Craig Bellamy - GoodFella (24 page)

Ten days later, they appointed Gianfranco Zola as Curbishley’s successor. I liked him straight away. He was brilliant. He had a clear vision on how he wanted to play and it very much revolved around keeping the ball on the deck. Almost immediately, we started playing really well under his management but despite our performances, we just couldn’t get the results.

Gianfranco just told us to keep playing as we were and that the results would come. That’s difficult sometimes when you are losing because confidence can seep away. But his training was first class. He brought in Steve Clarke, who was a top coach and Kevin Keen, who was innovative and clever.

There was one problem player he had to deal with fairly soon: himself. He still trained with us and the problem, basically, was that he was too good. It is difficult to be the manager while you’re lobbing your goalkeeper from 30 yards one minute and trying to tell him he’s the best in the Premier League the next. He could still have played for us and made a big difference. No question. He was embarrassing some of the players in training, he was that good.

In the end, he made the decision to watch from the sidelines instead. He was a great guy and an outstanding coach. It was no surprise to me when he took over at Watford and did so well. He is a terrific man-manager as well as a clever tactician.

Not long before Curbishley resigned, the agent, Kia Joorabchian, phoned me. He was working closely with Manchester City at that time when Thaksin Shinawatra was the owner. He said that City, who were managed by Mark Hughes, wanted to sign me. I didn’t speak to Sparky but City stepped up their interest. They approached West Ham and I was pulled aside at the training ground to talk about it.

The club said they didn’t want me to leave. They said they had been waiting for me to get fit and now they were looking forward to seeing me start to flourish in a West Ham shirt. I told them the last thing I was going to do was ask to leave after being out for a year. I wasn’t like that. I wanted to get on with playing for West Ham. I wanted to prove myself at West Ham. I had it in my mind to stay there for a long time.

From the beginning of October until Christmas, we only won once in 12 matches. It was a terrible run but after Christmas, things really picked up and we began to get the results our standard of play deserved. I scored two goals in an emphatic victory over Portsmouth at Fratton Park on Boxing Day, then we beat Stoke, Fulham and Hull at Upton Park, squeezing in a draw at Newcastle in between. Those results were a fairer reflection of our ability.

But as January wore on, I became more and more aware that negotiations were going on about my future. My adviser had rung on Christmas Eve to say that Spurs had offered West Ham £6m for me and that West Ham had turned it down flat. That was fine by me. In fact, I was pleased that West Ham still held me in that much esteem after my injury problems.

Then things began to get complicated. Manchester City rang me. They said they had an agreement with Tottenham that Tottenham couldn’t sign me. They told me they had had an agreement with Spurs that they would not bid for Jermain Defoe if Spurs would not bid for me. They had kept to their side of the bargain and stayed out of the race for Defoe and now they felt Spurs were reneging on the deal.

Spurs and City started firing in bids to West Ham and arguing with each other. I was called in by the club before the FA Cup third round tie against Barnsley at Upton Park on January 3. “You must be aware of some of what is going on behind the scenes,” I was told. “Do you want to play?”

I said of course I did. The point was made to me that I’d be cup-tied. I said I was a West Ham player and I wasn’t bothered about being cup-tied. I said I wanted to play. I found it strange that I was even asked about it. I wondered if the club was thinking about whether the fee they might attract for me would be adversely affected if I was cup-tied.

Soon after that, it became clear to me that the club was now encouraging bids from Spurs and City. I asked them what fee they were looking for. I understood that, particularly given the club’s financial problems, they needed to get as much as they possibly could for me, but the situation was starting to unsettle me.

West Ham said they didn’t want me to go to Tottenham. They said they would like me to sign a new contract with them, which I was open to. I told them that they needed to speak to my adviser about it. Then they asked me who I wanted to join. It was getting bizarre. I said I loved living in London and I would prefer it if they would stop encouraging Man City.

As I was about to leave the office, there was a call from Spurs. I could hear someone from the club on the phone. He said Man City had ‘gone to 10’. Then he phoned Man City and said ‘Spurs have gone to 10, what are you offering?’ I felt exasperated by it. It was draining me. Gianfranco didn’t know what was happening either. It was a mess.

I played and scored at Newcastle on January 10 and came off eight minutes from the end. A few minutes after the final whistle, I had a phone call from Man City. “We heard you pulled your hamstring,” they said. It was bizarre. I told them I hadn’t pulled my hamstring. I had just come off as a precaution because my hamstring felt tight. They sounded reassured.

I went in to training the following Monday to be told that the Tottenham deal was done. They said they had agreed a fee with Spurs but that I had to put in a transfer request. I said I wouldn’t do that. I knew they were trying to make it look as though I had been pushing for a move when, all along, I had watched them conducting an auction for me.

I said if they wanted to sell me, they had to tell the fans they wanted to sell me. Otherwise I’d stay. I was happy there. It was obvious they needed the money but they needed the highest fee. I understood that and I didn’t resent them for it but they needed to be straight about it. They said again that the deal was done so I went in to the training ground to say goodbye to everyone and went back to my flat in Canary Wharf.

I was sitting in my apartment watching Sky Sports. They started reporting that I had walked out of training. I didn’t know what to do. We were at home to Fulham on Sunday but the way West Ham had been talking, I would be sold before that happened. I had City on the phone, too, angry because word had reached them that the deal with Spurs was done.

I decided to go back to Cardiff. If I had to come back on Saturday to be involved in the build-up to the game, that was fine. But West Ham had told me I was going to be a Spurs player. I presumed I wasn’t going to be involved in the Fulham match and I was loathe to sit around in an empty flat on my own, fretting about what was going on.

I woke up in Cardiff on Saturday morning. I got a phone call to say that the back page headline on the Daily Mail was ‘Bellamy on Strike’. You couldn’t get further from the truth if you tried. It got people angry, understandably. A lot of West Ham fans were disgusted with the idea that I’d go on strike after the club had been so patient with me. I didn’t blame them.

Again, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just ring up a journalist and say it wasn’t true. I tried not to get involved in that sort of stuff. But I was really angry about it. I knew the newspapers must have been fed the line about me going on strike from someone at West Ham. They were trying to turn me into the bad guy, which, given my history, wasn’t the most difficult thing to do.

Gianfranco rang. He said I wasn’t right to play. He said West Ham wanted him to put me in the squad but that he had refused. I suppose they wanted to strengthen the picture of me as some sort of contract rebel, a greedy player demanding even more money from a club that had behaved well towards him.

It reflected well on Gianfranco that he wasn’t willing to play that game. I imagine they had put him under a fair amount of pressure to play along. I just told Gianfranco I wanted it sorted out. I didn’t want to miss any games. I wanted to play. He said he was still hoping they would get me back.

The situation got even more complicated. The Spurs boss, Harry Redknapp, rang and said that they had just made an approach to sign Wilson Palacios from Wigan Athletic and that City were threatening to scupper the deal in revenge for Spurs signing me. City didn’t want Palacios, Harry said, but they were saying that they would try to sign every player Spurs targeted over the next two transfer windows if they persisted with their attempts to sign me.

I got a message from him later that day. “Fuck Man City,” it said. “We’re going to try to sign you anyway.”

It got very ugly. It began to appear that West Ham wanted to sell me to Man City because Man City would offer more money. So on the eve of the game against Fulham, I was told that the fee with Man City had been agreed and I had to go up to Manchester to sign the contract. I was on the M56, heading into the city, when I got a phone call saying the deal wasn’t done after all.

City had offered £12m but there was an argument about an extra £2m. City said they’d pay it if City won the league but West Ham wanted it if City qualified for the Champions League. City wanted me to stay up in Manchester until it was cleared up but I didn’t want to get caught up there if the deal hadn’t been done. That would have made me look really clever. I could have been the first Peter Odemwingie, knocking on the gates at Eastlands and being told to go away. So I turned around and drove back down to Cardiff.

It seemed West Ham had just been threatening City with the Spurs deal to drive the price up. They were still doing their best to make me look the bad guy, too, and when the game against Fulham kicked off that Sunday lunchtime, I got a thorough slating even though Gianfranco said publicly it was wrong to suggest I had gone on strike.

I was even more fed-up now. I rang one of the people at West Ham at half-time and told him I wasn’t going anywhere. I said I’d sign the new contract he had mentioned to me. I told him to make sure it was on his desk on Monday morning and I’d come in and sign it there and then. I told him I was happy with what I had got at West Ham and that I had never wanted to leave.

He sounded taken aback.

“Leave it with us,” he said.

My head was spinning. I didn’t really want to go to Manchester City. I knew it was an interesting proposition though.

Sheikh Mansour had taken over from Shinawatra the previous summer and their ambitions, not to mention their cash reserves, seemed limitless. But I was happy in London. I had a lot of friends at West Ham and Spurs. I think I would have found the transition to playing at White Hart Lane easy. My kids loved coming to see me in London because it was an exciting place to visit. I didn’t want to move.

I went out for a jog around the lanes near my house for half an hour. When I got back, there was a message on my phone. It was from the club.

“The deal with City is done,” it said. “All the best.”

24

Sparks Fly

I
had made headlines at a lot of the clubs I was at. Sometimes for the right reasons. Often for the wrong ones.

The day I signed for Manchester City, I realised I was playing with the big boys now. But I arrived at the club’s winter training camp in Tenerife to find all hell had broken loose. Robinho had walked out.

In some ways, I wasn’t complaining. City had paid £14m for me and Mark Hughes had fought tooth and nail to sign me, above the objections of some people at the club who weren’t too keen on paying that amount of money for a 29-year-old with a lot of injuries on the clock and a few controversies in his past. If I could settle in quietly while everyone raged about Robinho, that was fine by me.

There wasn’t a lot that was quiet about Manchester City at that time, though. The club was like a great big building site with new skyscrapers appearing every day and work going on around the clock. Sheikh Mansour was an owner in a hurry. Robinho had been signed from Real Madrid on the last day of the previous transfer window for £32m. Nigel de Jong arrived from Hamburg for £16m two days after me. Wayne Bridge had been signed from Chelsea for £10m earlier in January. Shay Given was about to arrive from Newcastle.

Oh, yeah, and they were trying to sign Kaka from AC Milan for £91m. That deal broke down on the day I arrived, too. Garry Cook, City’s chief executive, said famously that Kaka had ‘bottled it’. And Robinho was arrested in connection with an alleged rape. He was soon cleared of any involvement in anything but all this was before I’d even played a game. It was chaos even without any help from me.

I made my City debut against Newcastle – who else – on January 28 and scored the winning goal. The talk was still all about Kaka and Robinho but it was a good way for me to start. The City fans gave me a great reception. They were brilliant with me from the first game to the last. I was delighted to score, not just for them but for Sparky, too. I could see the relief in his face when I scored.

He has believed in me more than any other manager in my career. He has got the best out of me, too. I knew what I could offer him. I felt comfortable with him and with the people around him. I could be honest with him and he could be honest with me. And sometimes, when you are highly rated by someone, that alone can give you the confidence you need to excel.

It made the Man City transition very easy football-wise. But it was difficult finding somewhere to live and it put an extra strain on my family as well because it was further for us to travel to see each other. I have to be honest with myself and say that, when it came to moving from club to club, I never really consulted my family that much. I did what I thought was best for my career and it was my decision.

It was all done for football. My decision was made on the basis of where I could progress the most. I always chased that. If I had to move to another club to get better, then that’s what I would do. Sometimes, I wonder how staying at a club for longer would have affected my career. I’ll never know. There are positives and negatives to moving on as frequently as I have. The way it’s worked out, I have had to try to prove myself all over again every couple of years, which has probably been a good thing.

We had some very good players at City but we were inconsistent. I saw what the problem was straight away. It was Robinho and Elano and a centre-back called Glauber, a centre-back who only played once for City. They had formed a Brazilian clique and as far as I could see, they didn’t give a shit. They didn’t train with any intensity and if you tackled one of them, it was like you had committed a crime.

The three of them were glued together. Elano was the voice. Robinho was the Sheikh’s man. If you had a problem with Robinho, take it up with the Sheikh. Elano would always say that if Robinho wanted something, he got it. That was his boast. If you had words with Elano, he would tell Robinho and then Robinho would tell the Sheikh. That was what Elano said.

Elano didn’t appear to have much interest in pulling his finger out. He wanted an easy life. Training was too intense. When they played for Brazil, though, they were transformed. In mid-February, I watched them play for their national team against Italy at the Emirates and they were both magnificent. I mean, really magnificent.

Elano scored the first goal in a 2-0 win. It was like something out of the 1970 World Cup. He backheeled the ball to Robinho, who slid a pass back to him and he lifted it over Buffon as Buffon rushed out to meet him. And then Robinho got the second goal and that was even better. He stole it off Pirlo, turned Zambrotta inside out about three times and then smashed a left foot shot across Buffon and in off the post. It was breathtaking stuff.

The following weekend, we played Portsmouth at Fratton Park. Portsmouth were without a manager and were fighting relegation. We lost 2-0. Robinho and Elano were a disgrace. It was like they only wanted to pass to each other. We weren’t good enough that we could carry them but when they lost it, they didn’t track back or anything.

We were woeful. I’d only been there a couple of weeks but I’d had enough of them. I came in after the game and I had a real go at both of them. I told Robinho I was his biggest fan and that I thought he was an immense player.

“But do you think how you behaved today was right?” I said.

Robinho pretended he didn’t understand. So Elano started to say something.

“You’re in no position to pipe up,” I said. “You were a fucking disgrace, too. You didn’t track your runners, you did what you wanted on the ball, you wasted possession.”

They seemed to be shocked that someone was having a go at them. They didn’t say anything. So I filled the silence.

“You think we’re all here to do your running for you, do you?” I said. “What, you can lose it but I’ll go and win it back for you so you can lose it again? I know that you’re incredibly talented. There’s no two ways about that. You proved that against Italy. But great players don’t come to Portsmouth and put in a performance like that.”

Sparky had been listening. At that point, he went out and left me to it.

Vincent Kompany backed me up as well. He was an outstanding professional and he had fallen out with the Brazilian clique before I arrived. I had only been there a couple of weeks but I felt so let down and so pissed off about what had happened. I didn’t want to be the one saying it. I would have loved to keep my head down. But I couldn’t help myself.

When I got to training on Monday, Robinho called me over to a corner of the changing rooms. Elano was standing behind him, just like he always did.

“Why you talk?” Robinho said.

“Do you think I’m out of order then, yeah?” I said. “I gather you do.”

He turned to Elano and they exchanged a few words of Portuguese. Elano took over then.

“I play for Brazil,” Elano said. “I play in the first team. I come here to Manchester City and I don’t play all the time. How do you think I feel? It hurts me. I can play for a great national team and not even play here at Man City.

“That’s not my fucking problem,” I said. “You had your chance on Saturday. And look how you played.”

“You never had a bad game?” Elano said.

“It wasn’t that you had a bad game,” I told him. “It was just the lack of effort. You weren’t interested. That hurts more.”

“You always talk,” Robinho said. “It should be the manager who talks, not you.”

“If I’ve got something to say, I’ll fucking say it,” I said. “If you don’t think I’ve put in my shift, then you tell me and I’ll take it on the chin. But you have let everyone down.”

“Okay,” Robinho said, trying to bring the conversation to an end, “don’t you talk to me again.”

“What are you on about?” I said. “You mean talk to you as in talking to you at all or talk to you after the game?”

“No, no, we are finished,” Robinho said.

“Whatever,” I said. “I’ll lose a lot of sleep over that.”

Robinho and Elano walked off. I saw Stephen Ireland sitting nearby. He caught my eye. “Now you see what we’ve had to put up with,” he said.

I scored in the next game against Liverpool at Anfield, although it was put down as an Alvaro Arbeloa own goal, and then it was West Ham at Upton Park. I got hammered by the West Ham fans, which wasn’t a problem. It didn’t change my high opinion of them. It’s their club and they thought I had treated them badly. It wasn’t true but they weren’t to know that. They’re entitled to react how they want.

I played well. I set up a decent chance for Robinho, which he missed. But in the second half, I landed awkwardly and felt the strain on my knee. I had to come off with about 25 minutes to go. The West Ham fans loved that. And I was replaced by Elano.

I made a substitute’s appearance in a victory over Sunderland three weeks later and then played 90 minutes in a defeat at Arsenal at the beginning of April. And then the pain in my knee got too much. I didn’t play again that season. The surgeon told me that if I didn’t rest it, I would need another operation and I didn’t want that.

I was upset about missing more time with injury, particularly because I felt like I was letting Sparky down. He had staked a lot on me and I had made a decent impact when I arrived. But now all the people who had warned him against me and said I would just get injured were being proved right. I was eaten up with guilt about it.

After I’d rested my knee and let it recover, I trained all through the summer again. Just like I had the last summer. My family loved me for that. It was an incredibly selfish way to behave but if you want to have a career as a Premier League footballer, you have to be selfish. If you want the rewards, you have to make sacrifices.

This time, I really didn’t have much choice. I knew City would go on another spending spree in the summer. If I wasn’t raring to go at the start of the season, I’d have no chance of getting in the side. But if I did get in the side, this could be everything I’d ever dreamed of. I could be part of something really big. It could bring me the honours and the medals I had always thought I needed to validate my career. It was my big, big chance.

I knew it was going to be a huge task but that if I succeeded, I was going to have the chance to play with some of the best players in the world. I knew I was good enough. The only problem I was going to have was if I was not fit. If I was in the treatment room, I couldn’t show everyone how good I was.

I went in on the first day of pre-season training and saw the fitness coach and the physios and told them that whatever they told me to do, I would do it. No more railing against what they told me. No more going my own way. No more ignoring their instructions. If they told me I had to miss training or do half a session, I would do it. I promised them.

So all pre-season, I was getting pulled out of sessions. There were days I wanted to train and they wouldn’t let me and I was chomping at the bit.

They brought in a fitness guy called Raymond Verheijen who I hated with a passion because he was one of the ones pulling me out of sessions. He was opinionated and a little arrogant but he had an annoying habit of being right about fitness issues.

Towards the end of pre-season, I began to feel great. The regime I had followed was paying off.

It was just as well. Before the end of August, City had spent more than £100m on new players. Carlos Tevez arrived from Manchester United. Emmanuel Adebayor was signed. So was Gareth Barry. So was Joleon Lescott and Kolo Toure. It was just a quality group of players. I felt like I was in Wonderland.

I didn’t make that much of an impact pre-season but I didn’t care about that. You make an impact when that whistle goes for the first game of the Premier League campaign. I made the starting line-up for the opening game away at Blackburn Rovers. That was my first goal achieved. I started up front with Adebayor because Carlos was not quite fully fit, although he did come on midway through the second half. Robinho was in the side, too, at Ewood Park. He started on the left.

Carlos started the next game, against Wolves at Eastlands, and I was on the bench. Then we played Portsmouth away and I started at left wing. I felt really fit. I felt stronger than I ever had.

We beat Blackburn, we beat Wolves and we beat Portsmouth. Adebayor scored in every game and we were flying. It seemed like the sky was the limit.

Then we played Arsenal at Eastlands. We knew that would be a test of how good we really were. Micah Richards put us ahead but then Robin Van Persie equalised a quarter of an hour into the second half and it was anybody’s game. We were the ones who stepped up. I put us 2-1 up and then Adebayor made it 3-1 with 11 minutes to go.

Adebayor had been taking fearful abuse from the Arsenal supporters throughout the game. He had also been involved in an incident with Van Persie where he had trodden, deliberately or not, on Van Persie’s head, and cut him above the eye. That had just ramped up the hostility towards him even more and made the atmosphere increasingly feverish.

So even though Adebayor scored at the opposite end from the away section, he celebrated by running the entire length of the pitch and throwing himself to the turf in front of them. I’d never seen anything like it. I doubt anybody in the stadium had. I understood why he did it but I also understood there might be consequences. Even I felt a little bit nervous about it and I went over to try to lead him away as a hail of missiles were thrown at him.

That was a crucial moment in our season and in all our careers. We had got off to a great start. We were about to record our fourth straight victory and we were starting to feel invincible. Adebayor was playing brilliantly. He was unstoppable. He was looking like the complete forward that so many had predicted he would become. With him playing like that, and with the strength in depth we had acquired, we would be a danger to anybody.

We beat Arsenal 4-2 in the end but the result was overshadowed by the furore that raged around Adebayor.

I was a bit puzzled by the stamping controversy. I saw Van Persie shake Adebayor’s hand after the game but then a few minutes later he was accusing him of stamping on his head. If you stamped on my head, I ain’t shaking your hand. I certainly ain’t going crying to the press and the authorities after it. If somebody did that to me, I would wait until next time around. I wouldn’t want the boy banned.