Craig Bellamy - GoodFella

by Craig Bellamy

  It didn’t take long for a little friction to build between me and Roberto. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t train every day. He said I had to train every day. I told him I couldn’t because of my injury history. He said I had to do double sessions – training morning and afternoon – and I told him I couldn’t do double sessions. If I do two sessions, I put too much stress on my hamstrings. I am an explosive player. He shook his head. He said in Italy, you have to train all the time. It was frustrating. I had been doing so well. I had felt so comfortable with my routine and it had been getting the best out of me. Now Roberto wanted to change it.

  In mid-January, we played United in the semi-finals of the Carling Cup. There was a lot of hype around it and a lot of talk about how this was the gateway to City winning their first trophy since 1976. We won the first leg 2-1 at Eastlands but I didn’t hang around celebrating on the pitch for too long afterwards. I shook hands with the United players and got down the tunnel as fast as I could. I knew we still had to go to Old Trafford for the second leg and if we milked it, they would make us pay.

  We didn’t milk it but Garry Cook did. Garry was a brilliant talker. I loved listening to him. He was very entertaining and could talk you into anything.

  But sometimes, by his own admission, he didn’t know when to stop. In the build-up to the second leg, he was filmed telling City supporters in New York’s Mad Hatter Saloon that City would get to Wembley “not if, but when, we beat United again.”

  That played straight into United’s hands. There were other things I was worried about, too. Roberto was still learning the ropes. Some things that he introduced were beneficial. We went zonal at the back and that sorted us out defensively. It suited us. But sometimes, his lack of experience in the Premier League was a problem. Sometimes, the ProZone guy was taking the team talk because Roberto didn’t know enough about the opposition. Roberto was listening in like he was a player. I didn’t have time for him to feel his way into the job. I needed to win things now.

  The atmosphere at the club quickly became tense under Roberto. The mood changed. He was not worried about whether players liked him or not. It was of no interest to him. You could walk past him and he would not even say hello. Brian Kidd was brought in to be the good cop. But he didn’t really have much of a line in to Roberto. He had no say whatsoever, from what I could see.

  The Carling Cup was important to us that season. People made fun of the competition but it would have been the perfect stepping stone for us. Clever managers can use a victory even in a lesser competition as a catalyst for greater achievements. Jose Mourinho won the League Cup at Chelsea in 2005 on the way to winning the Premier League. The League Cup was his first trophy.

  I’m sure United realised how important it was to try to stop us making that psychological step, too. Sir Alex Ferguson had been talking about us being ‘noisy neighbours’ and they were desperate to silence us. They went some of the way to doing that at Old Trafford in the second leg when Paul Scholes put them ahead on the night.

  Michael Carrick put them 2-0 up but then 15 minutes from the end, I swung over a cross and Carlos darted ahead of Rio Ferdinand, stuck out his right leg and flicked the ball past

  Edwin van der Sar to bring the scores level on aggregate. It looked then as though the tie was heading to extra-time. If that happened, having interrupted their momentum, I fancied our chances.

  The last few minutes were mayhem. I’d already been hit by a coin when I went over to take a corner earlier in the game and the atmosphere got more and more intense. Then, two minutes into injury time, Giggs swung a cross over and Rooney, who was in the form of his life that season, rose unchallenged in our box and headed it past Shay Given to take United to the final.

  When we got back to our changing room, we could hear the United boys celebrating next door. I was devastated. We’d got what we deserved. We’d been naïve in the build-up and we had fed them motivation. I knew that, in time, we would go on and win the league and the Champions League but I wondered if my time was running out to win something with the club.

  I found it increasingly difficult with Roberto. I felt that faith in me was slipping. When I played that season, I had been staying on until the end of matches because I had been playing well and had been regarded as a constant threat. But during a defeat to Hull at the beginning of February, Roberto substituted me. It was a bad sign.

  I went out in Manchester that evening with Wayne Bridge and Shaun Wright-Phillips and at the end of the night, I allowed myself to get into a scrape with a United fan. It was a bit of pushing and shoving. There was a group of United fans waiting for me as I went to get into my car. They were taunting me and because I was in a bad frame of mind, I got involved. It was nothing serious but it was serious enough that I aggravated my knee injury during the fracas.

  I was out for two weeks because of that. I came back to training and I did some running. Roberto said I would be running the next day, too. I said I couldn’t do two days solid in a row. He said I had been off for two weeks so I had to. I told him I couldn’t. I had to stick to my programme. He called me into his office for a meeting with him, his fitness coach and the club doctor. He was confrontational from the start.

  “Is it okay for you to be out for two weeks and think you can decide what you are doing?” he said.

  “I am sticking to my programme, that’s all,” I said. “It has kept me fit all season and I don’t want to risk being injured now.”

  “Okay, then, you have been away for two weeks,” he said. “Now you can go home for the rest of the season. Go on.”

  “What are you on about?” I said.

  “Well, you don’t want to train,” he said.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to train,” I told him. “I know my knee. I know it will react tomorrow if I train again and if it doesn’t, my hamstrings will.

  “No, no, no,” he yelled.

  So I went home. I told Brian Marwood and Garry Cook what had happened. Garry came round to my house to talk about it. He said something had been lost in translation. I went in the next day and trained but Roberto and I didn’t speak after that. That was a cut-off. That was him done with me, really. Rafa was harsh. Roberto wasn’t far behind.

  He didn’t freeze me out. I still played and I still put in some good performances. But it became common knowledge that we’d had a big disagreement and the tension between us grew.

  At the end of March, we lost to Everton at Eastlands and David Moyes and Mancini had a bout of handbags on the touchline. At the end of the match, Moyes came up to me and we had a bit of a chat. We’d had contact before when he’d tried to sign me for Everton and I had a great deal of respect for him.

  “What about you two, pushing and shoving,” I said. “Why don’t you just have a fight?”

  We had a bit of a laugh about it and that was it. The next thing I know, there were rumours that I was being investigated by the club because I had told Moyes he should have battered Mancini. Or something like that. It was bizarre but it did worry me a bit. I didn’t want Roberto to turn against me completely.

  Roberto kept playing me. I scored twice in a 4-2 win over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge and I got another in the 6-1 win over Burnley at the beginning of April when we went 3-0 up inside the first seven minutes.

  By then, we were neck and neck with Spurs for the fourth and final Champions League place. With three games to go, they were one point ahead of us. We beat Aston Villa 3-1 in the next game and I got the last goal. Roberto started me in the next game, the showdown with Tottenham at Eastlands that would decide who finished fourth.

  The Spurs defender, Younes Kaboul went right through me with a bad tackle after about 20 minutes and caught me with his knee in the small of my back. I was having back spasms for the rest of the game. The more the game went on, the more I struggled to run. Eight minutes from time, Kaboul went past me to the byline and cut a cross back. Our keeper, Marton Fulop, pushed it out and Peter Crouch headed it in for the wi
nner.

  So we finished fifth. The whole point of replacing Sparky was supposed to be that Roberto would get us into the top four but it didn’t work. Although I wasn’t terribly fond of Mancini, I was upset for the club. The fans had been tremendous to me from start to finish and I only wanted the best for them. I didn’t feel too bad for them. I knew the good times were just around the corner.

  I had got a fairly clear idea of the way things were going as far as my future was concerned about a month before the end of the season. I’d been accused of getting into a scuffle with a charity worker in Sierra Leone and I sued The Sun over it because it had never happened. It got complicated and in the end I dropped the case but by then it had cost me about £400,000 in legal fees. I asked City if they would pay it off for me and take it out of my wages month by month the following season.

  “We don’t know if you’re going to be here next season,” Brian Marwood said.

  I was annoyed. I told him he was taking the piss. But I suppose I should have seen it coming really. Things were moving on and Roberto had no particular loyalty to me. It wasn’t personal. These things aren’t usually. It was just about one man’s vision for the club and whether you fit into it or not.

  So the game against Spurs was the last time I ever pulled on a City shirt. Mancini took me off six minutes from the final whistle and that was the end of my City career. I wasn’t selected for the last game of the season against West Ham at Upton Park and, during the summer, rumours started to circulate that City were offering me around to other clubs.

  I knew that Liverpool were trying to get me back. Roy Hodgson had taken over and they wanted me on loan but City said they weren’t interested in a loan. Then Tottenham were pushing and pushing but City told them they wanted £10m. Spurs are never going to pay that for a 31-year-old. Daniel Levy is too cute for that.

  Steve Walford rang to say that Martin O’Neill wanted to take me to Villa. He said City were offering me in part-exchange for James Milner. Steve McClaren rang me, too. He was manager of Wolfsburg at the time and he said my name had been mentioned as a makeweight for City’s attempts to sign Edin Dzeko. I didn’t like that. I didn’t want to be a makeweight for any deal. I wanted to decide where I would go but it was obvious City were getting increasingly keen to offload me.

  I suppose I’d known it was coming but it still hurt. I had begun to come to terms with the idea that I wasn’t going to play any further part in the great revolution that was sweeping over the club but I was also acutely aware of what I was going to miss out on. I did feel some regret about leaving City because I could see what was coming and what they were going to achieve.

  But I knew I would be a bit-part player and I didn’t want that. I had been through all that at Liverpool and I didn’t want to do it again. It wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to be playing, not watching and wondering whether I was going to see my name on a teamsheet or not. At some point, City named a Uefa squad and my name wasn’t among the 25. I got told by the media about that. It could not get any clearer what was happening.

  I didn’t know what to do. All the transfer talks seemed to have broken down so when pre-season began, I did the only thing I could and went back to train with City. I gave it everything in the first weeks of pre-season. I didn’t have much contact with Roberto but I trained hard and tried to make an impression. The first pre-season match was against Valencia. I was on the bench. Mancini used every substitute except me. As messages go, it wasn’t very subtle.

  Garry Cook rang and said he was unhappy about the situation. He said the way things were was no good to anyone. But he made it clear that Roberto ran the show in terms of making the decisions about who came in and who went out. Garry asked me what I wanted to do and I said I just wanted to play at a good level somewhere. He said I would have to give up on the idea of going to Spurs because they were trying to get me on the cheap. He said Celtic had been on, too. I didn’t want to go back up there. It was too far from my family.

  “What about Cardiff?” he said.

  26

  Home And Away

  What about Cardiff? The team my dad supported, the scarf my father wore, all that sort of stuff. There was an emotional pull to the idea, of course. I was a Liverpool fan but Cardiff is where I’m from and Cardiff will always be my home. I had always been determined that I would play for them at some point in my career. It was just that I had never been sure when.

  When Garry Cook mentioned it, I was sitting in my house on the outskirts of the city. It was a nice, hot day. My garden looked lovely. The kids were playing outside on the lawn. It started to seem like a brilliant idea. I knew I had to get out of City. I thought ‘why not?’

  Things moved fast. City put the idea to Cardiff, who took it to Dave Jones, who was the manager at the time. City offered to pay a big percentage of my wages and the idea was that I would go on loan for a year. It suited City, too. It got me out of Mancini’s hair and ensured that I couldn’t come back to Eastlands with one of their rivals and embarrass them.

  Soon, the news of the proposed move leaked out. The city went nuts about it. Before I’d even signed, everyone was saying Cardiff were bound to get promoted now. They were rejoicing about the idea that there was going to be a Welsh club in the Premier League for the first time. Everybody began to get a little bit ahead of themselves.

  But the deal gained a momentum all of its own and the next thing you know, I’d signed. I was in a bit of a state of shock. I hadn’t really intended to be playing in the Championship just yet. I’d just been at one of the richest clubs in the world and now I was playing in the second tier. I had always wanted to play for Cardiff. I just wasn’t sure whether now was the right time. Still, I knew I had to get out of City. I knew it would drive me mad playing in the reserves and I knew it was bound to lead to conflicts of one type or another. I kidded myself that I was doing it so I could be closer to my family. The truth was I didn’t really have much choice.

  I wasn’t in a great state physically. I had been trying so hard to prove a point to City in pre-season that I had taken part in every training session and every double training session. I knew it was dangerous for me to do that after all my knee operations and sure enough, it came back to haunt me. I played in a friendly for Wales against Luxembourg at the beginning of August and my knee swelled up after the game. But I knew how much was expected of me. I knew that now was not the time to be trying to rest and recuperate.

  Cardiff had finished fourth in the Championship the season before but had missed out on promotion when they lost to Blackpool in the play-off final. There were some concerns that it would be hard to bounce back from that and that it would infect the new season but before I signed we started the 2010-11 campaign with a draw at home to Sheffield United and a win at Derby County.

  I felt the pressure as soon as my signing became official the week after the Luxembourg match. There was a huge banner advertisement with my face on it hanging from the ramparts of Cardiff Castle as soon as the news was officially announced. The town was abuzz with it. My debut at the Cardiff City Stadium against Doncaster Rovers on August 21 was sold out.

  And that debut was like a dream. My old man had travelled everywhere to watch me play during my career but I knew it would mean something extra special to him to see me running out for the team he had always supported. And it meant something special to me, too. Dave Jones made me captain and so I ran out at the head of my home-town team.

  I didn’t feel I played particularly well but I helped set up the first goal for Jay Bothroyd. I hit a great pass to free Chris Burke to put us 3-0 up and then I scored a decent goal to round off a 4-0 win. Scoring in front of the Cardiff fans felt immense. The write-ups in the papers the next day called it ‘the perfect debut’ and, for what it was worth, it left us second in the table.

  After the game, though, my knee swelled up again. I had to have it drained of fluid during the week and I needed a pain-killing injection in order to be able to play against Portsmo
uth at Fratton Park the following Saturday. I was eager to help Wales get off to a good start in our Euro 2012 qualifying campaign and I played the full 90 minutes against Montenegro the next weekend. We lost 1-0. My knee ballooned again.

  I knew there was something wrong but I was desperate not to be injured. No one knew what percentage of my wages Cardiff were paying but there was a lot of speculation about it. I knew people would be saying I was taking it easy, that I didn’t care and that I was a waste of money. I felt the pressure even more. I had to play and get the team up to the Premier League or I would be a failure.

  I knew the recent history of the club. I knew how the supporters had been let down before by big-name signings who never quite reproduced the form of the days that had made them famous. Players like Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Robbie Fowler had come to Cardiff late in their careers and been disappointments. It wasn’t their fault but that was Cardiff’s curse. They wanted to attract big-name players but the only ones that ever arrived were past their prime.

  My knee wasn’t getting any better. I saw a surgeon and he said it would get better with rest and that I didn’t need another operation. I was out for about five weeks. I came back against Barnsley at Oakwell at the beginning of October and scored in a 2-1 win that kept us second in the table behind the runaway leaders, QPR. My knee swelled up again.

  I tried everything. I hired Raymond Verheijen to come and work with me and paid his salary out of my own pocket. But it was a constant struggle to stay fit enough to play. I couldn’t train from match to match and I felt like a shadow of the player I had been the season before. Jones substituted me in most matches. I was being nursed along.