Craig Bellamy - GoodFella (16 page)

Kieron said he didn’t want to. He knew he was at his best in the middle and he had seen me protest successfully about being played out of position at Rangers and thought he was entitled to do the same.

Things got out of hand this time, though. Sir Bobby refused to budge and dropped Kieron to the bench. Jenas and Butt started and Milner played on the right. I scored early on and Kieron came on for Milner 20 minutes from the end but Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink grabbed a last-minute equaliser for Middlesbrough that robbed us of the win we needed.

The issue with Kieron wouldn’t go away. Sir Bobby tried to cover for him but the news leaked out that Kieron had refused to play on the right and when he played for England in a match against Ukraine at St James’ Park the following Wednesday, he was booed every time he touched the ball. A couple of days later he apologised publicly to Sir Bobby.

It wasn’t a happy episode but the idea that Kieron was somehow to blame for Sir Bobby’s departure was totally false. And the notion that took hold that Kieron was the ringleader of a group who mocked Sir Bobby could not have been further from the truth, either. Kieron idolised him. If anything, as I’ve said, they were too close. They felt they could be totally honest with each other and when that honesty was expressed in public, others misinterpreted it.

Sir Bobby had a real soft spot for Kieron. Maybe it began as a shared history with Ipswich but they got on great. If Alan wasn’t playing or if he was substituted, Sir Bobby would always give the captain’s armband to Kieron. So, again, this idea that Sir Bobby had lost the dressing room and there was some kind of players’ rebellion led by Kieron was just a joke.

I know Kieron felt guilty about what happened but he wasn’t the reason Sir Bobby got sacked. Some people may have used what happened around the Middlesbrough game as a stick to beat Sir Bobby with but there were far deeper reasons behind his exit than that. Everyone was fighting for power. The club was a huge institution in the region and there were people there who wanted praise for the club and where it was. They wanted to pat themselves on the back and they didn’t like seeing the manager get all the plaudits.

The weekend after the draw with Middlesbrough, we lost 1-0 at home to Spurs. Then we drew 2-2 at home with Norwich. I scored again in that game against my old team but that was three games without a win and we could all feel the pressure mounting on the manager. The next game was Aston Villa away.

Sir Bobby left Alan on the bench and started with Kluivert alongside me instead. That was a brave move because Alan was like a god on Tyneside. Sir Bobby had accepted a bid from Liverpool for him once but Shepherd had put the block on it. Shearer knew about it but he told us Robson didn’t know he knew. Alan wasn’t working against him or anything like that but it never felt comfortable between them. They were both idols to the north-east public and the unspoken rivalry between them always seemed to be there.

We played well at Villa and goals from Kluivert and Andy O’Brien put us 2-1 up at half-time. A couple of wins were all we would have needed to take the pressure off. We had been slow starters under Robson before and we would have turned it round again. But Villa fought back and overwhelmed us with a rush of goals from Carlton Cole, Gareth Barry and Juan Pablo Angel. We lost 4-2. We had two points from our opening four games. The knives were out.

I knew things were going to get rough in Newcastle. Sir Bobby had been getting a lot of stick from the fans. People conveniently forget about that now but he was booed and jeered towards the end. The fans wanted him out, too. A lot of them will deny that now but it’s the truth. The place went into lockdown. The Sky cameras were outside St James’ Park, interviewing people about their club being in crisis. It was only going one way.

The announcement came on the Monday morning after the defeat to Villa. I had driven down to Cardiff for a Wales game and I was upstairs at my mum and dad’s house when my dad shouted that the television was reporting that Sir Bobby had been sacked. The club had released a statement.

“The directors wish to thank Sir Bobby for the way in which he has worked tirelessly over the past five years to try to bring success to the club,” the club statement said. “The club agreed early in 2003 to extend Sir Bobby’s contract by one further season. However after careful consideration the club decided it was in the best interest of all concerned to revisit that decision. The club will no doubt continue to benefit from the knowledge and experience he has given during his time here.”

I knew it had been coming but I was still distraught. He was such a clever man. The best for man-management I ever came across. His whole aim was to get you playing well on a Saturday and he would do whatever it took to achieve that. All the bother I had at Newcastle, I never once felt I was the one to blame. He made me feel like it was everyone else. And that made me want to do well for him even more than I had before. I felt the same warmth towards him I would feel towards a grandfather.

I still felt I had let him down, though, whatever he might have said to me. I knew some of the things I’d done. Even that season, I looked at myself and thought ‘could I have done anything different?’ We were 2-0 up against Norwich and I hit the bar. If I’d scored then, we would have won that game instead of sliding to a 2-2 draw. But I think by then, the decision to get rid of him had effectively been made.

After the Wales game, I went back up to Newcastle. John Carver was going to be in charge of the home game against Blackburn that weekend but by then, we all knew that Graeme Souness was going to replace Sir Bobby. Souness had quit as Blackburn manager and it had been agreed he would take over after his old side played his new one.

I was at the training ground on Thursday when I saw Sir Bobby leaving. I found it uncomfortable going to speak to him but I knew I had to. I didn’t feel I had let him down behaviourally but I did know that I owed him a great debt of gratitude. The guy signed me and he created the conditions for me to play some of the best football of my career. I loved playing for him and the older I get, the more I realise just what a clever individual he was.

When I was saying goodbye to him, it hit me I was never going to get the chance to play for him again and I felt sad for that because I had enjoyed it immensely. I thanked him for bringing me to the club and for making me the player I was. I told him he was the man most responsible for turning me into that player.

“They think the world of you here, son,” he said. “You’re a cracking player. Go and have a good career.”

Part of me wanted to hug him but I just shook his hand. I began to feel bitter about what had happened to him. He was 71 years old. He was one of the greatest football managers this country had ever produced.

He had been in charge at Newcastle for five years. And yet now, even as he was leaving, there was already another guy waiting to walk into the building.

16

Man In The Mask

G
raeme Souness was the new boss. He was like this iron fist. Bang. Straight down. Everybody said he’d been brought in to deal with the trouble-makers and sort out the lack of discipline at the club. He was the hard man who was coming in to sort out the spoilt little rich kids. That’s what they said. He was a good manager but it felt like he came in to Newcastle with the wrong mindset. He came in wanting a fight. He wanted to make an example of somebody. I was bitter about what happened to Sir Bobby and I appreciate now that my feelings affected the way I treated the new boss. That was a bit unfair on Souness. It wasn’t his fault.

Souness had been offered a great opportunity to manage a big club. He had done well at Blackburn. He was one of the most immense players there has ever been. He deserved his shot at Newcastle, but that didn’t alter the fact that I struggled to deal with the change.

Training was different. We had a great sports scientist and he was sidelined. Souness didn’t use him. John Carver was sent straight back to the Academy, too. I felt those guys deserved better. But I suppose that was none of my business. I wasn’t the boss. It wasn’t my decision. As a player, you have to adapt to a new manager because if you don’t, you’re gone. And I didn’t adapt.

I wouldn’t say I was actively resentful towards Souness. But I wasn’t engaged. I wasn’t very approachable when he was around. We would snap at each other at times over the silliest things. Like a decision in training, a foul he might give against me in a five-a-side, something innocuous like that. He tried to wind me up, messing about like it was fun. But I wasn’t getting involved in any of his attempts at jollity and he could sense it.

I felt my time at the club was over. I felt I needed to improve as a player and I didn’t think Newcastle offered me that any more. My restlessness was kicking in. It wasn’t just losing Robson, I had lost Speedo as well and I still felt a bit bitter about that. Speedo was like a yardstick for me. He was an authority figure who gave me unstinting support. It was different without him and not in a good way.

I needed to do something different. I started to feel disgusted with myself. I didn’t like how my life had become at Newcastle. I didn’t like the person I had become. When you play well for Newcastle, it is an incredible city and it offers you incredible opportunities. Off the pitch opportunities, I mean.

Imagine being a young kid doing really well, playing at the top of your game in a city that worships its football team. I was going out once or twice a week and you can’t do that if you want to keep playing at the top level. My body started toremind me of that. I began picking up more and more niggling injuries.

But I had also started to believe a bit of the hype that now surrounded me. People kept coming up to me and telling me how great I was and I had begun to believe it. All my old self-doubt, all the worries about my deficiencies that used to torture me, floated away on a tide of flattery. I allowed myself to start thinking I was an incredible player.

I didn’t like the individual I became then. I became arrogant. I hated the way I was behaving off the pitch. All the temptations that were thrown at me, I didn’t turn my back on them. I began to hate myself and I began to push the people close to me even further away.

I have always been a little bit of a hermit. I have always kept myself at arm’s length from everyone. It’s nothing personal. It’s just how I deal with situations. If I’ve got a problem, I won’t come and talk to you about it. I keep a lot of things to myself. Because I was full of self-loathing, that got worse.

If I did have a problem with my knee, it would send me into a spiral of depression. There would be weeks, sometimes months, when I couldn’t get myself out of it. I didn’t want to speak to anyone. I didn’t want to socialise. Claire often couldn’t get two words out of me. I feel for the kids because I should have been more approachable but I didn’t know any other way to deal with it.

I suppose that was one of the indicators of my self-loathing. There were others. There were no pictures of me in the house where we lived in Newcastle. I couldn’t walk along a corridor and see myself in a picture. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. I didn’t like what I saw. I looked into that face and saw a man I really didn’t like.

I knew my life needed to change. I knew I needed a different avenue. I didn’t like some of the things I did off the pitch. I didn’t like some of the decisions I made. I have never touched drugs since my boy was born, I am not a gambler, booze can come or go. I can go months without it. But I like other things as well. There have always been women and I didn’t like that. I hated that weakness in myself.

I felt I was not being honest, not just with the people closest to me but with myself too. The realisation of that was difficult for me to grasp. I was cutting corners and I hate cutting corners and it was leading into my personal life and eating into me.

The adulation of the fans seeped into every part of me. My wife was ready to leave me. She was aware of what was going on. This wasn’t the father I wanted to be. It wasn’t the individual I wanted to be. I wanted a future with my children. I wanted my children in my life constantly but I was behaving in a way that was jeopardising that.

I wanted to leave. It wasn’t to do with Souness or the club. I just didn’t like who I had become and the strain it put on my partner and my children. I needed to get out of Newcastle. I could feel myself losing my own discipline. If I wanted to be the best I could be, I knew I had to take another step. I knew the nights out and the womanising had to stop and I had to take a proper look at myself. It wasn’t the path I wanted to go down.

I hate it when I look back on it because it seems boastful and boorish but you want to know how it could sometimes feel living the life of a footballer at that time? It felt like this. It felt like the scene in GoodFellas where Henry Hill takes his new girlfriend into the Copacabana Club. The soundtrack has The Crystals singing ‘And Then He Kissed Me’. Henry Hill leaves his car with a valet. Then he walks across the road, skirts a long queue of people waiting to get into the club and walks in through a side door.

“I like going in this way,” he says to his girlfriend, “it’s better than waiting in line.”

Then they go down a flight of stairs and doors swing open as if by magic. And he presses some money into a guy’s hand and walks through some more doors and everybody’s smiling at him and joking with him and they walk through the kitchens and out into the club. The maître d’ stops talking to the guests he’s with and comes straight over. A waiter appears carrying a table with a clean white tablecloth already laid out on it. And the table is carried to the front of the stage.

Henry Hill and his girlfriend sit down. Everybody’s still smil- ing at him. Guests at other tables get up to greet him. Then somebody sends over a bottle of champagne. His girlfriend smiles this kind of smile of wonder. She can’t help but be impressed. It feels like he’s some sort of royalty in here. And then a comedian called the King of the One Liners comes on.

And that was what it could be like for me in Newcastle when I got carried away with it. An anglicised version of the Copacabana Club. I knew it was wrong and I’m not saying I behaved like that all the time. But it was easy to get caught up in it.

English football was still in the midst of its post-Taylor Report explosion. Football was king. It felt like we could do what we liked, go where we liked. Not queue for anything, ever. Not play by the rules normal people played by. It was intoxicating. But it was also corrosive.

Reality has to check in at one time or another, though, and then you’re probably going to be in trouble. I’d got the balance of my life totally wrong. I didn’t trust anyone. I had good friends but I hadn’t seen them for ages. I have always dealt with my issues on my own, probably because I moved away from home at such a young age. I had no one else around me. I didn’t address any of the issues that were eating me up behind all the false smiles and the laughter.

I should have spoken to someone. My partner, perhaps. Or rung my parents up. I didn’t do any of that. Psychologists would say I internalised everything. I didn’t share anything. Ever. I was thinking ‘because I am not bringing football home with me, I am a good man’. But I did nothing but bring it home. I might not have talked about it but it was eating me up.

If something had happened in training that I thought should not have happened, I wouldn’t sleep. I thought that was what gave me the edge or made me a better player because I had that self-criticism. I was trying to suppress the fear that one day, someone was going to find me out. They’re going to point and say ‘actually, he’s not very good’.

In Newcastle, for the first time, I felt I had been found out. I had been found out as an individual and as a player. I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was and I wasn’t the man I thought I was. Nowhere near. I didn’t have Robson to give me the confidence any more, I didn’t have Speedo who could check me in discipline-wise. I thought ‘shit, I’m done’.

I thought I was being transported back to the player I was in my year at Coventry. I began to think that was the real me, the real player. I worked hard there but I didn’t make much of an impact. So maybe the last couple of years at Newcastle, the good years, were just a fluke. I thought my mask had slipped and that people would start to see that my excellence was just an illusion.

My love for Newcastle ebbed away. I didn’t like the chairman. I had lost Robson, who I thought was the best manager in the world. I had lost Speedo. My professionalism had come from him. I had watched him, trained with him, enjoyed trying to copy him. I just stopped enjoying it. I felt I was adrift.

Souness did things differently to Robson. Of course he did. Again, that wasn’t his fault. But it added to my sense of dislocation. He was actually a lot less strict than Robson had been in many ways. He was relaxed about a lot of things off the pitch. He had a great aura about him, too. Sometimes he could be a little bit too derogatory about the opposition and to you as well. He could put you down and question you as an individual.

It must have been difficult for someone like him to coach players like me because he was such a good footballer himself. He didn’t join in training with us, which was probably a good thing as far as my physical safety was concerned. I think he stopped that after he had a disagreement with Dwight Yorke during a five-a-side at Blackburn and left him with a badly gashed shin.

He was accused of threatening to break Yorke’s leg. I can believe that. If he’d still been playing, I think I would have got the full treatment in training. He would have had a lot of fun with me. If he could have caught me. Generally, we were at loggerheads but I played my part in us not getting on. And if I met him now, I’d shake his hand.

He played me on the wing at Newcastle. He made it clear to me he didn’t see me as a striker. He called me in and said his idea of a striker was Didier Drogba, big and strong. He wanted Kluivert and Shearer as his two forwards. He asked me to play wide. He was trying to fit me in until an opportunity came for me to try and take it.

In the middle of October, we played Charlton at The Valley in a live Sky Sunday game and he gave me a chance to play up front with Alan because Kluivert had got injured. Charlton has always been a good ground for me and I scored six minutes before half-time to put us ahead. Then, midway through the second half, Souness made a substitution and I saw my number come up.

I was furious. I just didn’t expect to be coming off. They had equalised by then but the game was open and I thought we could win it. The Newcastle fans weren’t happy when they saw I was being taken off. Shola Ameobi came on for me and when I got to the touchline, Souness was staring out at the pitch. I looked over at him and muttered ‘fucking prick’ in his direction. I didn’t exactly say it to him. Not really loud enough for him to hear anyway. But the cameras caught me doing it. I had no right to say it. It was stupid.

Souness didn’t see it or hear it but when he spoke to the journalists from the daily papers after the game, they told him about it. He looked surprised at first, apparently, and then he began to look angry. I don’t blame him, really. I would have been angry, too.

Nothing was said on the journey back to Newcastle but when we went back into training on Tuesday, there was a team meeting. Dean Saunders, who was one of Souness’s backroom staff, told me that if Souness had a go at me in the meeting, I should take it on the chin. I didn’t like Saunders but it was probably good advice. I didn’t take it.

Sure enough, at the meeting Souness started yelling at me. He mentioned a few of the trophies he had won, for a start. And he listed a few of the clubs he had played for.

“And then someone like you calls me ‘a fucking prick’,” he said. “I’ll fucking knock you out.”

He was absolutely raging. He came over to where I was sitting and tried to grab me. I pushed his hand away and he lost his balance slightly and stumbled. That made a couple of the other boys laugh which made Souness even more furious than he was anyway.

“In the gym now,” he said. “Me and you.”

I couldn’t believe what was happening. He was going nuts.

“What are you on about?” I said. “I’m not going to go in the gym to fight you.”

He didn’t say anything else. He just stormed out.

I apologised later for what I’d said to him at Charlton. I meant it, too. I was out of order. He told the press he had taken me off because I had played two games for Wales the previous week and he wanted to save my legs. He said he wanted to persevere with me. He said I was ‘a cracking little player’. It was good to hear but we flew to Greece the afternoon after our row in the team meeting for a Uefa Cup match against Panionios and we never really spoke properly again.

I just wanted to get to January so that I could move away and begin my career afresh somewhere else. I knew Souness wanted me out and I wanted to go. It was a shame. I do have a lot of respect for him as a manager. He has given a lot to the game and I still think he has a lot to give even now.