That wasn’t the norm. The idea was that you were offered terms and you accepted them, no questions asked. In my case, the offer was £200 a week. If I played 10 games for the first team, it would be renegotiated and renewed. If it had just been me, £200 would have been great but it wasn’t just me. I had my girlfriend and my kid, too. And the way I looked at it, I was probably better off on £40 a week with my accommodation paid for.
Norwich were a bit taken aback. They called my bluff but I said I would play on until the end of my second year and then take my chances and see what was available elsewhere in the summer. Two other lads had said they were going to do the same thing but they buckled under the pressure straight away and signed. I was painted as some sort of renegade. Some of the senior pros regarded me as an object of curiosity. Other people at the club started to shun me.
I didn’t care. I’d made a lot of sacrifices. I knew I was going to have to make a lot more. I believed in myself and I thought that if Norwich did not improve their offer, I would secure a better contract somewhere else. It wasn’t easy, though. Norwich decided they’d teach me a lesson. I found myself on the bench for the reserves. It lasted four or five weeks but I didn’t buckle.
Then they called me back in. They offered me £250 a week and I agreed. That was funny. If I’d accepted the £200 a week straight away, I would already have had that and could have still negotiated a rise. I probably would have been better off. What an idiot I was. But at least I had got my way. And I felt satisfied that I had done my best. It wasn’t much money, not enough to move Claire up to Norwich, but it got the ball rolling. Next, I wanted to get in the first team, get more appearances, get another contract.
I was playing well for the youth team. We were sailing in the league and progressing in the FA Youth Cup and I was scoring hat-tricks from the position they were playing me in, as a free man in the centre of midfield. I had a licence to go wherever I wanted and it suited me. I found it very comfortable and I felt that I was getting closer and closer to a spot in the first team.
Then one day in late February, I came in from training and Terry Postle, the kit man, called me into his little room and asked if he could have a word.
He told me my dad had just called to say that Claire had gone into labour. I was just a kid. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know whether to be excited or afraid for her or what.They got me over to the station and I got the train to London and then on to Cardiff. I was on the train for five hours and I thought I’d probably miss the birth. But when I got up to Heath Hospital, the same hospital where I had been born 17 years earlier, I found the room where she was, with her mum and her auntie. She was still in labour.
I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be in the room. We were kids. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like a spare part. Then my nan rang. So I went outside and chatted to her and during that call, Claire gave birth to our son, Ellis. I froze a little bit. I didn’t know what to do. I was just praying she and the baby were both well.
It all seemed like a blur. It was amazing when I saw him for the first time, amazing when I knew everything was okay. I slept at my parents’ that night and then went back up to the hospital the next morning. There were other new parents in the ward and I felt embarrassed because I was still a boy. But I wasn’t going to have anyone looking down on us, thinking ‘we’ll have to pay for those kids’.
I knew I was going to provide for Claire and my baby. I was going to pay my own way. We were young and it was going to be difficult but I knew I’d do it. The first night Ellis came home, we were in Claire’s bedroom and we slept on a mattress right next to him. Just listening to him breathe…I didn’t sleep a wink. I was just listening to him, holding my own breath until he breathed again.
It was a magical couple of days but I knew I had to go. I had to get back up the road. Football doesn’t stop. I knew I needed to get back quickly because I needed to get into that first team. I knew that the task of providing for Ellis had started in earnest now and I had to move up to another level. It had to start with me going back to Norwich that day. Claire’s mum promised me they would look after them both. And so I left.
Nobody mentioned it much to me back in Norwich. Football’s football. Everyone’s looking after themselves. You’re here, you’re back, that’s it. No little gifts from older pros. Nothing like that. You just got on with it. That was how I approached it. I didn’t expect anything different. I went back to The Limes with Robert Green and Darren Kenton. I made Tom Ramusat the godfather. I threw myself back into training.
I was hardly at the digs because I was training all the time. The other YTS boys knew what I was doing. Maybe in other circumstances, some of the other lads might have thought I was being busy, trying to make myself popular with the coaches, being a teacher’s pet. But they had seen how I had behaved the year before and the change that had come over me since I had found out I was going to be a father and I think they understood. I think they were thinking ‘look at Bellers now’. They understood my focus.
I made my first team debut against Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park on March 15, 1997, less than a month after Ellis was born. Norwich were in the First Division, the second tier of English football, and by the time I broke through, we were no longer contending for promotion. We had started well under Mike Walker but we went 10 games without a win before Christmas which put paid to our ambitions of going up to the Premier League. We lost 5-1 and 6-1 in consecutive matches away at West Brom and Port Vale in December.
There were a lot of decent players at the club, though. Bryan Gunn was a good keeper, Ian Crook and Mike Milligan were fine midfielders, Darren Eadie had a lot of pace out wide and there was Robert Fleck up front. I got about two minutes at the end of that game against Palace. There was no question of a call to my parents so that they could get to the game to watch my debut. It all felt very last minute. I was wearing a kit that was about three sizes too big for me, I touched the ball twice, we lost 2-0 and it was over.
It wasn’t the proudest time in Norwich’s history. That had probably come a few years earlier when they led the Premier League for most of the season during its first year of existence. They finished third in the end but the following year, they beat Bayern Munich in the Olympic Stadium in the Uefa Cup before losing to Inter Milan.
Those were the years when I first started travelling over from Cardiff to play for the boys’ team but by the time I joined as an apprentice in the summer of 1995, it was very different. The club had been relegated from the Premier League at the end of the previous season and there was some brutal cost-cutting going on as the club tried to adapt to its reduced circumstances.
I found out how ruthless football was that season. Martin O’Neill left after a few months in a row over money. I saw kit men who had worked at the club for years and years sacked. And the same with tea ladies. That was my introduction to the reality of football. It is ruthless. Clubs don’t care. Money’s tight and if things have to give way, they will give way. It does not matter how many years you have been somewhere. There is no loyalty in this game. I saw that early doors due to all that. What is more important: players or the club’s existence? It’s the club’s existence. Not us. Players come and go.
I wasn’t under any illusions about that. I knew how easy it would be to become a victim of football rather a beneficiary of everything it could offer. I was disappointed with my debut at Palace because I barely got a touch and it felt like an anti-climax. But it was one more goal achieved. I was 17 when I made my debut, just like Ryan Giggs had been, and now I wanted to kick on.
The week after my first team debut, I was sub for the youth team. It was their way of saying ‘don’t think you’ve made it’. That was fair enough. It was my motto anyway. It was perfect for me. I didn’t think I was a professional yet, really. I wasn’t expecting that everything would suddenly start coming easily. I knew I had to go away and work even harder.
At least I could see some rewards for the effort I was
putting in. The youth team won the South East Counties League and soon after we had clinched the title, I played for the first team again in the last home game of the season against Manchester City on a Friday night. I got 10 or 15 minutes this time and I felt like I made a contribution.
City had been relegated from the Premier League the year before and they still had some good players but I did okay against them. Ian Crook fed me the ball all the time and I played a couple of quick one-twos with him. I played centre midfield and I was roaming everywhere. The crowd took to me straight away, this little kid playing in a kit that was still way too big for him.
The last game of the season was Oldham away. I came off the bench again. It was all part of my education and a place like Boundary Park was a hard school. I nearly gave a goal away with a loose backpass and it gave me a real shock. I felt uncomfortable in that game.
The Oldham players seemed like giants. They were strong, direct and physical. It didn’t scare me but it did make me realise I was going to have to work hard that summer if I was going to impress in the first team. We lost 3-0.
I went home to Cardiff. I lived at Claire’s mum’s that summer, getting used to being a father and caring for Ellis. I was also coming to terms with the fact that I had an awful lot to lose and that I couldn’t afford to take any risks any more. I knew by that stage that I wasn’t too far away from getting a full cap for Wales, which would bring a new level of recognition, particularly in Cardiff.
It hit me with a jolt that I couldn’t really go round to my mates’ flats any more. What happens if I’m round there and they invite some other lads round and they start smoking cannabis or other stuff? I can’t tell them what not to do in their own place. And what happens if the police come running into that place? I’d get arrested and my name would be all over the papers even though I hadn’t done anything.
Not many people cared about Norwich City in Trowbridge. I knew that. In fact, interest in football generally in the area was at a bit of a low with Cardiff stuck in the Fourth Division. But people were aware that I was a footballer and I knew that, with my career looking as though it might be about to take off, I couldn’t afford any suggestions of bad behaviour to get back to Norwich. That would set me right back.
So I totally shut myself off from my old friends. I stopped going to the Hippo Club in Cardiff, a dance music place behind the train station, which had been one of my haunts. I knew then my life had gone in a different direction and even though they were my friends, my friends knew it too.
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
An 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 w
eek. 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.
Craig Bellamy - GoodFella Page 5
