Craig Bellamy - GoodFella (5 page)

My life was different. My focus was different. Providing for Ellis was what really mattered to me. I couldn’t afford any mistakes. I felt that I had a genuine chance of making it to the big time as a footballer. I was close now, really close. It was hard but I knew I had to completely sacrifice my friends.

If I couldn’t speak to them ever again, I wouldn’t.

5

In At The Deep End

A
n agent called Johnny Mac had started sniffing around me. I looked at his profile on the internet the other day. Next to the slot where it asks for your education, he had written: ‘Hard Knocks’. He was okay. I was 17. I was going to be in the
Norwich first team. I was doing interviews without having a clue what to say. I needed some representation.

I hit my quota of 10 first team appearances fairly quickly at the start of the 1997-98 season. That triggered a clause that said the club had to renegotiate my contract. They called me in and offered me £500 a week. I refused. I wanted to move Claire and Ellis up to Norwich so we could be together but I wanted to do it properly.

Johnny Mac said he would go in and sort it out. He had a meeting with the club. He got the wages up to £750 a week with various add-ons and that was fine by me. I just wanted to get it done. I went to watch a reserve team match that night and bumped into the chief executive. I hadn’t spoken to Johnny Mac but I told the chief executive I’d sign the next day and we shook hands.

The next day came. On my way into training, my phone rang. It was Johnny Mac. “Whatever you do, don’t sign that contract,” he said.

He told me that Crystal Palace, who had been promoted to the Premier League the previous summer, wanted to buy me. The Palace chairman, Ron Noades, had offered Norwich £2m to buy me and they were offering me £2,500 a week. I was a bit wide-eyed about that. It was a big jump in salary. And they were Premier League. It was my dream to play in the Premier League.

I had to go in to Mike Walker’s office because I knew they were waiting in there with the contract for me to sign. They were all smiles when I walked in. It was awkward. I just told them I wasn’t signing. Mike Walker and the chief executive looked at each other.

“Can I ask why?” the manager said.

I just said that I had been told not to sign it.

He and the chief executive looked at each other again.

“Get out of my office,” Mike Walker said.

So I was public enemy number one again. I felt bad about it but it wasn’t just about me. If it was just about me, I would have signed every time and just got on with my football. But I had made a conscious decision that everything was for Claire and Ellis. I had to stick it out for them. I wanted them to have more.

Norwich didn’t banish me. I stayed in the first team. Crystal Palace’s interest got even stronger and so Norwich called Johnny Mac in. They told him the club wanted ridiculous money for me and if I wanted to go, I would have to ask to leave. Johnny Mac asked me what I wanted to do but then said that staying at Norwich would be my best bet. He said there would be other moves in the future. He said I still had a lot to learn and I just had to keep progressing.

I didn’t know what was going to happen if I went to Crystal Palace. My mind was in turmoil. I left it a couple of weeks and then I went back in and signed exactly the same £750-a-week contract Norwich had been offering me in the first place. So much for the great negotiator.

It was for the best. Things went well for me at Norwich that season. I’d spat my dummy when I wasn’t included in the squad for the pre-season tour to Ireland and I pulled my thigh in training a few days later but, after that, everything was okay. Steve Foley told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. He reminded me it was a long season and that I had plenty of time. I knew he was right but when you’re a kid you want everything now.

Everybody was hoping that 1997-98 would be the season that Mike Walker would recapture some of the magic of his first spell in charge at Norwich and there was a lot of optimism around the first game of the season against Wolves at Carrow Road. I came off the bench for the last 20 minutes but it turned out to be the Robbie Keane show. He scored twice on his Wolves debut and we lost 2-0.

We got battered in the next game at Nottingham Forest and then lost at home to Crewe, too. But I found I was playing all the time. If Mike Walker didn’t pick me one week, I’d be back in the next week. I made 38 appearances that season, usually in centre midfield. I scored 13 goals and revelled in the role. I was probably responsible for plenty of the goals we conceded, too, many of which originated from the fact that I didn’t track the opposition’s runners well enough.

The optimism around the club had died but perhaps in a way that helped me. Maybe if the club had been pressing for promotion, first team opportunities for someone like me would have been limited but Norwich had been plunged into a financial crisis as it tried to adapt to no longer being in the Premier League and as a result, young lads like me were getting a chance.

I probably wouldn’t have had such a good career if I hadn’t got all that experience with Norwich. I probably wouldn’t have developed into the player I became if I had been stuck in the reserves at a club where it was impossible for a kid to force his way into the first team. I felt for the fans that the club was at such a low ebb but it became more and more obvious its circumstances were providing me with a golden opportunity.

I got more games than my ability deserved. I found some games very difficult physically and I was fatigued by playing twice a week. That meant my performances were inconsistent. My body was still maturing and I was still growing but I wasn’t rested because we had a lack of players. There wasn’t really anyone else they could draft in. Some games I felt drained. Some I felt great.

Robert Fleck and Iwan Roberts played up front and Darren Eadie scored plenty of goals, too. Eadie was decent. He was quick and direct. He wasn’t a clever player but he could do something. He scored plenty of goals. Iwan struggled with his weight a bit. I liked Fleck. He knew he was on his way out. He knew he was coming to the end of his career and his legs were gone but he was always generous to me with advice.

During that year, a guy called Peter Grant came in from Celtic and played alongside me in central midfield. He had been a cult figure at Celtic because of his love for the club and his combative style. His attitude was immense. He was in his early 30s by the time he arrived at Carrow Road but I was impressed by the way he looked after himself, the way he trained, the weights he did and the commitment he showed.

I kind of attached myself to him and he took me under his wing. A lot of the other players were a little bit intimidated by his work ethic because there was still a bit of a drinking culture in the game in those days. After every game there was a crate of beer on the bus, that kind of thing. Actually, a lot of the time, I’d be pouring the beers on the bus. As the youngest member of the team, it was one of my duties. I bit back occasionally but it was just the way it was.

Some of the other senior pros resented me. I seemed to rub them up the wrong way. They thought I was a bit of an upstart. So in training that season, one or two of them would try to clean me out with flying tackles. They wanted to bring me down a peg or two. They were suspicious of the fact that I wanted to work hard. Again, that was the way it was then.

There was a guy called Kevin Scott, a lad from the north east, who had been signed from Tottenham in February 1997 for £250,000. He was a big defender and there was one training game in particular where he took it upon himself to boot me up in the air the entire match. I was nearly in tears. I felt like walking off. Iwan Roberts looked out for me a bit and told me not to bite. The coaches didn’t do anything, though. They were in on it. They didn’t want to penalise Scott, so I just got on with it.

I had to learn the hard way but the thing that kept me going was that I knew I was going to be better than them. I looked at Scott and I thought ‘I ain’t going to be like you. You can say what you want and treat me how you want, but I am going to be a better player than you ever were or ever will be’. They probably knew I felt like that. I didn’t care.

I loved Norwich and I will always be grateful to them for everything they did for me, everything they taught me and the patience they showed me. But I wanted to go on to bigger and better things. I knew I had to work hard and, as far as I was concerned, people like Scott were the example not to follow.

I felt the club had too many players with the wrong attitude. I respected many of them but even though I was a young player, I felt they needed to earn my respect. I was getting players in their 30s who thought they were the best footballer in the world because they once finished fourth in the league talking to me as if I was a piece of shit. But if I had a go at them, if I told them they should have passed the ball earlier or covered back more quickly, they found that impudent and disrespectful. When I play in a match, giving everything to try to win, if I feel you are not doing something right, I am going to tell you. It’s just the way I am. I had Peter Grant on my side, too.

“Wee man,” he used to say, “I wouldn’t change you for the fucking world. You got something to say, you say it and I will back you up.” It was great to have that kind of support from a pro like him.

He was 33 and I was a raw teenager but he would invite me round to his house and I’d have something to eat with him and his wife and his two kids. I thought that if I could train as well as him and look after myself as well as him, knowing that I had more ability than him, then I could have a good career. He said that, too. He said he had got the maximum out of what he had. He told me that if I could apply myself, I would be able to go wherever I wanted to and achieve whatever I wanted to.

I had Claire and Ellis with me by then. After I signed my new contract, I bought an apartment and moved them over. It was a fantastic feeling to be all together at last although it was daunting, too. We were still kids and we had a kid to look after. Everything I had went on that apartment and all my focus was on trying to provide a good life for us.

I was a lot happier once they arrived and I went from strength to strength, even though we were struggling as a side. Between January and April 1998, we went 14 games without a victory and slipped to within three points of the relegation zone. The atmosphere around the club was grim and even though we staged a minor recovery to finish 15th, Mike Walker was sacked just before the end of the season.

It had been hard for Walker. He had been forced to blood a lot of young players and at the same time, some of the older players, stalwarts of the club, were moving towards retirement. Being exiled from the Premier League was really taking its toll financially by then. It had felt like a cutting edge club when I was coming up through the ranks, full of new ideas and optimistic about the future. That had gone.

Players like me were thrown in at the deep end. I benefited from that but he probably didn’t. I’ll always be grateful to him for giving me my league debut but did I learn anything from him? Not really. Did I learn anything tactically? No. Did I learn anything about how to motivate players? No.

Maybe that was partly because I was still very close to Steve Foley. I was still learning in the game and I was always aware of that. When training with the first team finished, I would still go back with the reserves in the afternoon. I didn’t need to but I wanted to improve. I didn’t settle for just being a first team player. I wanted to play at the top and I knew there was a lot of work to be done.

Foley was my motivation. He watched every game. He was on my case if I did stuff wrong but he was encouraging, too. Walker was sacked at the end of April 1998 and Foley took charge of the last game of the season. It was Reading away and I scored the goal in a 1-0 victory. It was the last game at Elm Park, I think.

Bruce Rioch took over for the start of the 1998-99 season, with Bryan Hamilton as his assistant. It was clear immediately we got back for pre-season training that improvements had been made. That summer, the club had created a new sports science department. We had heart monitors, there were finger pricks to take the bloods for fatigue, there was a new emphasis on diet with a nutritionist. Instead of buying a player for three or four hundred grand, you might as well spend the money on that kind of stuff and get the club right. It felt like the cutting edge was back again. Everything was very professional.

I liked Rioch. He knew the game. He had an army background and was very strict. He struggled to warm to people and some players struggled to warm to him. But he was always willing to try and improve you as a player which was right up my street. He was a sharp observer of the game, too, so when we went on pre-season tour to Ireland and he saw me playing centre midfield, he knew immediately I wasn’t a natural fit there. He had been a pretty good central midfielder himself, which helped.

After we got back from Ireland, he called me into his office the day before another pre-season game against Spurs. He said he could see I was a goalscorer but that he felt I left too many gaps and the team had to adjust to me. He said I sometimes left the team exposed because I was looking to get forward all the time. He was right. He wanted an all-round midfielder.

I had been getting away with playing in central midfield when we were a poor Division One side but he knew I wasn’t what we needed there if we were going to try to press for promotion. He asked me where I wanted to play and I said that if I had a choice, it would be up front. So I started in attack against Spurs. I scored and I played really well. Rioch wasn’t there because he had gone to scout another game but Hamilton was and when the new season started, I was up front.

I scored seven goals in the first eight league games and never played central midfield again. I was the name on everybody’s lips for a while and Norwich moved quickly to head off interest from other clubs, including Spurs. They offered me another new contract, my third in a year. This time, I would be on £2,000 a week. It was a five-year deal that was structured so that, by the fifth year, I would be on £7,000 a week. I signed it straight away. No fuss this time.