Craig Bellamy - GoodFella (18 page)

We desperately tried to rescue things. We laid siege to the Motherwell goal. But then they broke forward and McDonald scored again with a shot that looped over Douglas via a deflection from one of our defenders.

And then the final whistle blew. We had lost 2-1.

Rangers won at Hibs and that was it. We had lost the league by a point. I was vaguely aware that the noise of a helicopter buzzing overhead had disappeared. It was carrying the SPL trophy with it. It had flown away from Fir Park. It was heading to Easter Road.

It was a desperate, desperate feeling. We went into the changing rooms and there was just silence. I have heard Neil Lennon say in the years that have elapsed since then that it was the most sickening blow of his career. Martin didn’t attempt to disguise his disappointment, either.

We still had the Scottish Cup Final to prepare for the following weekend but nobody wanted to think about that. Martin just muttered something about seeing us on Wednesday or Thursday. That was it.

I was in shock. I went back to my apartment where Claire and the kids were waiting. But I needed to be by myself. I left them at the apartment, went straight to the airport and got a flight to Cardiff. I didn’t sleep for two days.

I felt tormented.

I thought I was cursed, I thought I was destined never to win anything.

That was typical of the rubbish that used to go through my head in those days. I tortured myself for not passing at a certain moment, or not taking a chance I should have taken.

I stayed at my mum and dad’s house and drank. I wallowed in self-pity for a while. I didn’t think about Claire and the kids being by themselves in Glasgow.

Eventually, I snapped out of it and told myself I had to get ready for the final. I still felt distraught about what had happened at Fir Park. I still couldn’t believe it. But I knew there was a chance to salvage something.

There was extra emotion attached to the game because it was Martin O’Neill’s last game as manager. He was going to take some time off so that he could help care for his wife, who was suffering from cancer, and nobody really thought he would be back.

We were up against Dundee United. It was another match we were expected to win but after what happened against Motherwell, no one was taking anything for granted.

We went ahead early. Alan Thompson scored in the 11th minute and we never really felt threatened after that. We couldn’t get a second goal and Chris Sutton missed a penalty but we were not punished for it this time.

I felt a sense of elation when the final whistle blew. Martin went up to lift the trophy himself. He was very popular with the players and everyone was keen to make the gesture because they knew it was the end of an era.

It was the end for me, too, at Celtic.

They made noises about wanting to keep me but Newcastle weren’t willing to extend my loan and I knew it was not realistic to think that Celtic would be able to afford either the transfer fee Newcastle would ask or my wages.

I had loved my time up there but I have never been able to shake the regret about the way we lost the league.

I had finally won a trophy but I did not feel liberated by it.

I felt like a failure. I felt like the process of rebuilding my career had only just begun.

18

Destiny Calls

T
he summer after I lost the league with Celtic, I took a month’s holiday in Majorca with my family. I didn’t know where I was going to be playing at the start of the following season. I knew I wasn’t going back to Newcastle and it was clear to me that even though Celtic would have liked me to stay, they couldn’t afford me.

A couple of days before I went away, I met David Moyes at the Celtic Manor hotel just outside Newport. I really enjoyed talking to him. I had always liked the way Everton played under Moyes. I loved their work ethic and their attitude.

The fans are right on top of you at Goodison Park, too. It is a difficult place to go and play when you are in the opposing team.

Moyes was very persuasive. I felt a bid odd about the prospect of joining them because I had been a committed Liverpool fan since I was a young kid. But a lot of Evertonians end up playing for Liverpool and I thought it would be typical if I ended up doing it the other way round.

I spoke to David O’Leary at Aston Villa a couple of times and there was interest from Benfica and Fiorentina but Moyes had sold me on Everton.

The more I thought about it while I was in Majorca, the more I liked the idea of going to Goodison. I agreed terms with them and when I got back from holiday I went up to meet Moyes at his house near Preston. I took my suitcase with me so I could move into a hotel that night and start pre-season training the next day. I was excited about it.

But when I got to his house, I could tell straight away that something had changed. It was like talking to a different bloke. He seemed tense and hostile.

He presented me with a list of rules. They were very detailed and exact. They tried to imagine certain scenarios and dictate how I would react. “If I ask you to move to the right in the 60th minute, I don’t want you shaking your head” or “If you have got something to say, do not speak to anyone else about it, come and see me.”

They went on and on. I thought ‘where are we going with this?’ It was a completely different individual to the guy I was speaking to a month ago. It was as if he had spoken to someone who had changed his mind about me. He seemed to have got cold feet. It felt like he was looking for a way out. It was bizarre. If we hadn’t had a second meeting, I would have signed anyway. Now I couldn’t.

It was awkward. Bill Kenwright, the Everton chairman, was on the phone saying that all the arrangements were in place for the medical once the formalities had been completed with Moyes. My representative didn’t go into details. He just told Mr Kenwright I had had a change of heart. It was a real blow to me. I had to get in my car and drive back to Cardiff.

A few weeks later, Moyes rang my representative and apologised. I don’t hold a grudge about it. I’ve got a lot of time for him and he tried to sign me a couple of times subsequently. I don’t blame him, really. My guess is that someone had told him I would be trouble and he panicked a bit. It did leave me in limbo, though. Newcastle had begun pre-season training but even though I was still their player, that chapter was over. They told me to stay away.

A few days after the Everton deal broke down, my representative rang to say he had spoken to John Williams, the Blackburn chairman. Mark Hughes had left the Wales job in September 2004 to take over at Ewood Park, which was a big plus in my thinking. But even though they had reached the FA Cup semi-final in his first season, they had flirted with relegation and finished 15th. I wanted more than that. I said ‘no’.

I thought it was going to be another tough year for them and my confidence was low. I thought they needed someone better than me. I didn’t think I would be good enough to give them the lift they needed and to make them a top half team. After what had happened at Newcastle and the disappointment of missing out on the Scottish title, I felt worthless again.

My representative urged me to go and meet Mark Hughes anyway. At least hear what he had to say. He kept stressing that Sparky was the manager who knew me best and valued me the most. He would look after me. He would breathe life back into my career. He would get my confidence up again. I was still reluctant but I agreed to meet him at the Vale of Glamorgan hotel just outside Cardiff. I owed him that.

After about 10 minutes in his company, I was ready to sign. He said all the right things. He played to my vanity. He said he knew that in the normal course of events, a player of my ability would be beyond Blackburn’s reach. He said he realised I was too good for Blackburn really but that they would give me a platform to show what a player I could be and then I could move on to one of the top clubs.

Sparky said I had been made to look a troublemaker and that I needed to repair my reputation. He reminded me he had known me since I was 15. He knew how I worked. He knew what I needed. He said he would put me on a pedestal and before I knew it, there would be a whole queue of clubs after me. It was a clever pitch. The next day, I went up to Blackburn for the medical.

I was impressed by everything at the club. It was only 10 years since they won the Premier League and the place was still full of class. John Williams was great, the staff were lovely and warm and welcoming and the training facilities were unbelievably good. I realised that this was actually going to be a great opportunity for me. I began to feel more confident even before I had kicked a ball.

I wanted to find out who I was as a player. I was at a crossroads. Was I the player who had struggled to step up a level at Coventry or was I the player who had excelled at Newcastle? Was I capable of moving upwards from here and becoming a genuinely top player?

The same kind of themes were whirring round my mind about my personal life. I knew that Claire had reached the stage where she wanted us to get married and if we didn’t, she was going to leave. That was fair enough. She wanted commitment and I wanted to try to put the way I had behaved in Newcastle behind me. I wanted to try to prove to myself that I could become a decent husband and a better father.

I didn’t want her to leave. Partly, I suppose, that was because I was desperate not to spend any more time away from my kids than I was already spending. I wanted the kids to have the same surname as their mum, too. I needed to become a man for the first time in my life. So on my 26th birthday, July 13th, 2005, I proposed to Claire at The Lowry hotel in Manchester and she accepted.

We bought a house in the countryside just outside Cardiff and decided that this would be our base. No more moving the family around from city to city, trailing around after me when I moved. We wanted the kids to have a settled school life. The plan was for me to come home as often as I could. We knew it would be difficult but we thought it was the best option.

Things didn’t start well at Blackburn. I played in the first game of the season, a 3-1 defeat at West Ham, but then I picked up a thigh injury and missed the next four games. Inevitably, my first game back, in the middle of September, was against Newcastle at Ewood Park. We lost 3-0. Shearer scored. The result left us in the bottom three.

I got plenty of stick from the travelling Newcastle fans at that game. That was fine. I had to suck it all up. I felt some of the Newcastle players were gloating at the end of the game, rubbing the result in for my benefit. Souness came out on to the pitch, applauding the fans and milking it. I went out of my way to make sure I shook his hand. I wanted to show there were no hard feelings.

And there weren’t. Sure, we fell out at Newcastle. He bore some of the responsibility for that. But I accept that it was my fault, too. And I have never lost sight of the fact that the man is one of the best footballers the English game has ever seen. He is a legend, someone who was at the core of the great Liverpool teams. I remember that about him more than anything else.

I didn’t feel too downhearted at the end of the game. It was my first match back after injury. I knew I was going to play a lot better before long. And even though we were heavily beaten, I felt even then that we would have climbed above Newcastle at the end of the season. I knew that we had a better work ethic than them and players who were more hungry for success.

I was right about that. Newcastle’s season quickly went downhill and by the time we played them at St James’ Park at the end of January, Souness was under a lot of pressure. I missed that game with a hamstring injury but we won 1-0 and the crowd was chanting for him to be sacked. A few days later, after a defeat to Manchester City, Freddy Shepherd fired him.

If Newcastle declined after that September victory over us at Ewood Park, we went in the opposite direction. We began to turn things around. The next match was against Manchester United at Old Trafford, with Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Ruud Van Nistelrooy and Paul Scholes pitted against us. We won 2-1 with a couple of goals from Morten Gamst Pedersen and that result was the springboard for our season. We won the next game against West Brom, too, and climbed the table steadily.

We had a decent team. We were hard-working and there was a lot of talent in the side, too. Tugay was a magnificent player and David Bentley is a lad who should have achieved more in his career. We had Lucas Neill at the back and Brad Friedel in goal and I played with a variety of players up front. Paul Dickov, Shefki Kuqi and Florent Sinama-Pongolle all played a number of games but, just as Mark Hughes had promised, the team was focused around me.

We had characters, too. Robbie Savage was at the heart of the team. He was not a particularly talented player but he was honest and he would work himself into the ground for the team. I admired that in him. He was still the insecure lad I knew from the Wales set-up and he could be very loud. He tested my patience at times but I liked him. How he never got battered by some of the other boys, I’ll never know. But I had a lot of time for him. Andy Todd was a good lad, too. He has got a bit of a fearsome reputation after a couple of bust-ups he has had with people. I heard that he gave Dean Kiely a good hiding once when they were teammates at Charlton. He was one of the hardest players I have ever played with and you certainly wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him but I always thought he was a lovely man. I guess we all have a switch.

By mid-season, I was in great form and scoring plenty of goals. Between mid-December and the beginning of March, we won seven times in 10 games, including another victory over Manchester United and a win against Arsenal. We were playing so well that the win over Arsene Wenger’s side moved us above them into fifth place in the table, three points off a Champions League spot with 11 games to go.

We had got to the semi-finals of the Carling Cup, too, losing narrowly to Manchester United over two legs but we kept our league form going. We won our last three games of the season, away to Charlton and at home to the champions, Chelsea, and Manchester City. It wasn’t quite enough to catch Arsenal, who had recovered after we beat them. Arsene Wenger’s team finished fourth.

But we had ended the season only four points off a Champions League place. Spurs were fifth and we finished sixth, in the final Uefa Cup spot. It felt like a great achievement considering where the club had finished the previous season and I felt as though I had rebuilt my reputation. I scored 13 league goals that season and 17 in all competitions. It was a delight playing for Mark Hughes. He helped me believe in myself again.

I felt open-minded about what might happen in the summer. I loved it at Blackburn and I knew I was on to a good thing. They loved me, too. I was voted the club’s Player of the Year and Sparky had plans to make me captain the following season. But I had a get-out clause in my contract that meant if a club bid £6m for me within a certain time period before the start of July, then Blackburn would have to release me. They soon opened negotiations with me about buying that get-out clause out of my contract and extending and improving my current deal. They were willing to pay £2m just for me to void the clause.

But then everything changed. My representative phoned to say that Liverpool were interested in buying me. Djibril Cisse had broken his leg playing for France in a warm-up game before the 2006 World Cup and he was going to be out for a long time. They needed a replacement and Rafa Benitez had identified me as the main target.

I loved Liverpool. I’d loved them since I was a kid. They were big in South Wales and they were still the top team when I was growing up in the 1980s but that wasn’t the only reason I supported them. I loved the kit for one thing, that brilliant crispy, shiny red kit that always looked so beautiful against the green of the turf with its big Liver Bird emblem. The first kit I owned was the yellow away kit they wore for the 1985-86 season.

My dad was a Cardiff City fan and I love Cardiff because it’s the club I went to watch as a kid. I don’t care who you are, wherever you are born, you have an affiliation with that club like no other because that’s your club and it represents you and the community you grew up in. That can never change.

But you were on a bit of a hiding to nothing being a Cardiff City fan in the 1980s. They were a Fourth Division club. You couldn’t even buy their kit in the local sports shops. None of my mates supported them. Being a Cardiff fan wasn’t going to give you any bragging rights in the playground.

And there was something about Liverpool that caught my imagination. All their success helped, obviously. But even as a kid, I loved the history. I read all about Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley. I looked at all the stats and the old players. I devoured everything about the history of the club and I stayed true to it.

I am a Liverpool fan and will always remain one. I have lived in Liverpool. I know what it means to come from there. It can be a hard, hard place and it breeds tough, resourceful people. I’ve always been proud to be a supporter. A few years ago, I had ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ tattooed on my side.

The way things worked out, it felt as if I was meant to follow them.

The first game I ever saw at Anfield was the match against Arsenal on May 26, 1989, when Liverpool lost the league title to that late goal from Michael Thomas just a few weeks after the Hillsborough Disaster.