Craig Bellamy - GoodFella (3 page)

I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be one of the lads. I was going through puberty, too, of course, and I started to entertain the idea that maybe I would like to do what my mates were doing. There was a freedom about that.

I knew how hard I was going to have to work if I was to become a professional footballer and I didn’t know whether I wanted to work that hard. No one from the area had ever done it. I had no one to look up to. There was no role model for that, no example to follow. I started to think ‘what’s wrong with what my mates do, would it be so bad to stick around in Cardiff and drift along with them?’

I don’t know if I could say there was a low point, a point of maximum danger, a moment where I realised I was risking more than my football career. Perhaps it was the time I rode in a stolen car. I only did it once. I was skiving off school with a mate and a lad pulled up who was known around the area for stealing cars.

Me and my mate jumped in and this lad screamed up the road to my school and roared out on to the playing fields. All the other kids were in the classrooms staring out of the windows at us and this lad pulled a couple of doughnuts on the football pitches and then drove back out on to the streets. When we got a couple of hundred yards away, I asked him to let me out. I was scared stiff. I hated every second of it. I thought then ‘I am never, ever going in a stolen car again’.

That episode still haunts me now. It was one of the stupidest things I have ever done. What if it had crashed? I could have lost everything. The other thing that haunts me is the mate that was with me carried on riding in stolen cars with the lad who was driving. He ended up stealing cars with him. He started taking heroin. He travelled along a different path.

Perhaps most people are like this but when I did the wrong thing, I always had a voice in the back of my head telling me to stop. I always had a limit.

When glue came into my little group of mates for a couple of weeks, I remember putting the bag to my mouth once and wondering what to do. In that split-second, I thought about this young kid who was well-known in our area for being a gluey. I had an image of him in my mind, thin and miserable, with cold sores all around his mouth and his face red and raw. I didn’t want to look like that. I thought ‘no’. I put the bag down and passed it on.

I was always aware of what went on and I knew what older kids were doing because you would see them smoking stuff and it wasn’t just cannabis. I realised quickly that the ones who were doing hard stuff didn’t look great. It was the people who were selling it who were clever. They would be around boys my age with wads of cash, exploiting the image that they were flash and super-successful. A lot of impressionable kids loved that.

You know what I thought? I looked at them and I thought ‘great, but this is bullshit’. I saw the drug dealers hanging around and I saw the local kids heading up to the Trowbridge Inn, the pub that was the focal point of our community.

Some of my mates had to go up there if they wanted to see their fathers because they were in there all the time. They couldn’t wait to grow up so they could go and start drinking in there, too. My dad wasn’t like that but I knew I was close to choosing that way of life. The drink, the glue, the Glade, all of it. I knew that was how life could go for me. I could see how it might work out.

I knew some of the older boys were starting to make appearances in court. I could see the route their lives were taking, where it was leading. All the time, I looked at what was going on around me, at the kids trooping up to the Trowbridge Inn, at the little circles of kids sniffing glue and a thought kept going through my mind.

“There has got to be more to life than this,” I kept saying to myself. “There has got to be more.”

3

Life Changer

I
n those months, I came incredibly close to blowing it and never having a football career. One of the things that saved me was meeting Claire. Claire and I got divorced at the end of 2012 but we had been together from the day at the end of 1993 when my brother, Paul, came up to me and told me that she fancied me. I met her on the corner and we had our first kiss. We quickly became inseparable and I began to spend less time with my mates. Suddenly, it was Claire who was my focus, not sitting round with my pals, drinking.

The following summer, it was the 1994 World Cup and even though people don’t remember it as one of the great tournaments, it helped me fall in love with the game again. I made up my mind I was going to watch every match. I loved studying Roberto Baggio and Romario. I had a brilliant summer and I felt like football had become my priority again. I came back from the brink at a time when some of my mates were falling over the edge.

I was lucky in other ways, too. I had a great relationship with my nana Mary, my dad’s mum. She looked after me and my brothers from an early age because both my mum and dad were often at work. So I would spend most of the school holidays in Adamsdown, quite close to where we used to live in Splott, with my nana, my brothers and my cousin Sarah.

I thought Nana Mary was unbelievable. She showed us pure love. We had to kiss her when we came in and kiss her before we left. She was a lovely woman who wasn’t scared of showing emotion. She was also an important influence on me. My parents would never have a real go at me if I did something wrong but my nana would and I felt more guilty letting her down than anyone. I adored her. She was a brilliant, brilliant woman.

It was in that summer of 1994 that I began to realise that my time in Cardiff was almost at an end. I was dreading leaving. There might have been social problems in Trowbridge but I still loved it. It was what I knew. In my area around Trowbridge Green, every door in every house was open. There was music playing in the street. You could walk into anyone’s house.

And inevitably, some of my happiest memories are simple ones linked to football. I remember the 1990 FA Cup semi-final when Liverpool played Crystal Palace; flitting from one mate’s house to another. I went into one house and Ian Rush had scored, then popped into another house and someone else had scored and suddenly Alan Pardew was scoring the goal that won it in extra-time for Palace and it was 4-3. And then after the match, the ice cream van appeared in the street and it was carnage.

But those days were gone. Things had moved on. Some of my mates had already gone to jail for crimes they committed trying to feed their drug habits and it had got to the point where my dad actually wanted me to go to Norwich because he was so worried about what might happen to me if I stuck around at home in Cardiff.

Norwich wanted to move me over to the club early but they were restricted because of my school age. But I wasn’t going to school anyway, so one way and another, I started spending more time in Norwich. I began playing for the youth team and the more football I was getting, the more they were coaching me and improving me.

I still found the final separation from home very hard when it came. I joined up on July 1 and the night before I left, it dawned on me that this was it. I knew life was changing. I knew life was never going to be like this again. I knew I had to do it or I was never going to be a footballer.

Leaving Claire was very difficult. She was still at school. There was no possibility of her coming to join me and I worried we would drift apart. And suddenly, simple parts of my routine that I had taken for granted, like hopping on the bus to go and see my nana, seemed unbelievably precious now that I knew I was never going to be able to do them again. These are the rites of passage that many kids go through when they leave home but I was 15 and I found it very tough.

It had an impact on those around me, too. My elder brother and I were two different people but I was close to my younger brother. He was my kid brother and we shared a bedroom when we were kids and I was very protective of him. When I look back on it now, I feel for him because I moved away at 15. One minute your big brother is looking out for you and the next he is gone.

He was at a difficult age and all of a sudden, he was alone. We have drifted apart since then and I think it’s because I moved away at a young age. It wasn’t just the geographical separation. It puts a psychological barrier between you, too. Me moving away as young as I did affected a lot of relationships in my close family. That determination to make it, it can set you apart.

My mum and dad drove me up to Norwich. My dad had been counting the days to me leaving because he knew the dangers I was facing at home. My mum was different. She would have been happy if I’d said I wanted to come back home. She would have driven me right back to Cardiff there and then. She was losing her 15-year-old son and it was tough for her. My father told me later how upset she was in the car on the way back but she couldn’t show that in front of me. She thought she had lost me, which she had. I wasn’t going to be there any more.

In many ways, I think the pain of that separation and what I endured in the following weeks and months shaped the person I became. That first year of my apprenticeship at Norwich was the hardest year of my life. For the first few months, I cried myself to sleep most nights. I learned to cope on my own. I didn’t ever turn to others.

Everything about it was difficult. I was in digs and the house was owned by a family who hadn’t put anyone up before so they weren’t quite sure how to act. They imposed curfews at night. It was strict and formal, a bit of a culture shock after the life I had been living in Cardiff.

I shared a room with another apprentice who had grown up in a village a few miles away. So at weekends, he could go home. I couldn’t. I was down. I moped around quite a lot and the family who were putting me up found that difficult, too. I probably wasn’t the best introduction to lodgers for them. They wanted to try to make me feel better but they couldn’t.

Pre-season was difficult in those days. It was hard work and it was unforgiving. It was all about long runs and supposed character-building. It was what I imagine it’s like in your first few days in the army. The senior professionals treated you like dirt. So did some of the staff. All the apprentices had a senior pro we had to do jobs for and mine was John Polston, the defender, who was a club stalwart by the time I arrived.

I had to clean his boots, get his kit for him, make him a tea or a coffee if he wanted one and generally clean around after him. He was difficult. He made a point of it. Every so often, I would go away with Wales Under-17s or 18s and every time I came back, I’d have to introduce myself to him all over again. “Who are you?” he’d say. He knew who I was but he wanted to try to humiliate me.

If he wasn’t happy with the tea, he’d throw it in the sink and tell me to get another one. He complained about his boots all the time, too. He wasn’t unusual. I think the rest of the players saw it as character-building, too. Look, I agreed with certain aspects of it but it felt like bullying really. You were intimidated. It felt like they were trying to break you.

Every six weeks, I was allowed home for a long weekend. I played on a Saturday and the deal was I had to be back in training the following Wednesday. So I would get a few days off but then I found it difficult to go back. The first occasion I was okay but the second occasion, I was crying at my parents’ house when the time came to leave. I didn’t want to go back.

My father rang Norwich and they gave me an extra couple of days off. They didn’t rush me. They had probably seen it before. In the end, my father got firm with me. He said I needed to go back. He said I’d get over it and it would get better and if I could cope with this, I could cope with anything. I wasn’t so sure. I was missing my girlfriend, I was missing everything.

I had just turned 16. When I came back to Cardiff for a couple of days, I wasn’t really one of my friends’ group any more. There was a distance between us. It was kind of understood that I had left, that I had chosen a different route. I suppose at a basic level, my friends felt I had rejected them and, at a basic level, they were right. I had gone in another direction. I became alone when I was at home as well as when I was in Norwich.

That period of being ripped away from my old life was agony. I refused to go back to Norwich during another one of my home visits and one of the other apprentices, another Cardiff lad called Tom Ramusat, came round to the house to persuade me to return with him. He put me on a guilt trip about how he couldn’t face the journey back by himself. I owe a lot to him. He went out of his way to make sure he looked after me. I’ve stayed friends with him and his family ever since.

Things were difficult for a long time because of how I felt. Once, I got involved in a fight outside the Norwich training ground with a triallist. It didn’t go too well for that kid. He was a goalkeeper and I broke his arm. I felt embarrassed about it afterwards and Norwich warned me that if anything like that happened again, I was gone.

The thing was, part of me wanted to be sacked. I was looking for every excuse I could to get sacked. I thought if I got sacked then I could come home and I could say it was their fault. I could say it wasn’t my fault that it didn’t work out. It was theirs. And then I could do what I wanted to do and blame everyone else for the loss of my football career.

But Norwich knew what I was up to and they didn’t half bend the rules for me. I was pushing certain things. I walked off the training pitch once. Then I refused to come back out for running. When I felt really unhappy, I was looking for ways to get myself out of it. But the people at Norwich were absolutely fantastic. I will always be grateful that they persevered with me.

Martin O’Neill had been appointed the first team manager that summer. He wasn’t particularly sociable with apprentices like me. In fact, he didn’t even look at you. The only contact I had with him was walking past him in the corridor at the training ground but even in those circumstances, I knew there was a kind of magnetism about him.

Because I didn’t go home at weekends, I had to clean up the first team dressing room after matches at Carrow Road and the best part of it was hanging around just outside the door, listening to the way O’Neill talked to the players. He would praise some of them like you wouldn’t believe and he made some ordinary footballers play very, very well. Some of them never played at the same level again after he left that Christmas.

But he wasn’t shy about getting stuck into someone if he felt they weren’t pulling their weight. I remember one occasion. He had signed a guy called Matthew Rush for more than £300,000 from West Ham. It was O’Neill’s signing, a biggish signing for Norwich and Rush was a flash Londoner who had a healthy opinion of himself.

But in one of his first games, he came on as a substitute for about 20 minutes and didn’t do particularly well. Martin absolutely destroyed him after the game. He called him a big-time Charlie and generally lambasted him for his lack of effort and quality. I was impressed. It showed he didn’t care who he got stuck into. I admired that about him.

Martin didn’t take any interest in the apprentices but the reserve team boss, Steve Walford, who has been part of Martin’s coaching team wherever he has gone in football, went out of his way to get to know me. He was brilliant to me. Even when I was 16, he gave me a lift back to my digs a couple of times. He told me about his debut at Spurs and about how, when he first began playing for West Ham in the early ’80s, the hardest team he played against was Liverpool. As a Liverpool fan, that was music to my ears.

Then there was John Robertson, who until recently was the other constant in Martin’s managerial life. Someone told me that he had been a proper player once. I know that now. I know that people thought he was a genius, that he was Brian Clough’s favourite player at Nottingham Forest, that he won European Cups. But back then, I’d look at him with bandages round his knees, puffing on a cigarette and think ‘no chance’.

It didn’t work out for O’Neill and his staff at Norwich, though, and they were out before Christmas, 1995. They were replaced by Gary Megson and although I didn’t really think it would make much difference to me who was the first team boss, Megson soon made it plain he thought I had a future and the homesickness that had been crippling me began to fade a little.

I moved out of my digs after a few months. Tom Ramusat lived in some digs called The Limes with six or seven other apprentices from the club and I asked Norwich’s youth development officer, Gordon Bennett, if I could move in with them.

It was more like living in a B&B than being cooped up in someone else’s home and Gordon fixed it up for me. I began to settle in a bit better. I was quite professional. For all the problems I had been having, I was trying to take my football as seriously as I could and do the right things. Most nights, I would go to bed on time. If we had a game the next day, I would go to bed on time because I wanted to play well.

Most of the other boys would stay up. There was no one to keep an eye on us like there would have been in more traditional digs. As I was the youngest of the kids in there, I became the victim of a lot of practical jokes and pranks. One night, we were playing Scrabble, which wasn’t really my strong point. We had Arsenal the next day so I headed off to bed. The rest stayed up playing Scrabble and I fell fast asleep.

The next thing I know, they’ve all come rushing into the room, all dressed and ready to go. They were in a panic, shaking me awake and saying we had overslept and that we were going to miss the coach. They looked scared. We’d been late before and been disciplined for it so I was in a real state. I started saying I had to pack my bag because I was being allowed home after the game but they said I didn’t have time.