Craig Bellamy - GoodFella (7 page)

A month later, we travelled to Copenhagen to play Denmark in the next qualifier and it was billed as Gould’s last game. The press were after him, the fans had lost patience and the players had largely lost faith in him. Most people expected us to get beaten heavily. We were in freefall.

I was on the bench. I had a good view of Denmark battering us in the first half. They finally got the goal they deserved in the 57th minute when Soren Frederiksen put them ahead with a scrappy shot after we failed to clear a corner. But a minute later, we equalised when the Denmark keeper, Mogens Krogh, who was standing in for Peter Schmeichel, somehow let a header from Adrian Williams squirm through his hands.

With 21 minutes remaining, Gould brought me on in place of Nathan Blake. Four minutes from the end, Darren Barnard swung a long cross over from the left, their centre half missed it and I headed it past the goalkeeper and into the corner of the net. I wheeled away, ecstatic, before Sav grabbed me to celebrate. I might have scored against Malta earlier in the year but this felt like my first proper international goal. It was a big game against a decent side and my goal won the game. I was Wales’ new hero.

Not with everybody, though. After the match, Dean Saunders came up to me. “You do realise you’ve just saved this guy’s job,” he said. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

When we got home, I felt like a big star for the first time in my career. And when I got back to Norwich, I was feeling so pleased with myself that my attitude was slack in the next match against Crystal Palace. Bruce Rioch had to have a word with me and remind me that the best players never rest on their laurels or celebrate their achievements for long.

Four days later, we won again, beating Belarus at home. We nearly blew it, going 2-1 down early in the second half. But we equalised and then Kit Symons got the winner five minutes from the end. For a few months, there was an unfamiliar feeling of optimism about our fortunes but that was punctured the following March when we lost 2-0 to Switzerland in Zurich. Next up was Italy in Bologna in June. That was when the fun and games started again.

We prepared for the game in Rimini on the Adriatic coast, about 80 miles away from Bologna. Gould tried to change his approach. He let us do what we wanted to, basically. He abandoned the playing of charades. Even he had begun to realise that wasn’t working. You’d see boys trying to sneak out of the door while it was going on. In Rimini, we were out most nights.

It was hot in training. When the sessions started to get serious, it began to look as though the front line would be Giggs on the left, Hughes in the centre and me on the right. That meant Mark Pembridge, Saunders and Harts would miss out. All three of them had probably been expecting to play. They weren’t impressed and they weren’t shy about showing it.

There was one full-scale training match where one or two disaffected players got the ball and then just booted it into touch. They spat their dummies, basically. I’m not judging them. It was just a way of showing their frustration. I wasn’t going to say anything because I was a 19-year-old kid but I knew things were going to get interesting.

Gould caved in. He moved things around to accommodate the established players and now it looked as if I was out. It didn’t bother me too much but it upset a few other people. So now the ones who felt they were being discriminated against started not to try in training. Gould had had enough of it. So he called everyone in.

“I tell you what, you lot can pick the team,” he said, “and when you’ve done it, come and let me know what it is.”

“You’re paid to pick the team, not us,” Speedo said.

“I’ve just picked it,” Gould said, “and nobody listened to me.”

People started laughing. Maybe Gould was trying to play a mind game but it felt like we were in chaos.

I went back to my room and before long, there was a knock on my door and Gould came in. Neville Southall, who was his assistant, had seen me play in central midfield in a game for Norwich when we had gone down to 10 men and I had run the game. He had mentioned that to Gould, who had now decided he was going to play me in central midfield.

We travelled to Bologna. The day before the game, he sat us all down, got a clipboard out, flicked over a page and showed us the team. Sure enough, I was in a three-man midfield with John Robinson and Speedo. Giggs, Hughes and Saunders were up front. I felt excited. I was going to play against Italy, one of the best teams in the world. I felt quite good about myself.

Then Gould flicked over another page. It was a diagram of the Italy team. Except it wasn’t just their names. Underneath every Italy player, he had written their age and the amount of caps they had won. When he came to Christian Panucci, he mentioned that he had won the Champions League with Real Madrid the previous summer. He also mentioned that he had won it with AC Milan in 1994, too.

Then he moved on to Cannavaro and the goalkeeper, Buffon, and what unbelievably good players they were. He pointed up to the roof. “Cannavaro could jump as high as this ceiling,” he said. Then he got around to Maldini. “Paolo Maldini,” he said, reverently. “Need I say any more?” It went on and on and on like that. He went through every single Italy player.

I was an admirer of the Italians, too, but I started thinking ‘how on earth am I going to make any sort of impression at all against this lot, we’re going to get murdered’. I hardly slept all night.

We got to the stadium the next day and the pitch was beautiful. They were a great team. They even looked incredible in the warm-up. I looked at them in the tunnel with their immaculate hair and their blue kit. I started thinking about everything Gould had said about them.

Soon, it was ‘bang’ and they had scored. Vieri put them ahead after seven minutes. He jumped higher than the crossbar to get to it. Filippo Inzaghi and Maldini added another couple before half-time and the game was over. Their movement was on a different level to anything our defenders had ever seen before.

Gould took Saunders off at half-time. That went down well. Harts played the second half but things didn’t get much better. We stopped shipping goals until Enrico Chiesa added a fourth in the last minute. It was just a bad, bad day. Not being able to compete was difficult. They could have won by as many as they wanted.

“Boys,” Bobby Gould said in the dressing room after the match, “I think I have taken you as far as I can.”

“What,” Speedo said, “you mean as far down the world rankings as you can? We were 27th before you took over.”

Gould said he was going to resign. He said he would not travel on the plane back home with us because we had a game against Denmark at Anfield a few days later and he did not want his presence to be a distraction for whoever took charge (it was Neville Southall, as it happens, and we lost 2-0). A lot of the players seemed relieved Gould had gone but the chaos of it all was making my head swim.

We got to the airport the next day and the first person we saw was Bobby Gould. It turned out there weren’t any other flights. He had to come back with us after all. It was the final indignity.

7

Hell And Back

T
here were still ups and downs at Norwich, too. I made that great start to the 1998-99 season but a couple of months after the high of scoring the winner for Wales against Denmark in Copenhagen, I suffered the first bad injury of my career. Like a few other victims before and after me, I came up against Kevin Muscat and suffered the consequences.

In those days, a lot of players at that level talked a lot. They yapped. At the top, players are so confident in their own ability that they don’t need to talk but in the Championship, it was common for players to threaten to break your legs. It might be before a game or during it.

Threatening a player was a way of testing whether they could deal with it mentally. It might give an ordinary defender an advantage over a clever attacker he would not otherwise have enjoyed.

It happened to me a few times. In February, 1999, we played Bury at Gigg Lane and when I wandered out for the warm-up before the game, a guy called Darren Bullock was loitering in the tunnel. He had some skinhead sidekick standing next to him and they were both getting lairy. “Oi, Bellamy,” I heard one of them say as I went past, “you’re going to get your legs broken today.”

It seemed like the two of them were sent out there to cause trouble, basically. Luckily for me, Bullock didn’t hang around long enough to do me any damage. He got sent off after 11 minutes for dancing on Peter Grant’s head. I have never felt so relieved in my life. It was Bullock’s home debut, too. Nothing like making a good first impression.

The skinhead was still around but he wasn’t so brave without his mate. I scored a quarter of an hour later. I wasn’t going to be intimidated. I wouldn’t go into my shell. I didn’t need much encouragement to get lippy myself in those days but I knew what I was up against and that was one way to combat it. I spoke to them as they spoke to me. I might have been small and new on the scene but I wasn’t going to take any shit.

I had already made my acquaintance with Muscat by then, anyway. He was the real McCoy. Once you’d run into him, other players didn’t hold quite the same fear. He was playing for Wolves at that time and we went to Molineux to play them in the middle of December, 1998. We started off well and took the lead. The crowd became hostile and restless and the Wolves players reacted badly.

Muscat was already notorious by then. Ten months earlier, he had effectively ended the career of Charlton’s Matty Holmes with a foul that injured him so severely his surgeon told him he had been fortunate not to have had his leg amputated. Holmes underwent a series of operations but was unable to return to top flight football. Holmes subsequently won £250,000 in damages from Muscat at the High Court.

And a few years later, in an uncanny echo of what happened to me at Gigg Lane, Muscat told Watford’s Ashley Young, who was warming up as he waited to come on to make his debut, that he would break his legs if he took the ball past him. Like Bullock, Muscat was sent off for stamping on someone before he had the chance to turn his attentions to a kid trying to make his way in the game.

Muscat had compiled a long, long rap sheet by the time he finished his career in Australia by earning himself an eight-game ban for a grotesque knee-high tackle on Melbourne Heart’s Adrian Zahra. That was in 2011, 13 years of crazed challenges away from the one he inflicted on me at Molineux. “He is probably the most hated man in the game,” Birmingham’s Martin Grainger said somewhere in the interim.

I got an early warning in the Wolves game when Muscat flew at me with his studs up. I managed to avoid his lunge and stared at the referee to suggest that maybe he ought to be doing something about that kind of challenge, but the referee did nothing. He knew the crowd was on his back by then because we were winning and a couple of decisions had gone against Wolves and he did not want to provoke any more jeers or boos.

People like Muscat are clever. They know in a situation like that that they can get away with anything because the ref is scared. After I avoided him the first time, Muscat told me I was going to get it. He was as good as his word. In the second half, I went to close him down when he was on the ball in his own area and as we came together, his foot went over the ball and he stamped on my knee. My knee hyper-extended and I knew I was in trouble.

Everyone stopped but the referee panicked. He didn’t know what to give because he would have had to have given a penalty, so he let play continue. Bruce Rioch, who had been a hard player in his day, was so horrified by the challenge that he ran on to the pitch to try to get play stopped and remonstrate with the linesman. He had to be restrained by our backroom staff.

They took me to the Wolves medical room. After the game, Wolves players Carl Robinson and Keith Curle came to see me. Muscat didn’t. Some players have reputations of being hard players. Some players will give you a kick and you can take kicks. You get that in most games. But when someone seems to get in trouble as regularly as he has, it makes you a breed apart, a different category.

I hear he is a nice guy off the pitch. Maybe he is but if he is a man who has any kind of self-knowledge, the consequences of what he has done will hit him one day. I was very lucky. I had an operation and a couple of months out. I had a puncture wound to my knee-cap where the stud on Muscat’s boot drilled into it but compared to Matty Holmes, I was very fortunate.

It was still the most painful recuperation from an injury I’ve ever had. I was in agony afterwards. The operation was to get in and clean it out because of the danger of infection. I had a few months out. My rehab was very ordinary. I wasn’t allowed to do too much straight away. It was my first real injury and I lost a lot of muscle in my leg.

I was rushed back. A couple of months later, one of the usual suspects was offering to break my legs for me at Bury. I did okay but my knee didn’t feel right. I pulled my thigh a few weeks later and still kept playing. I was limping around but if you are told you have to go and play when you are that age, you go and play. But I was an accident waiting to happen.

I finished off that season with one or two goals and 19 overall but I wasn’t in a good condition. We finished just outside the play-offs and, after I got back home to Cardiff from the debacle with Wales in Italy and the subsequent defeat to Denmark, I thought the summer would allow my leg to recover and that I would get back to Norwich as good as new.

When pre-season began, my knee was still sore. I was dismayed. There was a lot of talk around that time that Spurs, who were being managed by George Graham, were about to make a bid for me and even though I knew my knee wasn’t right, I still felt flattered that a Premier League team was keen on signing me.

I got on with pre-season. We played a friendly against Southend United at Roots Hall and it was all fairly routine. I spent a lot of the game on the fringes. Then somebody played a ball long for me and I chased it down into the corner. I remember that my feet were sore. I remember thinking about my blisters as I ran after the ball.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a lad coming with me to my left and I thought I could hold him off. I was marginally ahead of him and I was favourite to get the ball but then he did something I didn’t expect. Instead of jockeying for the ball, he tried to tackle me. It wasn’t really a bad challenge and it wasn’t his fault but it was a foul and it was needless.

Because it caught me by surprise, my left leg was planted and, as we made contact, I heard a click in my knee. His weight shoved my leg forward and I hit the floor. I was in pain straight away. It was my left knee, the one I had experienced problems with after Muscat’s tackle, and I wonder now whether, if the muscle had been properly built up around it, I might have avoided the injury at Southend. I’ll never know.

The club wanted me to get a scan so the Norwich physio, Tim Sheppard, took me to Southend University Hospital, which is only about a mile from the ground. It was Friday night, the drunks were in and I was sitting there with my knee swelling and my Norwich City kit on. You can imagine the scene. It wasn’t pretty. I had an x-ray but it did not show anything definitive. I thought I was probably okay.

My knee blew up even more during the night but I still didn’t think too much of it. That day, I went to see the specialist at a private clinic in Norwich and they had a look at my knee movements. I heard them talking and one of them mentioned something about ‘six to eight’. I thought ‘oh, no, I can’t be out for six to eight weeks’. My mind flitted straight to the Tottenham interest. Six to eight weeks out would ruin any move.

Then they said I had ruptured my cruciate ligaments. It wasn’t six to eight weeks. It was six to eight months. It hit me really hard then.

Claire and Ellis came to pick me up at the clinic and they didn’t know what to do or say. We got into the car with Tim Sheppard so I could be driven back home. I was distraught.

“I know what a blow it must be,” Tim said, “but look in the back. That’s what’s important.”

Ellis was sitting there in his baby seat and even though I didn’t acknowledge what Tim said at the time, I knew he was right. I didn’t want to hear anything anybody said then, though. On the drive back, I was just silent. I thought it might be the end of my career. I didn’t know whether I was going to come back. I knew that Alan Shearer and Dean Saunders had both had cruciate injuries and come back. That gave me a bit of comfort.

I had to wait about a week before the knee was operated on and I was feeling sorry for myself. I rang people up and they didn’t know what to say. I worried that I would wake up after the operation and a surgeon would come and stand at my bedside and say that it had not gone as well as they had hoped and that I would never be able to play football again.

But that didn’t happen. They operated on me and the surgeon, David Dandy, said that, with the right rehabilitation, I would be able to resume my career. That was perfect for me. I made up my mind I’d come back better. There were loads of things I could work on almost straight away, like my upper body, and when I came out of hospital five days later, I vowed I would be the perfect patient.

I started off doing my rehab in Norwich but we only had one physio and Tim Sheppard had an entire squad of footballers to look after. I knew I needed work. I needed to be pushed and at the beginning of my rehab, I was left on my own a lot. I sunk into a depression. I felt nobody cared about me any more. I wasn’t a player any more. I felt I didn’t matter to anyone.

When the players had some sort of evening out, I’d go along but I was on crutches and I didn’t feel I could really be part of anything. It got to the point where I didn’t want to go to the training ground when the other fit players were there. So I started coming in to do my work after they had gone home.

Sometimes, players could be tactless. Sometimes they could be insensitive. Sometimes, they could be spiteful. I was out with the players one night and one of the senior lads, Neil Adams, had had one or two drinks. He turned to me at one point.

“That’s you done,” he said. “You’re finished. Your career’s over. You aren’t going to come back the same player.”

He might have thought he was taking the piss and being funny but I still remember it now. I thought ‘all right, good one, we’ll see about that’. I shut myself off from everyone. Even Claire and Ellis. Everything was a blur. Paul Gascoigne had undergone the same operation and he never looked the same after it. All sorts of dark thoughts crowded in on me.

I consoled myself with the fact that I was young. I was desperate for all the rehabilitation work I was doing not to be a waste. I persuaded myself I could come back quicker. I was determined to think only positive things. But I also needed the sacrifice of shutting myself off from everyone else. I needed that single-minded approach, or else I thought I wouldn’t get through it.

After some time, I bought a Technogym leg presser and put that in my garage at our home in Norwich. I did leg presses every night before I went to bed. Building my leg muscles all the time, trying to make sure there would never be any kind of weakness there, trying to do everything I could to protect myself from having to go through this again.

I even went into the garage to do my leg presses on Christmas Eve. I thought I’d remember doing that for the rest of my career and it would make the sacrifice worthwhile. But after Christmas, I still felt I wasn’t getting the attention I needed in Norwich. I wanted to step my recovery up. I wanted to shut up people like Neil Adams as soon as I came back. I wanted to show everyone straight away that I was just as good as I had ever been.

So I went to Cardiff and saw an eminent surgeon called Professor John Fairclough, who had worked with the Welsh rugby squad and was based at the Cardiff and Vale Orthopaedic Centre at Llandough Hospital. I had a check-up and he said things were good but they could be better. He recommended a guy called Tim Atter, who went on to become the physio for the Cardiff Blues rugby team.

We began working three times a day and even though Norwich were reluctant to let me move back to Cardiff to begin with, they soon came round when they realised how focused I was. I worked with Tim for a couple of months and as soon as I was able to run and work outside, I went straight back to Norwich to begin the next phase of rehab.

I didn’t watch Norwich as much as I should have done because it hurt not to be playing. They weren’t doing too well and that made me feel even more guilty. Every time I went to a game at Carrow Road, people were asking when I’d be back. That kind of tortured me.