I knew I might be inconsistent and there would be times when I might need a rest. I still didn’t know how my knee was going to react when I was back playing regular football week after week. At Newcastle, I would be around really good players and I would have space to be rested for a week if I needed it. That wouldn’t happen at Coventry.
I knew at Coventry, not only would I be straight into the side but everybody would be looking to me. They would need me to score 20 goals that season or else they would be relegated. I looked through the team and I knew it was going to be hard work. They had lost Robbie Keane to Inter Milan and Gary McAllister to Liverpool. They were important players.
The next day, Jon picked me up and took me back to the Norwich training ground to get my boots. There were a few people there and I said goodbye to one or two of the reserve boys and to Steve Foley, who had been such a big influence on me and had helped my career so much. When we drove away, I knew I was never going to come back.
It felt sad. I knew I was going to leave Norwich at some time or another and I had been hoping for a move to a Premier League club for a while. But when it actually happens, it still catches you by surprise. I had been there since I was 11 years old. I had worked very hard but that didn’t change the fact that I owed the club a lot.
They persevered with me as an individual. They could have got rid of me in the early days when I was so homesick that I was almost begging them to kick me out. But they didn’t. They were different class. They brought me up right in football, with passing and keeping the ball on the deck. That was their philosophy on the game and that was how they wanted to produce young players and I was a beneficiary.
I was educated well in the game at Norwich. They shaped me. Even when I was in the youth team, we were doing step classes and other things that were thought curious then but turned out to be ahead of their time. As a club, they were open and innovative and I bought into that. It was a good grounding.
But I knew I needed to improve as a player and I knew I needed to move up to the Premier League to do that. I had just come back from a big injury and I didn’t know if I would get the opportunity again. I was still in a dreadful quandary about Newcastle but it had started to seem as if their bid would never arrive. I should have been more patient.
After we left the Norwich training ground, I travelled down to Coventry as promised. I still had the feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach but it was like the move had gathered this momentum and I just couldn’t stop it. Bobby Robson phoned again. He said the bid was coming in but I told him that unless it actually arrived with Norwich, there was nothing I could do. He told me he would phone back as soon as he could.
That conversation made me feel even worse. I didn’t have a clue what to do. I had given my word to Strachan and I didn’t want to go back on that. But when I parked at Highfield Road and got out of my car, I stood around for a while. I didn’t want to go through the doors because I knew there would be no way back then. I stood there for half an hour, waiting for Bobby Robson to call me back but my phone didn’t ring.
Eventually, I went inside. I met the directors who gave me a very warm welcome. Then I sat down and signed the contract. Even as I was signing it, I thought ‘what am I doing?’ but the die was cast. It was too late to back out. I was taken to the training ground then. My first thought was that it wasn’t as good as Norwich’s. I said hello to the players and then went to a hotel in Henley-in-Arden that would be my home for the next few weeks.
When I got to my room, I switched my phone back on. There was a message. I started to listen to it.
It was from Bobby Robson.
“Hello son,” he said. “Good news. Our bid’s in.”
9
Down
I signed for Coventry four days before the start of the 2000-01 season. I didn’t particularly like what I saw but then I hadn’t really signed for the club, I had signed for Gordon Strachan. I believed in him but I didn’t believe in the team. I looked around at training and realised it was pretty likely we were going to be in a relegation fight.
They had replaced Robbie Keane and Gary McAllister with me and David Thompson, a promising midfielder from Liverpool. They had good players, too, like Mustapha Hadji, Youssef Chippo and my old mate, John Hartson, who was signed during the season.
But there were plenty of others who struggled at Premier League level and that became evident very soon. Even Hadji and Chippo failed to get anywhere near the form of the previous season.
It’s strange when you go to a new club. A lot of eyes are on you. A lot is expected of you. I could tell immediately that some of the Coventry players resented the money I was on. Some of them were probably looking at me and wondering who this little jerk was that the club had paid so much money for. Still, they were expecting a lot from me because they knew that if they had any chance of staying up, they needed a lot.
We were at home to Middlesbrough on the opening day of the season. It didn’t go well. I got a good reception from the Coventry fans in the pre-match warm-up – they were always decent with me. There is not quite the intensity there as at some of the other clubs I’ve played for. It’s not a football heartland because their support is diluted by having so many Midlands clubs in close proximity.
I was desperate to do well for them, though. I was excited about appearing in the Premier League and I was keen to make an impact straight away. It didn’t happen. I was up against Gary Pallister and even though he was a veteran by then, he had a terrific game. It was a good early taste of the step up in quality I was going to have to make if I was to succeed at a higher level.
Middlesbrough had just signed Alen Boksic, the great Croatia forward, from Lazio and it would be fair to say that he made more of an impact on his debut than I did. He scored twice in a 3-1 win for our opponents. It wasn’t a great day for Coventry. David Thompson marked his debut by getting sent off 20 minutes from the end.
The games came thick and fast. The following Wednesday, we played at Southampton and won 2-1. I scored a penalty in that game, my first goal in the Premier League. The next weekend, I scored again in a 2-1 win over Manchester City at Maine Road. I know this sounds like I was walking round with a cloud over my head but I knew it wouldn’t last and it didn’t. We won one in the next 13 and by mid-December, we were deep in relegation trouble.
The first game in that run was against Newcastle at Highfield Road. As the game approached, I kept thinking things could have been very different for me. I still couldn’t get those conversations with Bobby Robson out of my head. We lost 2-0 and after the game, I bumped into Sir Bobby in the tunnel. “Work hard, son,” he said. “All the best.” I couldn’t help but think of what might have been.
I was struggling to adapt to moving up a level. The game was quicker. You have to be fit in the Championship because it is helter-skelter stuff but the Premier League was more technically demanding. I noticed that straight away. Now you had to concentrate on receiving the ball at the right angle or a defender would read the pass and come and pick it off.
Playing against Tony Adams at Highbury was an education. No other word for it, really. It was in the middle of September, early in our descent towards the bottom and at a time when I was just beginning to realise how clever some of my new opponents were. Adams was just out of this world, the best I’ve ever played against.
I thought I knew all about him. I thought I might be able to exploit his lack of pace, in particular. Well, I might have been quicker than him in terms of raw speed but he was about five seconds ahead of me in terms of football intelligence. I hardly got a kick. He anticipated everything. He was playing one-twos round me, just having fun, taking me to school. He played me off the park. He was at another level.
I came off 27 minutes before the end. I think Strachan was showing me mercy. As I sat down on the bench, I knew I had a long way to go before I could compete with players like Adams. He was immense and he was playing in a terrific side. I was a month into my first sea
son in the Premier League and the learning curve was getting steep.
Strachan was brilliant with me. He has got a quirky sense of humour and he rubbed some of the players up the wrong way. He could be harsh, too. When he fell out with someone, it wasn’t pretty. Sometimes, he took things personally. I heard him tell people they would never play for the club again after arguments.
But he worked tirelessly to try to improve me. He talked to me about forward movements like coming off at the half angle. Sometimes I would come short to receive the ball and then spin to try to catch the defender out and run on to a pass that was played in behind him. But Strachan told me to forget about coming short sometimes.
“Just spin,” he said. “If you come short, a defender’s on his toes and he is ready for you to do something. But if you pretend you are not interested and then just go, you will catch him off guard. And with your pace, you’ll be in.”
Because I was unsure about my injury, sometimes I would just run with players rather than trying to go past them. Sub-consciously, I was scared of getting wiped out and hurt again, I think, because that was how I had done my cruciate in the first place. Strachan told me to trust my pace, to run past players, not with them. He was correct. If you are looking to get past someone, they have to come in with a challenge. It commits them.
Strachan was full of tips and instructions for me. He was such a good coach but unfortunately for him and the club, they did not see the benefits of everything he was teaching me. I did, though. I could feel myself becoming a better player. I felt I was developing a greater awareness of the game. It was just that Coventry didn’t see the effects of my improvement quickly enough.
I understand now that when you have been out for a while, it is very hard to play well consistently straight away. My movement was different. Everything was new. When you have had major surgery like that, you are finding yourself as well. I was in the gym all the time because for me to cope at that level, my body bulk needed to be bigger. The fitness people were trying to pile food down me non-stop to get my body weight up so I was adjusting a lot. I was still a bit of a scrawny kid, too fragile for the top level.
We were not a good side. Defensively, we lacked pace and offensively, we lacked creativity. And we had players who simply weren’t playing well. I was one of them. Things improved a bit when we signed Harts and that gave me a new lease of life. I felt like I had an ally in the side at last, someone I knew, someone who looked out for me a bit. Players like Paul Williams and Paul Telfer, who had been there for a number of years, made it plain they didn’t like me. Stephen Froggatt was the same. I was young and I’d come in on good money. Maybe they were bitter. It happens. It’s part of the dynamic at clubs. I can usually defend myself but I felt I wasn’t part of their gang. They behaved as though they held me responsible for Coventry’s plight.
It even happened in training. Williams would try to give me the rough treatment. Because he was slow on the turn, I would often go past him quite comfortably and he would pull me back straight away. He came across as a bit of a bully. And like all bullies, they are not so brave when a bigger bloke turns up. Maybe I imagined it but when Harts arrived, all the rough stuff from Williams suddenly seemed to stop.
I wasn’t particularly vocal during that period. My confidence was low. I knew I had to work and improve. These players had played at this level a lot longer than me and I didn’t feel I could shout the odds with them. I felt responsible for the manager and the club after my fee. Sometimes, I even felt responsible for the other players as well.
It all got to me. I bought a house in Stratford-upon-Avon before Christmas. Claire was pregnant with our second child and Cameron was born in January in Cardiff. I went down there the day after the birth. I wasn’t behaving particularly well. I was wrapped up in my own troubles and worries because I was so concerned about what was going on at Coventry. It was taking over my personal life, too.
Coventry was all I was thinking about. I was feeling down a lot. I shied away from Claire, too, even when she was pregnant. I found everything so difficult to cope with. Anyone who came to visit me couldn’t get two words out of me during that period. I kept it all inside. So Claire and I weren’t going through a great spell when Cameron was born.
I felt so much shame about what was going on in my career that I blanked everything else out, which was very selfish. Cameron’s an incredible child but I was so wrapped up with everything that was going on at Coventry that I neglected him and Claire. I was questioning myself as a player. I was asking myself whether I was good enough for the league. I thought I’d be back in the Championship.
My aspirations had always been to play at the top level but I began to think that perhaps I had been deluding myself to think I could make it, particularly after my injury. Maybe I wouldn’t come back as good as new after all. I was still feeling pain in my knee. I kept thinking about what Neil Adams said about how I wouldn’t be the same. I kept thinking maybe he was right.
I missed the odd game here and there but my knee felt better in the second half of the season and I started to come to terms with what the Premier League was about. But by then, it was a bit late. We had a good result against Everton at Goodison Park on Boxing Day but then we went on a run of 10 games without a win and things began to look grim.
I played some good football in the last quarter of the season and we got three wins in four games, beating Derby, Leicester and Sunderland either side of a defeat to Manchester United. Harts scored in all four of those games and I got one, too. We gave ourselves a glimmer of hope. Everyone started to believe that after struggling for so long down at the bottom we could get out of it.
But when we went to Aston Villa to play the penultimate game of the season, we knew that if we lost, we would be relegated. Bradford City were already down and Manchester City were scrapping with us in the relegation zone but we knew that if we beat Villa, we could still catch Derby and make a great escape. Two goals from Hadji put us 2-0 up but we couldn’t hold on to our lead and Villa came back to win 3-2. We deserved to go down but it was still a desperate moment.
I felt all eyes were on me. A few members of the Coventry staff went round shaking people’s hands to say hard luck and I noticed that three or four of them missed me out on purpose. I was a 20-year-old kid. I felt that was a bit harsh. They were trying to make the point I had let them down. They didn’t have to do that. I knew it myself. I didn’t need telling.
I didn’t say anything because I felt the guilt. I had come with the price tag. I felt I hadn’t lived up to expectations. I was the big money signing and I hadn’t delivered what they needed. I might have been the club’s joint top scorer in the league but I only got six goals. It wasn’t enough. Hadji had a poor season and he got as many as me. Harts only arrived in February and he got as many as me, too.
I worked so hard that season and I felt that if we could just stay up, I would have shown Coventry fans what I could really do. But relegation ruined everything. I went back to Cardiff that summer and turned my phone off. I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to speak to anyone.
I had found a different representative by then, Steve Horner, who was David Thompson’s agent, too. I have looked to him for advice and guidance ever since. He told me there were one or two clubs interested in bidding for me. You always get one or two rumours of interest from other clubs but I thought ‘who’s going to want to buy me after the season I’ve just had?’ Coventry would want decent money back for the fee they had paid and I didn’t think anyone would take a chance on me.
I was geared up for going back to the Championship and I was hoping I could make amends. I told myself that I was to blame for them going down and that the only way I could make myself feel any better would be if I was responsible for getting them back up. I was an improved player and I wanted to pay my debt to Gordon Strachan.
Then my dad rang. My agent had called him. He wanted me to phone him urgently. When I rang, he said Coventry had accepted a bi
d from Newcastle. They needed to slash their wage bill because of relegation and Newcastle had come back in for me. They wanted me to go straight up to Tyneside to have a medical. I couldn’t believe it.
I had been given a lifeline. This was my big chance. The next day, I flew up from Cardiff to Newcastle. Straight away, I felt there was an aura about the place. Not just St James’ Park but the city, too. I love the stadium, sitting there above the city, dominating it. I was going to be playing there every other weekend now. I was going to be part of this great institution.
It all felt right. It was important to me that Gary Speed was there. He was someone I looked up to and I knew he’d take care of me. I knew Kieron Dyer well, too, from the time when I was at Norwich and he was at Ipswich. And then there were players of the calibre of Alan Shearer and Rob Lee. It was quite a cast-list.
Harts rang me up from Coventry’s pre-season trip because he had seen the news of my signing on the television. He was disappointed I was going. He said he would probably leave, too, and soon after, he joined Celtic.
Gordon Strachan rang, too. He said he knew I was disappointed about how the season had gone but that he was grateful for all the work I had done. He was as gracious and classy as anyone could be.
I got a call from Bobby Robson then. He hadn’t been at my medical. He was away on holiday somewhere.
“I’m delighted you’re here, son,” he said. “Now I’ve finally got you, I want you to know I think you’re an immense talent.”
For someone of his stature to say that meant an awful lot to me. After all the strain of the past season, it gave me a huge boost in confidence. Generally, I felt like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
Craig Bellamy - GoodFella Page 9
