We were staying at the Carden Park Hotel, south of Chester, and when I went into the team meeting at 10am, I noticed that Robbie Savage wasn’t there. That didn’t make me particularly observant, by the way. Sav was such a loud presence that you noticed when he was absent. I thought maybe he had been injured in training the previous day.
I have always liked Sav. Behind all the bluster, he’s actually a pretty insecure guy. Because I’d been playing well for the Under-21s and I was creeping closer to a place in the first team, I could tell he was threatened. I wore the number 4 shirt during the friendly in Tunisia and Sav collared me soon afterwards. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll be giving that back to me soon enough.” That was typical Sav. He knew I was a better player than him and he knew he was going to be under the cosh for his place.
Bobby Gould walked into the meeting room and went straight into a rant about how he had been watching television the previous evening when he saw Sav doing an interview with Sky. Sav was holding an Italy number 3 shirt, Paolo Maldini’s shirt, and then he scrumpled it up for the benefit of the camera and threw it away. Bobby Gould was appalled by that. He said it showed a complete lack of respect for one of the world’s greatest players.
He told us what he had done. He had rung Sav in his room in the middle of the night and told him to leave the hotel and that he would not be playing any part in the Italy match. He had sent him home. Sav himself said later that the call came at 5am and that Bobby Gould had threatened to call the police if Sav refused to leave. Sav was insistent it was just a prank and he thought Gould was overreacting. Once again, we were lurching into farce.
Speedo spoke up straight away. He asked Gould what he had sent him home for. He said we needed him for the game.
“What can I do?” Gould said. “I’ve sent him home and the media knows I’ve sent him home.
“Well, then go and get him back,” Speedo said. “Ring him. We need him back in the squad.”
Chris Coleman backed Speedo up and Bobby Gould began to retreat. It didn’t make him look very clever. It was another fuss about nothing and it was overshadowing a massive game. It was obvious to me, obvious to everybody, that Sav respected Maldini. It was just Sav’s idea of a joke, his tongue-in-cheek effort at saying the Italians didn’t scare us. It was obvious it was meant to be funny, not derogatory, but now we had made a big drama out of it.
By then, Gould had already given a television interview explaining why he had sent Sav home. “Players must realise that they have a duty to put-up on the field of play and shut-up off it,” he said. “This type of ‘set-up’ interview has caused problems in the past and is totally alien to the true spirit of the game which was so epitomised in the classic picture of Pele and Bobby Moore embracing and exchanging shirts in the Mexico World Cup of 1970. That was true sporting comradeship and what I saw last evening certainly was not, and I have a duty to uphold the good name of Welsh international football.”
It was a total mess. All sorts of rumours started flying around. Sav was still at home. Sav would be on the bench. Sav would be in the first team. Sav would never play for Wales again. Nobody knew what was happening. Everyone was talking about the row, not the fact that we were about to face a team that included Alessandro Del Piero, Fabio Cannavaro and Christian Vieri.
When we arrived at Anfield, Sav was there like a puppy with big eyes. He was very emotional. He was upset about what had happened. It turned out that Gould had backed down up to a point and had put him on the bench. He gave a debut to Nottingham Forest midfielder Andy Johnson instead and Johnson played superbly.
In fact, we did not disgrace ourselves. Giggs was absolutely outstanding up front and he started off by going on this blistering run that took out most of the Italian defence before he was denied by a last-ditch tackle. The crowd was roaring us on, the atmosphere was brilliant and for 20 minutes, everyone was dreaming of an upset.
But then we conceded a silly goal when there was a mix-up between Chris Coleman and the goalkeeper, Paul Jones, and Diego Fuser slid the ball into the net. Giggs hit the bar with a free-kick just before half-time and Cannavaro defended brilliantly in the second half before Roberto Baggio came off the bench and set up Italy’s second for Vieri 14 minutes from the end. By the end of the match, the crowd had begun to turn on Gould. “We want Bobby out,” they sang.
Sav came on for the last 10 minutes but the game was lost by then. I didn’t make it off the bench but I still got a lot out of the game. I looked at some of their players, their attitude, their professionalism, their talent, the way they carried themselves, and it spurred me on. I wanted to get to their level. It made me determined to keep working and keep trying to improve myself.
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 agains
t 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
There 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.
Craig Bellamy - GoodFella Page 7