Craig Bellamy - GoodFella (26 page)

Garry Cook rang and said he was unhappy about the situation. He said the way things were was no good to anyone. But he made it clear that Roberto ran the show in terms of making the decisions about who came in and who went out. Garry asked me what I wanted to do and I said I just wanted to play at a good level somewhere. He said I would have to give up on the idea of going to Spurs because they were trying to get me on the cheap. He said Celtic had been on, too. I didn’t want to go back up there. It was too far from my family.

“What about Cardiff?” he said.

26

Home And Away

W
hat about Cardiff? The team my dad supported, the scarf my father wore, all that sort of stuff. There was an emotional pull to the idea, of course. I was a Liverpool fan but Cardiff is where I’m from and Cardiff will always be my home. I had always been determined that I would play for them at some point in my career. It was just that I had never been sure when.

When Garry Cook mentioned it, I was sitting in my house on the outskirts of the city. It was a nice, hot day. My garden looked lovely. The kids were playing outside on the lawn. It started to seem like a brilliant idea. I knew I had to get out of City. I thought ‘why not?’

Things moved fast. City put the idea to Cardiff, who took it to Dave Jones, who was the manager at the time. City offered to pay a big percentage of my wages and the idea was that I would go on loan for a year. It suited City, too. It got me out of Mancini’s hair and ensured that I couldn’t come back to Eastlands with one of their rivals and embarrass them.

Soon, the news of the proposed move leaked out. The city went nuts about it. Before I’d even signed, everyone was saying Cardiff were bound to get promoted now. They were rejoicing about the idea that there was going to be a Welsh club in the Premier League for the first time. Everybody began to get a little bit ahead of themselves.

But the deal gained a momentum all of its own and the next thing you know, I’d signed. I was in a bit of a state of shock. I hadn’t really intended to be playing in the Championship just yet. I’d just been at one of the richest clubs in the world and now I was playing in the second tier. I had always wanted to play for Cardiff. I just wasn’t sure whether now was the right time. Still, I knew I had to get out of City. I knew it would drive me mad playing in the reserves and I knew it was bound to lead to conflicts of one type or another. I kidded myself that I was doing it so I could be closer to my family. The truth was I didn’t really have much choice.

I wasn’t in a great state physically. I had been trying so hard to prove a point to City in pre-season that I had taken part in every training session and every double training session. I knew it was dangerous for me to do that after all my knee operations and sure enough, it came back to haunt me. I played in a friendly for Wales against Luxembourg at the beginning of August and my knee swelled up after the game. But I knew how much was expected of me. I knew that now was not the time to be trying to rest and recuperate.

Cardiff had finished fourth in the Championship the season before but had missed out on promotion when they lost to Blackpool in the play-off final. There were some concerns that it would be hard to bounce back from that and that it would infect the new season but before I signed we started the 2010-11 campaign with a draw at home to Sheffield United and a win at Derby County.

I felt the pressure as soon as my signing became official the week after the Luxembourg match. There was a huge banner advertisement with my face on it hanging from the ramparts of Cardiff Castle as soon as the news was officially announced. The town was abuzz with it. My debut at the Cardiff City Stadium against Doncaster Rovers on August 21 was sold out.

And that debut was like a dream. My old man had travelled everywhere to watch me play during my career but I knew it would mean something extra special to him to see me running out for the team he had always supported. And it meant something special to me, too. Dave Jones made me captain and so I ran out at the head of my home-town team.

I didn’t feel I played particularly well but I helped set up the first goal for Jay Bothroyd. I hit a great pass to free Chris Burke to put us 3-0 up and then I scored a decent goal to round off a 4-0 win. Scoring in front of the Cardiff fans felt immense. The write-ups in the papers the next day called it ‘the perfect debut’ and, for what it was worth, it left us second in the table.

After the game, though, my knee swelled up again. I had to have it drained of fluid during the week and I needed a pain-killing injection in order to be able to play against Portsmouth at Fratton Park the following Saturday. I was eager to help Wales get off to a good start in our Euro 2012 qualifying campaign and I played the full 90 minutes against Montenegro the next weekend. We lost 1-0. My knee ballooned again.

I knew there was something wrong but I was desperate not to be injured. No one knew what percentage of my wages Cardiff were paying but there was a lot of speculation about it. I knew people would be saying I was taking it easy, that I didn’t care and that I was a waste of money. I felt the pressure even more. I had to play and get the team up to the Premier League or I would be a failure.

I knew the recent history of the club. I knew how the supporters had been let down before by big-name signings who never quite reproduced the form of the days that had made them famous. Players like Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Robbie Fowler had come to Cardiff late in their careers and been disappointments. It wasn’t their fault but that was Cardiff’s curse. They wanted to attract big-name players but the only ones that ever arrived were past their prime.

My knee wasn’t getting any better. I saw a surgeon and he said it would get better with rest and that I didn’t need another operation. I was out for about five weeks. I came back against Barnsley at Oakwell at the beginning of October and scored in a 2-1 win that kept us second in the table behind the runaway leaders, QPR. My knee swelled up again.

I tried everything. I hired Raymond Verheijen to come and work with me and paid his salary out of my own pocket. But it was a constant struggle to stay fit enough to play. I couldn’t train from match to match and I felt like a shadow of the player I had been the season before. Jones substituted me in most matches. I was being nursed along.

My knee felt unstable and I started to spiral into depression. I didn’t leave my house except to go to training. I wouldn’t take my kids to school because I didn’t want to be in the car too long in case my knee stiffened up. I wouldn’t go out with the kids because I didn’t want to walk around in case my knee reacted. I went out for an easy jog once and it swelled up even after that.

I really feared for my career. I thought ‘this is how it is going to end’. I just couldn’t get the swelling down no matter what I did. It left me miserable. I felt like I was letting everyone down. I wasn’t nice to be around. I didn’t speak to anyone. My wife bore the brunt as usual. I never took her anywhere. I locked myself in my own world.

What an irony that was. I was playing for my home-town club so I could spend time with my family and yet I couldn’t have been further away. I wasn’t there. I was in the house every day but I slept in a different bed to my wife. I even had an altitude chamber built specially for my bed, so I ended up camped out in that a lot because I thought that would help my knee. I was a poor husband and I was a poor father at that time. I thought this was the end of my career and I started trying to prepare myself for that.

I was worried about the reaction in Cardiff. More than anywhere else, I didn’t want to let people down in my home town. It was the one place I wanted to be remembered. I didn’t want to be a failure here. I always wanted to be a hero here more than anywhere else. It is where I am from. It is where I grew up. It is where so many of my friends are, where my family is, where my kids are.

I wanted to be able to achieve something with the club that no one else had been able to achieve and to be remembered for that. I am not saying I wanted a statue but I wanted the affection that would come with having been able to do something for my own people.

And the crushing, awful thing was that I just wasn’t able to do that. It pushed me into the destructive cycle of isolating myself from everyone. I hardly spoke to the other players. My friends had seen more of me when I lived away. I had enjoyed better quality time with my wife and kids when I was away. I tortured myself and I tortured the people who love me most by being so distant.

Eventually, around Christmas, the misery started to lift a little bit. The work I had been doing on my knee, the rest it had been getting between matches, finally began to pay dividends. It took me a while to get my sharpness back. I still had to get up to speed, but I started to feel better. My confidence returned. I started to play to my potential.

By the beginning of February, I felt sharp again. We played Swansea at the Liberty Stadium, both of us near the top of the table, both of us vying to be the first Welsh club to make it in to the Premier League, both of us desperate not to be beaten to the honour by our most bitter rival. It wasn’t a great game but with five minutes left, Aaron Ramsey, who was on loan to us from Arsenal, passed me the ball 20 yards out and I curled it round the Swansea keeper, Dorus de Vries, for the winner. It was the first time Cardiff had beaten Swansea on their own patch since 1997 and I knew how much it meant to the fans. Like I said, I was one of them. That goal, that win, brought me a lot of happiness.

It also took us above Swansea and into third place in the table, behind QPR and Nottingham Forest. I felt we had a good chance of automatic promotion. QPR were away and gone but I felt it would be between us, Swansea and Norwich for second place. I did realise quite quickly, though, that it was a hell of a difficult division to get out of.

The quality of football is not the same as the Premier League and there are a lot of managers with the same philosophy which basically revolves around playing safe, percentage football. A couple of clubs played differently, like Norwich and Swansea. They played a diamond formation and tried to pass the ball and by and large, they were rewarded for it.

Some managers got success from being brave and some didn’t. The ones who didn’t were gone pretty quickly and replaced by managers who are more ‘Championship’. By that, I mean a switch in play is fairly rare, patience on the ball is rare, keeping hold of possession for more than a couple of passes is rare. Decision making on the ball is not at the same level. That’s why we were playing in the Championship.

It wasn’t a great dressing room at Cardiff that season. Dave Jones had been at the club since 2005. He had got the club to the play-offs and to the FA Cup final. He had done a great job for Cardiff and that should always be remembered. But by the time I joined the club, training was easy going. It wasn’t intense. A couple of times, a player just didn’t bother turning up for training and it seemed to go almost unnoticed.

Michael Chopra’s problems with gambling are well known now but he was so caught up in his betting that he would be pawing over his phone at half-time in matches to check how his wagers had fared. Once, during the match against Bristol City at Ashton Gate on New Year’s Day, one of the coaches hid his phone because they wanted him to concentrate on the half-time team talk. When he came in at the interval and couldn’t find it, he went mad. He said he wasn’t going out for the second half until he found it. And he meant it. I was looking at this scene unfolding and thinking ‘what the fuck is going on here?’

We would be travelling to a game on a Friday and the horse racing would be on the television. Fucking hell. I had to bite my lip a lot. Sometimes it was unbearable but I didn’t go crazy about it at first because I was caught up in my own self-pity about my knee. My own insecurities and self-doubt came to the fore more than they ever had.

But as the season approached its climax, the fitter and sharper I got and the more able I felt to start saying what I felt. There had been no point me digging anybody out before that. How could I when I wasn’t playing up to the standards I set myself either? But I got to a point in the season when I couldn’t accept what I was seeing from some of my teammates.

We played Barnsley at the Cardiff City Stadium in the middle of March and allowed them to come from behind twice. The second time they equalised, in the last minute, was a particularly sloppy goal to concede. The game finished 2-2 and we dropped to fourth in the table. That was it for me then. I went back into the dressing room after the game and let it all go.

“This is bullshit,” I started yelling. “We are not training at anywhere near the intensity we need. If someone doesn’t track a runner in training, how do we expect them to track a runner in a game? That’s what just happened now. That’s why we conceded that goal. But it’s fine. No one says anything.”

I didn’t have a direct go at Dave Jones but I had a go at his fitness people, his coaches and one or two players as well. And I felt better.

“We’ve got nine games left,” I told them. “We win all nine and we are promoted. We win eight and we are promoted. Let’s fucking get this together now and save what we have got otherwise we won’t even make the play-offs.”

I felt fresh by then. I felt fit and I felt ready. I was ready to make an impact and I wanted the rest of them to get on board. I thought we could do it. No one could catch QPR, although there was a suggestion towards the end of the season that they might be docked points for some player irregularities. I’m glad that didn’t happen. They deserved to go up.

But we had a chance of second. It was between us and Norwich. With three games left, we beat Preston at Deepdale to send them down. Norwich were playing Derby at Carrow Road and if they got anything other than a win, we would move ahead of them into second place.

Robbie Savage was playing for Derby at the time and I spoke to him the day before their game with Norwich. I told him that if they won, I would give them £30,000 to share between them all. Pay for a night out, have a meal, do whatever you want. I told Sav I’d even give them the money if they got a draw. That’s how desperate I was.

And you know what happened? They were drawing 2-2 and we were back in the dressing room at Deepdale after beating Preston. We thought Norwich had blown it and then they fucking won it in the fifth minute of injury time. I looked at our players when that result came in and they were on the floor.

I tried to rally them.

“Good luck to Norwich for doing that,” I said, “but fuck it, we’ll go and win the next game. There’s still everything to play for.”