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.
And Claire and I went house-hunting. We went to look at a show house. It had four bedrooms and it had two garages. It was the kind of place I had never imagined that I would live in, not in my wildest dreams. We were both still teenagers and we were looking at a house that was miles better than the houses our parents lived in. It was a strange feeling.
Claire fell in love with that house but she thought it was beyond us. I didn’t tell her but I went back to the estate agent and bought it. I took the keys home and pressed them into Ellis’s hand and told him to go and toddle over to mummy on his walker. Claire looked at the keys and they had a tag with the address of the house on them. She thought I’d kept them from the appointment.
“You’ve got to go and give those keys back,” she said.
“No, I haven’t,” I told her. “It’s our bloody house.”
To tell the truth, there was another house I’d liked better. When we first started looking, they took us to look at John Polston’s place.
Polston’s career had fallen into decline since the days when I used to clean his boots and watch him throw the tea I’d made for him down the sink. He’d only played a handful of games for Norwich in 1997-98 and now they were shipping him out to Reading, who were a league below Norwich in the old Division Two, on a free transfer. He wasn’t there when I w
ent round to look at his house. I don’t think his wife enjoyed showing me around too much. She had probably heard a few stories about what an arrogant little prick I was. And now the arrogant little prick, who was only 19, was coming round to look at the house Polston had grafted his whole career for.
I liked that house. I was going to buy it. But then I decided against it. It was odd really but I did it out of respect for Polston, even though I felt he had shown me absolutely none. It felt like it would have been me laughing at him if I had bought his house and I didn’t want to do that. I had no interest in trying to score points over him any more.
I thanked his wife and walked away.
6
Goulden Start
When I first started playing for Wales, it often felt as if I had stumbled into a black comedy. I was incredibly proud to be involved with the national team but when I joined up with the squad for the first time before a friendly against Jamaica at Ninian Park, I spent most of the days leading up to it in a state of wide-eyed bemusement.
It was well-known that there was friction between the manager, Bobby Gould, and John Hartson, who I had got to know quite well from playing with the Wales Under-21s. At my first training camp, Gould got everyone to form a big circle and then told us all that he and Harts were going to go in the centre of the circle and wrestle each other.
He told Harts that he wanted him to use it to vent all his frustration, to rid himself of the resentment he was feeling by expressing himself in the wrestling. I suppose it was the equivalent of getting a kid to hit a punchbag, except in this case the punchbag was the manager of the national team.
Harts was reluctant. He felt awkward about it. For obvious reasons. But the rest of the players were urging him on and telling him he had to do it and that he couldn’t back down. So in the end, Harts went to the middle of the circle. He’s a big bloke and after a few seconds of grappling, he gripped Bobby Gould in a headlock and then flung him across the circle on to the floor.
Everyone was roaring and shouting. I almost had to pinch myself that this was happening. It was a bizarre sight. When Gould got to his feet, he was holding his nose and looking aggrieved. Blood was streaming out of it. He muttered to everyone that they should go for a jog so we set off around the pitch. I couldn’t believe what had just happened.
I came to understand that it wasn’t actually that unusual. I liked Bobby Gould. He was a well-respected man in the game and he was generous to me. I also understood that he was trying to bring new, young players in and that Wales at that time were a comparatively weak football nation but a lot of the new ideas he tried, on and off the pitch, didn’t always work.
He would do things like organise games of charades in the evening. The players didn’t like it. Footballers can be conservative, cautious people in a group and charades never went down particularly well. The only occasions it got animated were when Gould became the object of ridicule in some of the mimes. It was comical but it was heart-wrenching, too, because it was your country. The training, frankly, didn’t impress me.
I made my debut against Jamaica at the ground where I had watched my first football match and seen Wales play for the first time. I was still only 18 and I felt I had achieved something special. At the end of the 1997-98 season, Wales played a couple of friendlies in Malta and Tunisia and I was included in the squads for those games, too.
I started the game against Malta. I played in a three-man midfield alongside Gary Speed and Mark Pembridge and scored my first international goal to put us 1-0 up in a game we went on to win 3-0. The next evening, we were allowed to go into the town for a night out and I went out with Chris Llewellyn and Simon Haworth. Bobby Gould had allowed it but he had asked us to be back at a certain time because we were 18.
We kept our distance a bit from the senior players. Harts was on the trip, too. He was five years older than me and he was out with the senior players. I always thought he was a great guy. He had been in the team when I made my Under-21 debut against San Marino and it was clear then that he was too good to be playing with us. He was at Arsenal and he should have been in the first team. In fact, he was better than three quarters of the first team.
His relationship with Bobby Gould was already poor back then. He scored against San Marino and then booted an advertising hoarding so hard in frustration that he broke it in half. Gould asked him why he had kicked the board, which started a big row about why he had been selected for the Under-21s instead of the senior team in the first place.
Harts is Welsh through and through. He’s a hard boy and confident, too. He would always be on the karaoke and whenever we went out with him, he wouldn’t let anyone else buy a drink. He got every round. Maybe one of the reasons for that was that few others seemed to drink at his pace.
There were a lot of Cardiff fans in Malta that night and there was tension between them and Harts because he was from Swansea. Even though he played for Wales, it sometimes felt there was a chance that the Wales fans might attack him if they bumped into him on a night out. To a lesser extent, it was the same with me. I come from Cardiff but had never played for Cardiff and there were one or two who tried to take me to task because I had left the city to play for Norwich.
I was only a kid and I said something back. Suddenly, there were two or three blokes coming at me and swinging punches. Simon Haworth dragged me into a taxi but I was very close to getting into trouble. It was my first away trip with Wales and it made me realise how careful you have to be, even with your national team. I thought because we were all Welsh, we would all get on but it wasn’t like that. It caught me by surprise.
The next day, we travelled to Tunis. When we arrived at the hotel in Tunis, it was a shocker. Gary Speed said it wasn’t good enough. Bobby Gould agreed and we were moved to another place. It wasn’t the ideal start. Everything seemed to be done on a shoestring with Wales. There was a lot of penny-pinching. Rows like that were not uncommon.
Tunisia had been in England’s group in the 1998 World Cup that was beginning a few days later and they thought British opposition like us would provide them with the perfect test. But I’m afraid we weren’t much of a challenge for them. We had one or two players who weren’t in good shape. They hadn’t ended the season well for their clubs and then they had neglected their fitness before they joined up for international duty.
Those summer games can be difficult. They can be treated as an afterthought. Ryan Giggs and Mark Hughes weren’t there, but there were a few of the younger players who knew we had Italy in the first qualifier for Euro 2000 at the start of the next season and wanted to put themselves in the frame for that. They were hungry to do well – but they were in the minority.
The game kicked off at 3pm in Tunis, so you can imagine the heat. Tunisia gave us a hiding. We played one up front with Harts, who was out of shape and was suffering so much in the heat he could barely move. To make matters worse, we played in this garish green Lotto kit that has never been seen since. I don’t even know where it came from. It was a little bit too small for Harts. None of us looked good in it but he looked worse.
It was a grim afternoon. We were beaten comfortably. Harts and Dean Saunders were substituted midway through the second half and then I got subbed in the last ten minutes.
On the bench, Saunders started moaning about Gould. “What’s he doing, bringing us off? We were the best players,” he said.
Saunders was like that. He liked to start the ball rolling and then sit back. He never said anything to Gould’s face. Deano was always the one at the back of the bus, moaning and chipping away. Gary Speed was the opposite. He would always do it in the open. I loved Speedo for moments like that. He wouldn’t bitch. He said his bit – and he was correct – and then he went quiet. I knew the people who I admired and why.
To be fair to Saunders, a lot of players were unhappy with Bobby Gould before that anyway. After the game, Speedo went ballistic. He said we were a pub team, we were a disorganised rabble who hadn’t got a clue wha
t we were doing. He turned on Gould, too. He told him he had set us back years, that we had been a decent team and now we couldn’t even give sides like Tunisia a game. Gould was reeling. He said Tunisia were a decent team but Speedo went into one. He said England would batter Tunisia and that we should all be ashamed.
I sat there in the dressing room with my head down. I was only 18 and this kind of stuff was new to me in football. ‘This is going to be a tough, tough living,’ I thought to myself. Then the black comedy started again. Gould looked at Chris Coleman.
“There are too many players in this dressing room who think they are better than they are,” he said.
“What are you looking at me for, Bob?” Chris Coleman said.
“I don’t mean you,” Gould said. “I just mean in general.”
The balloon went up again then. All the players were annoyed now and everyone started having a go.
Harts sensed an opportunity to salvage something from a pretty dire afternoon and had a go, too.
“Why did you take me off, by the way?” he said.
“Because you looked overweight, the sun was way too much for you and I thought I was doing you a big, big favour,” Gould said. Harts just looked at him. There wasn’t much of an answer to that and he knew it.
“Okay,” he said.
At least it was never dull with Wales. The following season, I found myself sent back down to the Under-21s squad when the qualifying tie against Italy came around at the beginning of September, 1998. That was fair enough. All the top players who had missed the summer friendlies were back and this was Italy. It was a glamour game. Even the Under-21 match had a smattering of superstars.
We lost 2-1 to our Italian counterparts but that was hardly a disgrace. They had Andrea Pirlo, Gianluigi Buffon and Massimo Ambrosini in their ranks, so they weren’t too shabby. I scored the Wales goal and after the game I was drafted into the senior squad for the match at Anfield the following evening.
Craig Bellamy - GoodFella Page 6
