I was on edge about the team selection. I thought the game would suit me. There was a lot of talk about Milan’s lack of pace and how that was a way we could hurt them. They had great players in their defence like Alessandro Nesta and Paolo Maldini but I thought I might have a decent time against them. They tried to play high, which was quite rare for Italian teams, and they liked to press.
Everyone was fit so I fluctuated from thinking I might start to worrying about whether I would even make the bench. Rafa didn’t break with tradition. He didn’t name the team until very late. We went ten-pin bowling on the morning of the game. I don’t like bowling. And then finally, he named the team. I wasn’t in it but I was on the bench. He had gone with Dirk starting by himself up front with Stevie in behind him and Jermaine Pennant and Zenden on the flanks.
That was okay. I was disappointed, obviously, but I could deal with it. That was the way Rafa wanted to go about it and it was up to him. There was no point being down because I could still come on and score the winner and you’re not going to do that if you are in a negative frame of mind. I had to accept it and see what happened.
We started reasonably brightly but AC Milan were the better team. It was a tight first half but they scored just before the interval when Filippo Inzaghi deflected a free-kick by Andrea Pirlo past Reina. The longer the game wore on, the longer they held on to their lead, the less chance I thought there was of me getting on the pitch.
If Milan were leading, they would sit deeper and deeper and Rafa’s logic would be that there would be less and less space for me to exploit. That was the way it worked out. He brought Harry Kewell on for Zenden after about an hour and then replaced Mascherano with Crouchie with 13 minutes left. I knew then that my chance of influencing the game in any way had gone and a few minutes later, Inzaghi put the game beyond us when he ran on to a ball from Kaka, took it round Reina and slid it into the net.
In the dying minutes, Rafa brought Arbeloa on for Finnan. Right-back for right-back. Explain that one to me when we’re 2-0 down. Dirk did grab a late goal from a corner but there was to be no miracle this time. The final whistle went and Milan were champions.
I was disappointed for Liverpool and the rest of the players. But it felt like a double disappointment for me because I didn’t get the chance to get on. It was heart-wrenching not to play any part at all. It would have been the biggest game of my career. To play in a Champions League final is the pinnacle and, having got there, I had to sit on the sidelines and watch it. It was a massive anti-climax.
When we were on the coach back to the hotel, a couple of the boys expressed surprise to me that Rafa hadn’t brought me on. It was nice of them but it didn’t help. It didn’t make any difference. It was over. The chance had gone. As a fan of the club, I felt sick about the defeat. As a player denied the chance to play in the biggest game in club football, I just felt empty.
Rafa’s decision not to play me also indicated that I wouldn’t be there next year. I didn’t think I could take another year of continual uncertainty about whether I would be playing or not and I didn’t think I had his backing anyway. Rafa didn’t say a word to me about it on the night. He didn’t say sorry for not bringing me on. He didn’t come out with any platitudes to try to soften the blow. He didn’t do sympathy. That wasn’t his style.
I sat by myself on the plane back to England the next day. Rafa came to sit next to me. At first, I thought maybe he was actually coming to justify his decision to leave me out. I should have known better by then.
“What are your plans for next season?” he said.
I looked at him. We’d just lost the Champions League final. I hadn’t got on. I was feeling glum. I wasn’t in the mood.
“I haven’t really thought about it,” I said.
Rafa didn’t mince his words.
“We’re going to buy another striker,” he said. “If you want to go and speak to other clubs, that’s fine.”
He started to get up to go but I told him to wait for a second.
“I’m still trying to come to terms with the disappointment of what’s just happened and now you tell me you want to get rid of me,” I said. “Classy timing.”
Rafa started stuttering. He did that shrug he does, that merciless kind of shrug that says all emotion is futile and, actually, wholly unwelcome.
“Go and speak to my advisers about it,” I said. “Leave me alone.”
The plane journey home seemed to last forever. I felt thoroughly dejected. I was obsessing about how I still hadn’t won a trophy. If I could have won the Champions League trophy, the biggest one there is, the one that players value above all others, it would have wiped out all my other near misses and semi-final defeats. It would have been a one-stop shop for validating my career in my own mind. So the defeat was hard to take.
And to know you didn’t get on as well makes it worse. You are part of it but you aren’t. You are part of a team and you have to accept it as part of the team. But you are wondering if it would have been different if you had played. Maybe I wouldn’t have made any difference in Athens that night. I’ll never know.
I wasn’t bitter towards Rafa. Not really. I was just disappointed. I didn’t want it to turn into bitterness. I didn’t want to resent him. I loved the club and I knew how much happiness he had brought the supporters. I didn’t want my relationship with him to deteriorate or for anything to affect my feelings for the place.
The timing of him coming to sit with me on the plane and tell me I was surplus to requirements was a bit hard. He could have let me get over the disappointment of not playing in the final. But Rafa doesn’t have any sentiment. He’s not interested in social skills. He tries to come across as a warm person but he is as harsh a guy as you will ever come across. I don’t mind that really. There probably isn’t any good way to tell someone they’re not wanted.
Rafa signed Fernando Torres that summer. No one could really argue with that. Not even me. He was a great signing for the club. But I was worried about how I was going to move on. I had been in a team that had a chance of winning the league and which had just reached a Champions League final. Where would I find that again?
As we arrived back at John Lennon Airport, I tried to remind myself how lucky I had been to play for the team I loved. I thought about the very first time I had visited Anfield in the wake of the Hillsborough Disaster, I thought about all the things I loved about the legend of Shankly and the empire he had created and the stories older players had told me about facing the great Liverpool teams of the Seventies.
It was still the most incredible club in the world to me. What it represents as a club is what I represent as a person. I feel like a black sheep but people have to acknowledge me because my play demands it. I’m an outsider but sometimes I play so well that you have to let me in. That’s what it’s like for me and sometimes it feels as though that’s what it’s like for Liverpool. They have to fight and fight for everything they get.
I didn’t want to leave but I didn’t really have much choice. I thought maybe I’d move abroad, make a fresh start. It hadn’t ended how I had wanted it to end at Liverpool but at least I was part of their history now. And one way or another, sooner or later, as player or coach or supporter, I knew I’d be back.
22
Giving It Back
Maybe it was because I was worried about how I was going to follow playing for Liverpool. Maybe it was because I felt the need to do something completely different to put some distance between me and the crushing disappointment of the Champions League final. Whatever the reasons, I did something random that summer, something that changed my life. I went to Sierra Leone.
Why? Well, I had a mate who was working out there and he invited me to come and visit. I could have said ‘yeah, thanks, but the hotels are a bit nicer in Puerto Banus this time of year’ but I didn’t. I wanted to see what it was like. I’d always been intrigued by Africa. So I got on a plane and flew to Freetown. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever m
ade.
When I say I’d been intrigued by Africa, I suppose I mean I’d been gripped by the stories they told on Comic Relief. I wondered what it was really like. I didn’t want to go to somewhere like South Africa or Kenya where there is great poverty but there is great wealth as well. I didn’t want to go somewhere where you could take refuge in a rich man’s lifestyle.
I knew that in parts of West Africa, there was no rich man’s lifestyle. Not really. There was poor and there was poor. I wasn’t intimidated about going out there. It didn’t cross my mind at all. I was fascinated by the idea of what I would find. I wanted to see how people lived.
It was a culture shock. It was bound to be. I landed at Freetown and found out that the airport is on the other side of the Sierra Leone River from the city. So I either had to get a ferry that took a couple of hours, a taxi that took about four hours on a roundabout route or an old Russian helicopter. They have got a habit of ditching in the river, I found out later, but it seemed like the safest option at the time. I took the helicopter.
Freetown was great. It was chaotic but it was great. An 11-year civil war had only just ended so a lot of the city was a ruin. But the people were wonderful and life was vibrant and vital. I’d been worrying about the Champions League final and what was going to happen to me, whether I’d join this club or that club for £40,000 a week or £50,000 a week. Seeing Freetown woke me up. I thought ‘you ain’t got no problems’.
The poverty I saw made a huge impact on me. But not the poverty in isolation. It was more the fact that the people who were living in all that poverty were so positive. It amazed me. Maybe I’d become accustomed to moaning about inconsequential things. Maybe I’d lost sight of what mattered. But I looked around there and I saw people who had very, very little and still had such a good outlook on life. For them, being alive is the biggest achievement of all. What they have to go through just to have life is more important than any material things.
Yeah, I was worried about diseases and snakes and all the things Europeans worry about when we think of Africa but when you are there, you just get on with it. There was no electricity in a lot of places. For somebody who’s grown used to the comforts of western civilisation, it felt quite challenging. But, of course, there was one thing that linked me with the people I saw: football.
I was shocked by how many people knew me. The day after I arrived, I woke up and thought I’d go into the centre of Freetown. I was interested in the history of the place. I wanted to see the effects of the civil war. I wanted to get a better idea of how people lived. I got a taxi into town and climbed out to have a walk. Within a few minutes, I had to get back into the car. I was mobbed.
I was still technically a Liverpool player then and I wasn’t really aware quite how popular the leading Premier League teams were. I soon realised. Armed police had to come and get me out and take me back to my hotel because the roads became blocked with crowds. It took me aback. It wasn’t like Wayne Rooney or Steven Gerrard was in town. I’m only Craig Bellamy. But it was probably the first time a Premier League player had ever visited the city.
Soon, it became evident it was going to be impossible for me even to remain at the hotel I’d booked myself into. The lobby was packed with people wanting photos and autographs. There were too many people for the hotel to cope with. So I had to move out. I didn’t want to leave but I could tell I was making life difficult for the hotel. The hotel put me in touch with a British security company that had houses for ex-pats out there and they took me to one of those.
A couple of days later, I travelled east. I wanted to see the diamond mines in that part of the country. It was a seven-hour journey by car, although in the UK it would take about half that. I’d brought a load of footballs with me so we stopped off now and again on the way up whenever we saw a group of kids and had a kickabout.
It was funny: when the kids saw four or five white men getting out of a car, they just scarpered. You go back in the history of the place, there’s probably a very good reason for that. But eventually, they’d come back in their droves. To see their pleasure in a simple football was enough for me. They were used to playing with a bundle of rolled up newspaper bound with sticky tape.
Again, a lot of them seemed to know me. I thought there was no way that some of the villages we stopped in would have any access to television but the power of the Premier League is far-reaching. One of the main teams in Freetown is even called Mighty Blackpool.
When we arrived in the Kono district where a lot of the diamond mining goes on, I found out the local chief wanted to meet me. Word had spread that I was visiting and when we got close, the crowds got out of control again. There were people as far as I could see who had come to greet me. It was absolutely surreal.
I wanted to see the diamond mines because I wanted to see another side of Sierra Leone. It made me sad, seeing the poor panning in the water. They would get a couple of dollars for what we would pay thousands for. I wasn’t averse to a bit of bling in those days but seeing the conditions those people worked in – and a lot of them were kids – put me off. I would never buy a diamond now. I certainly wouldn’t wear one.
I can see how some people can come away from a country like that, drained and never wanting to go back. But it had the exact opposite effect on me. I felt inspired and energised by what I saw. I wanted to do something positive. What’s the difference between me and them? I was born where I was born and they were born where they were born. None of us are given a choice where we are born in this world or which parents we are born to. That’s the only difference.
I made up my mind straight away that I wanted to give something back. I knew by then that West Ham were trying to sign me and they were offering me a lot of money, more money than I had ever earned before. Reports said later that I would be earning around £80,000 a week. They weren’t far wrong. However much it was, I felt it was the right thing to give some of it away. I didn’t need it all. I don’t need that much to live. Lifestyle isn’t hugely important to me. As long as my kids are comfortable, that’s really all I care about.
I wanted to give something to these people in Sierra Leone. I thought about building a school but it would have to be free education and so you’d have to turn people away because there would be too many. So I thought about building an orphanage but then you are fighting with Christian groups and Muslim groups and things can get very complicated.
So then I thought about a football academy, a place where people could come and live and play for free. It would have to be selective. It would be for kids who were talented footballers but I wanted to make sure that they were also academically up to a level where we could teach them and educate them.
I wanted to give them an opportunity in life, not just in football. I wanted to do something for the country and the society, not just for the game. So if they didn’t make it as a footballer, I wanted them to be able to go back into Sierra Leone society very well educated. I wanted them to become the next minister of health, the next president, a doctor or a lawyer. Or go to America on a college scheme.
My dream was that one day, one of the kids who goes to the academy would be able to become a top player and look after his family. And then when that happened, he remembered the opportunity he was given and was able to do the same for other kids in his country. I wanted the academy to start what people call a virtuous circle.
That was in the summer of 2007. We started work in earnest the following year. Building the academy took a while. No one works during rainy season, for a start. It just isn’t practical. The government gave me land in a nice village outside Freetown called Tombo. It’s a fishing and farming village and the 15-acre site where the academy is based overlooks the Atlantic.
There were teething troubles. There were bound to be. Everyone had told me to be prepared for that. But the local people grasped the idea that this was something that would give kids an opportunity. With the help of Unicef, we set up a youth league, too, because nothing like
that existed at the time. It was a pre-requisite that the kids who played in the league had to be going to school. If they weren’t at school, they couldn’t play in the league, no matter how good they were.
The first group of 15 boys arrived at the academy in August 2010. We gave five-year scholarships to children aged 11-13 who live, study and train at the academy. I was ambitious. I wanted the facilities to be good. The playing surface we have now is generally recognised as the best grass pitch in Sierra Leone.
The league has been a success, too. There are more than 40 teams across the country and Unicef loved it. Teams earn league points not only for match results, but also for school attendance, good behaviour and fair-play, and leading development projects in their communities. One of the teams was even called Young Cambridge because of the kids’ commitment to the academic side of things.
There’s another called Central Professionals, which has attained brilliant school attendance rates and another called Welding United, which is run by a committed lady called Edna Sowa. I read on our website recently that Edna had named her new son Bellamy.
We have a special group of 12-year-olds at the academy now – our second intake – who have blossomed due to the establishment of the league. The quality is improving all the time. Unicef aren’t involved any more because their policy, which I agree with, is to work with a project for a couple of years and then move on.
Finding funding is hard. In some people’s eyes, I am the Premier League footballer who has endless amounts of money. Why should anyone give me money when I should be paying it all myself? But realistically, my money won’t last forever. I set an initial period of five years which was my West Ham contract to get it up and running.
Craig Bellamy - GoodFella Page 22