, as you get older, all you want to do is play regularly in the first team," he said. "Once you've had a taste of the senior set-up being restricted to the reserves gets to you. We were playing at Bury or Altrincham, different worlds to Old Trafford.
"I needed to kick-start it all. I asked Sir Alex Ferguson if it was possible to get away and he did all he could to help me. I'm grateful for that. The thing he drilled into me was that it doesn't matter if you're not playing well, but the result is the be-all and end-all. That's definitely the case here at West Ham. This division is a battle. Teams see us as a big club and they're up for a scrap."