Craig Bellamy - GoodFella (30 page)

30

The Only Way Is Up

M
y mind was in turmoil at the start of the 2012-13 season. It was probably the worst time of my life. I was still struggling to cope with Speedo’s death, I was being confronted with the realities of the break-up with my wife, I had turned my back on Liverpool and I was beginning to wonder whether I even wanted to play football any more. I moved into an apartment in Penarth, a few miles from Cardiff city centre. It looked out over the Bristol Channel and sometimes the sight of the sea brought me a bit of peace.

It was the first time I had put my family in front of my career. I had tried to convince myself I was doing that when I had played for Cardiff a couple of seasons before but I was deluding myself. I was so disillusioned with what was happening at Manchester City back then that I would have gone and played in Chechnya just to get away.

Now, I really was doing it for my family but I still felt dislocated from my kids. I couldn’t live in the house I had bought for me and my family any more and I had been naïve about how much I would be able to see my kids. I thought I’d be able to have them pretty much every day, pick them up from school all the time, look after them in the evenings. But it wasn’t like that. My access was strictly limited, like it is for a lot of divorced fathers. I found that very hard. I still do.

I felt overwhelmed by it all. I played in our opening league game against Huddersfield at the Cardiff City Stadium, which we won 1-0 with a late, late goal, but I felt exhausted after the Olympics. I was struggling to come to terms with everything that was going on in my personal life and when I got a minor calf strain, I asked Malky Mackay if I could have some time off.

I told him I needed to adjust to everything that was going on. I couldn’t lead the team when I wasn’t leading myself. I didn’t know when I was going to come back. I didn’t know if I wanted to come back. The club was brilliant. Vincent Tan, the owner, and the chairman, Dato Chan Tien Ghee, who everyone knew as TG, told me to take all the time I needed.

I took a couple of weeks off. I played a lot of golf. I got bored shitless. Rumours started to spread that I had retired. Then I thought ‘fuck that, I’m a footballer’. And I went back to work.

There was a huge change from when I had been at Cardiff under Dave Jones. I knew I had made a mistake within a week of signing the last time. But now, things were so different. Discipline was better. Nobody turned up late for training. Nobody was allowed to drive silly distances just to get to training every day. Malky was hard line. We all worked. There were no exceptions, no prima donnas, no one excused when it came to tracking back. We were a team. We were all in it together and after they had been so understanding about what I was going through, I felt I owed it to the group of players to become a valuable member of the team.

It took me a while to get back up to speed. Anyone who has been through a divorce knows you are fighting a number of battles. Like I say, I had a lot of sleepless nights. It’s a difficult period for anyone. I had to play through that but I needed football to help me through it as well. The players at Cardiff pulled me through it. There was no resentment from them. There was no feeling I was shirking my responsibilities, which there easily could have been.

The manager was open with the rest of the players about what I was going through and they were brilliant with me about it. I was invited out to dinner with them. I was given all the encouragement and all the space I needed. I realised then that this was a group with real character. I owe them more than I will ever be able to repay.

I returned to the side in the middle of September and scored in the victory over Leeds but then a few weeks later, I ruptured my ankle ligaments in a home win over Watford. I was out for almost a month. We lost a couple of games but we won a few tough ones, too, and I started to think it might be our year. From the sidelines, I watched the team closely and I saw how hard they worked. No one in the division worked harder.

This was a group I wanted to be a part of. I loved their attitude. No one slagged each other off. There was no bitchiness. The manager was brilliant. I began to realise I’d never been involved in more of a team than I was now. Even when we weren’t playing well, everyone did their bit to try to turn it around. Even the boys on the bench were willing the team on and that’s not always the case in football, believe me.

There was one divisive issue at the club around the start of the season, although it was nothing to do with the players. In the face of a lot of opposition from the fans, Vincent Tan had changed Cardiff’s home kit from its traditional blue to red. Red is viewed as a strong colour in parts of Asia, including Malaysia where Vincent is from, and he thought the move would help with the marketing of the club for that reason.

I understood the opposition of the fans but I was okay with the change. I was looking at the bigger picture. Vincent was putting a lot of money and commitment into the club. If he wanted to change the kit, it didn’t bother me. He owned the football club and I worked for him. The way I saw it, he was giving me the opportunity to have a decent shot at helping Cardiff get into the Premier League and in that context, the colour of the kit wasn’t a problem for me.

In an ideal world, you would want your traditional colours but nothing in this world is ideal. You have to be prepared for change and if this is the change it takes for us to be a much more stable and powerful club, we have to be prepared to do that.

I didn’t actually give it that much thought. There were more important things to worry about. I knew how hard it was going to be to get to the Premier League.

The Championship is the hardest league in football. The pitches, the referees, the unpredictability: it is difficult for every single team. In that situation, you have to work and work and work. Our Prozone stats showed we worked harder than anyone.

I came back from the ankle injury in the middle of November for a home game against Middlesbrough. We won that and when we beat Barnsley at Oakwell the following Saturday, we went back to the top of the league. I knew then it would take quite a lot to shift us but I also thought that there was a group of other sides that would start to challenge us.

I thought Leicester would be strong and Middlesbrough. I’d been worried about Wolves, too. You are always wary of the teams that were relegated from the Premier League the season before. Look at Blackburn. They spent £8m on Jordan Rhodes. I thought they would be a threat, too. You always know there is going to be a surprise package as well, and this season it was Watford.

When people looked at Cardiff and the players we had, they were surprised that we were in the mix for promotion. Because you look at us and you don’t see stars. You see grafters. Malky Mackay was given the option to spend money. In fact, when the January transfer window came around, the club was urging him to spend. He didn’t want to.

He had spent the best part of two years building a team that had got where it was because of hard work and he was very wary of upsetting the team spirit by bringing in someone who might not share the same mindset. I understood exactly why he was concerned about that. We are more of a team than any team I have been involved with and that’s what you need most of all in the Championship. Because games come thick and fast, you have to be together.

We tried to abide by the old rule of approaching the season one game at a time. We never looked at other teams. Never looked at Palace or Leicester. Never thought about how many points we would be ahead of someone if we won one game or drew another. No one mentioned promotion. We weren’t scared of it. It was just one game at a time.

Before every single game, the manager had a number of team talks and the preparation was fantastic. The last thing he did before we walked out on to the pitch was put up a sign on the board. ‘Individuals win games, team work and intelligence wins championships’, it said. It was similar to something Michael Jordan once said and the manager left it on the board every time we went out.

And that was us. That was Cardiff City. I never thought of myself as an individual during last season. I thought of myself as someone who was giving everything for the team. We got where we got through sheer hard work and doggedness. If we weren’t going to win, the opposition was going to have to play damn well to beat us. We never gave an easy defeat away.

We were still top of the table going into the Christmas period. On December 22, we went to Leicester and won 1-0. Leicester started strongly but we limited their chances and managed to hold them. Then I scored to put us ahead and we locked the door. We saw it out. It felt like a big win.

Then we beat Crystal Palace, Millwall and Birmingham, away, in the space of six days. Each time it was by a single goal. We were grinding games out. We didn’t play particularly well in any of those games but we won them all. And at the start of the new year, we were seven points clear of Hull City, who were second. There was distance between us and the rest and no one ever really narrowed the gap.

No one put a run together to exert any pressure on us. The form teams towards the end of the season were the relegation teams. And until a few weeks before the end of the season, no one really talked about us that much. Maybe it was because of our lack of stars and lack of controversy, but we pretty much went under the radar. We played one home game on Sky all season and that was the first match of the season.

We did begin to tie up a little bit when the prize was in sight. We only won one game in March, a month that was bookended by defeats to Middlesbrough and Peterborough. But even then, none of our pursuers took advantage. Hull, Leicester, Crystal Palace and Watford were all dropping points, too. Nottingham Forest came with a bit of a run but they were starting from too far back to be a real danger to us.

By April, we were close. Really close. We drew at Watford, who were third, on a Saturday evening and that was a big step forward. It kept them at arm’s length. There was a hiccup when we were leading Barnsley deep, deep into injury time in a midweek home game only for them to steal a deflected equaliser with the last kick of the match. But a few days later, we battered Forest and Watford lost at Peterborough.

Hull, who were second, could still catch us but now we were 12 points clear of Watford with four games left to play. We only needed a draw at home to Charlton the following Tuesday to be out of reach of Watford and sure of promotion.

The excitement building up to the Charlton game was great. You couldn’t get a ticket for love nor money. This was it. This was something the city and the region had been waiting 56 years for, something that we had begun to think would never come.

Now we were one point away from the realisation of the dream.

It was difficult to know how to approach it. The excitement around the ground was all-consuming. I couldn’t think. We only needed a point but the idea of playing for a draw is foreign to any player. I did my utmost not to get carried away because I knew that it might not happen that night. But I desperately wanted it to happen. I wanted it to happen here in Cardiff, in front of our own fans, in front of friends and family, in the city where I grew up.

I felt emotionally exhausted before the game even began. I just hoped adrenaline would get me through. Charlton were a useful side and they had come into form but we tore into them in the first half, eager to get the goal to settle our nerves. But the goal never came and in the second half, the mood changed.

Now, we were concentrating on not losing the game. Now we were focused on getting that solitary point.

I made bigger efforts to sprint back to cover than I made to sprint forward to attack, put it that way.

With about five minutes to go, the crowd started going ballistic. Something had happened. Watford were playing at Millwall and I assumed there had been a goal. I looked across at the manager. I couldn’t hear him but I could see that he was mouthing ‘Watford are losing’. Millwall had taken the lead in the 83rd minute. If it stayed that way, it meant we were up whether we got a point or not. I tried to ignore it. I told the players to concentrate. “We’ve got to get this done,” I kept saying.

The crowd celebrations did us a favour. It brought the game to a premature end, effectively. The last five minutes turned into a bit of a practice match. It was one of those strange psychological things where Charlton didn’t really want to do anything to spoil the party and we didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise what we had.

I saw the fourth official come to the touchline to hold up the board to show how much added time there was. It said three minutes. That was a relief. Things started to happen in slow motion. I noticed every single detail. I saw expressions on faces in the crowd. I looked around at my teammates. I saw the ref nodding to the linesmen, intimating that he was about to blow the final whistle. I saw him signal to the Charlton captain to get their keeper in before the crowd invaded the pitch. I realised that there were only a few seconds left.

Then he blew. When he blew that whistle I just dropped to my knees. One, because I was so knackered and two, because I couldn’t believe it was done. I couldn’t believe this thing that had seemed like an impossible dream had actually been achieved. I had come so close to things so many times in my career but this was the thing I wanted most and we had done it.

The fans came rushing on. It was carnage. Happy carnage. Eventually, I made it back to the tunnel and gazed around at the joy on the faces of the other players. I saw the club doctor, Len Nokes. We call him Doctor Len but he’s actually a professor and I’ve known him my whole career, since I was 16 and he was the doctor of Wales Under-21s.

He has given so much for the club and I knew how much he had always yearned for this moment. We hugged each other for a couple of minutes. We were both tearful. I wanted to soak it up but it was difficult. Everyone got to share it. The staff, the people in the media department, the groundsmen. This meant an awful lot to an awful lot of people.