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.
There was another reason, too. I just don’t like going to watch matches. It’s one thing preparing for a game when you’re in the dressing room and cocooned inside the bubble that players live in. You can be single-minded about what you do and not worry as much about everything that surrounds the game. But when you take yourself out of that bubble, when you sit in the stand and hear the crowd and realise the expectations they have, it can feel daunting.
You sit with the fans and you realise what a responsibility you have. There’s no escape from the fact that what happens out there on the pitch is very important to them and that they are relying on you to deliver. I felt that if I saw too much of that side of things, the pressure might start to get to me, so I ended up rationing the amount of games I watched.
When I got back to Norwich after working with Tim Atter, I started to join in a few training sessions. I noticed a difference with my knee. It wasn’t exactly as good as new. But it was appreci
ably better than it had been after the injury Muscat inflicted on it. I could feel it was stronger. I could feel that the work I had put in had paid off.
I had missed football. It had been taken away from me and now that I was close to a return, I had even more determination to try to succeed. I didn’t feel vulnerable. I played a reserve team game in April against Cambridge United that felt like a huge step forward. My dad came to watch and some Norwich fans turned up too, which meant a lot to me.
I made a couple of tackles and went in hard. I wanted to show people I wasn’t going to try and hop out of it. I only played a half but I felt great. Phil Mulryne, one of my Norwich teammates, had suffered a double leg break a few months after I was injured at Southend and we both made our comebacks at the same time. We’d become good friends during our rehabilitations. We helped each other pull through. I could sense that the same sort of relief I felt was coursing through him, too.
Some of the reserve team players held a party for Phil and me after the game and it felt like a great triumph for both of us. Injury is every footballer’s secret struggle and the fight is made harder because it is conducted away from the limelight. Nobody sees the work you are doing, nobody knows how hard you are trying, nobody knows the fears that are stalking you.
I had been out for so long that by the time I was fit again, Bruce Rioch had left the club. We had had another disappointing season, getting nowhere near the pace set by clubs like Charlton and Manchester City and Rioch resigned in March. Bryan Hamilton took his place on a temporary basis so he was in charge when, after nine months out, I made my first team comeback against Port Vale on April 22, 2000.
I came off the bench against Barnsley at Oakwell in the next game and scored. And then, in the last home game of the season against Sheffield United, I got my first start. After about a quarter of an hour, I found myself one on one with the goalkeeper. I took it round him but he dragged me out wide and I thought my chance might have gone but I drilled it in from a tight angle.
That goal meant a hell of a lot to me. More than almost any other goal I’ve scored. After everything I had been through, it was a symbol of recovery, a sign that everything was going to be okay. To people like Neil Adams, to the fans, to Premier League managers who might want to sign me, it sent out the message that I was back.
8
Signing Off
I didn’t want the season to end. I was fit again and I wanted to keep on playing. I would have played all summer if I could. I did get a bit of an extension when the new Wales manager, Mark Hughes, called me into the squad for the June friendlies against Brazil and Portugal.
I’d missed the first ever game at the Millennium Stadium, a 2-1 defeat to Finland in March when Jari Litmanen had run the show. But Sparky called me up for that game just so I could be part of the occasion, which was something I really appreciated. Then I came on for about 20 minutes against Brazil, who included Rivaldo and Cafu. And then I started against Portugal in Chaves against stars like Figo and Rui Costa. I’d worked hard to fulfil the dream of playing against great talents like them.
I went on holiday for a few weeks but I never stopped training. I couldn’t wait for the new season to start. And the closer it came, the more phone calls I started to get telling me that other clubs were interested. I wasn’t even back in pre-season training when I got a call from an agent who said that Newcastle wanted to sign me. He asked if I would like to go there. “Of course I would,” I told him.
But before the season began, I was told that Wimbledon had bid £3.5m for me. Bryan Hamilton called me in and said it had been knocked back. He said going to Wimbledon was no good for me or for Norwich. They had just been relegated so it wasn’t as if they could offer me Premier League football, and Norwich wanted more than £3.5m.
Hamilton was aware of Newcastle’s interest. Bobby Robson was the boss at St James’ Park and he and our manager were friends because of their Ipswich connection. Norwich kept waiting for the Newcastle bid to come but Newcastle kept stalling. They wanted to get Duncan Ferguson out and they knew Everton wanted him. But they needed the money from that deal to sign me.
I felt very unsettled. I was a young kid who had just done my cruciate and I wanted to sort the situation out. I played in the first game of the season against Barnsley and then the following Monday, Hamilton called me. He asked me where I was. I told him I was at home. He said he was coming round. When he arrived, he sat down and made a bit of small talk. Then he said Norwich had accepted an offer of £6m from Coventry.
He asked me what I wanted to do. He said Norwich would offer me a new contract, although the terms wouldn’t match what Coventry had offered. I was a naïve kid back then so I asked him why they were offering me a new contract if they had accepted a bid from another club. Hamilton was straight with me. He said it was too much money for them to turn down. I guess they had to be seen to be offering me a new contract to try to save face with the fans. They were making me look like the bad guy.
I said it was unfair. Hamilton said it was just politics. I told him I didn’t want to go to Coventry. He said he realised that. He said he knew I wanted to go to Newcastle but Norwich still hadn’t received a bid from them yet. I was almost pleading by then. I asked him if we could wait for a while to see if the Newcastle bid materialised.
He said that was one option. But he also said that Norwich had given Coventry permission to talk to me and that the manager, Gordon Strachan, and the chairman, Bryan Richardson, were driving down to meet me as we were speaking. He asked me to go and hear what they had to say. He said there was no pressure on me to make a decision and that if I didn’t like their offer, we could wait and see what Newcastle came up with.
I didn’t know what to do. The club said Strachan and Richardson were going to meet me at a place called Dunston Hall, a country house hotel in an Elizabethan-style mansion a few miles south of Norwich. It was all in motion already. It felt like I was being rail-roaded into something. I kept thinking that I didn’t want to sign for Coventry. I wanted to sign for Newcastle. This wasn’t what I had envisaged.
I felt I couldn’t refuse to meet them. I thought I’d just listen and then walk away. I didn’t have an agent at that time. I had a financial adviser called Jonathan, so I rang him and asked his advice. He was just as nervous about it as me. He didn’t know what to do. He just dealt with my financial stuff. Jon said he would get straight up there and would make sure I didn’t get stitched up.
I set off for Dunston Hall. While I was in the car, my phone rang. It was Bobby Robson.
“Speak to them by all means, son,” he said, “but whatever you do don’t sign. We’ll have made our bid in the next 24 hours.”
A couple of minutes later, the phone rang again. This time, it was David Stonehouse, the Newcastle chief executive. He said pretty much the same thing.
I got to the hotel and Strachan and Richardson were waiting for me. Strachan spoke brilliantly about football, his philosophy and his plans for the club. He was up front. He said Coventry weren’t a top Premier League club but they worked hard. He said he would work night and day to help me become the player I wanted to become. He really impressed me but Coventry as a club didn’t. I had set my heart on Newcastle.
Then things got messy. As I was talking to Strachan, Jon walked in with John Fashanu. I was open-mouthed. I had never met him before. I had no idea what he was doing suddenly presenting himself at the negotiations for my transfer deal. I took Jon aside and asked him what was going on. It turned out he had got to know Fashanu over the last few months.
When I had called Jon to tell him that I was going to the meeting at Dunston Hall, Jon had phoned Fashanu to ask for advice. And before he knew it, Fashanu had invited himself along as well. He said he would come along to make sure I didn’t get taken for a ride and offered to look over the contract while we were at the hotel as well. Jon didn’t really know what to do so he accepted his offer.
After they had been gone for a little while, Strachan
marched over to where Jon and I were sitting.
“What’s your arrangement with John Fashanu?” he asked.
“I haven’t got a clue,” I said.
“You know he might be trying to get paid money for this,” Strachan said. “He could want a percentage.”
I didn’t know if this was true but I looked over at Jon and his face went white because I think he realised how embarrassing this was. He went to speak to Fashanu and left me with Strachan. “I’m sorry,” I said “This is a mess. It’s nothing to do with me.”
My brain felt scrambled. Strachan was a decent bloke. I didn’t want to appear like an idiot in front of him. But this all looked so amateurish. I felt guilty. I felt embarrassed. It was just a nightmare.
Strachan told me what they were offering me. It was a lot of money. Credit to Coventry. They were up front about it. Newcastle had told me they were going to offer me a straight five-year contract worth £12,000 a week. Coventry were offering me a five-year deal worth £18,000 a week to start with and going up to £25,000 a week by the final year.
It was a huge jump in salary for me and Strachan and Richardson pitched it well to me, too. They knew what I had gone through with my cruciate ligament injury. They knew how I would have been worried about my future. They pointed out to me that if I signed, I would never have to work again after football and my family would be taken care of for life. That struck a chord with me. It wasn’t long ago when I feared I might not have a career any more.
They were persuasive. I also felt undermined by the mess with Fashanu. I wanted to save face with Strachan. I felt stressed. My chest was tight because I’m asthmatic. I was struggling to breathe properly because I was so tense. I was in a state. So I did what everybody had told me not to do. I told Strachan I’d sign. I shook his hand. And then I went home.
I felt a sense of dread about what I’d done. I just didn’t want to go to Coventry. I didn’t feel comfortable. I felt that, with the players they had, Coventry were going to have a difficult season. They would look to me to lift them out of it but I wasn’t sure I could do it. I had been out for a long, long time and I knew that I was bound to have ups and downs.
Craig Bellamy - GoodFella Page 8