Craig Bellamy - GoodFella

by Craig Bellamy

  Newcastle paid £6m to sign me. At least Coventry got their money back. And I was on a similar salary to the one I had been on at Highfield Road. Before I went back to Stratford, I went to the boardroom at St James’ Park to meet the Newcastle chairman, Freddy Shepherd. He strode over to shake my hand.

  “So this is the little shit that’s cost me so much money,” he said.

  10

  One Of The Greats

  I am aware there are many people who believe that I had no respect for Bobby Robson. From a lot of the coverage of my time at Newcastle, you could be forgiven for thinking that I spent my years there trying to undermine him or, failing that, simply mocking him or refusing to do what he asked. The impression that was conveyed was that I was an unruly kid taunting a wise old teacher. Many people still seem to think I was responsible, either directly or indirectly, for his eventual exit from the club.

  That is a million miles from the truth. The truth is that Bobby Robson was the best manager I ever worked with. The truth is that I had the utmost respect for him.

  The truth is that I admired him and revered him and that I could never quite accept the way he was forced out of the club. He was one of the greats. I was very, very lucky to have played for him.

  When I was growing up, Bobby Robson was the manager of England but I always followed his career closely because he went on to become the manager of PSV Eindhoven and I loved Dutch football. Then he was the manager of Barcelona when the Brazilian Ronaldo played there and that lifted Sir Bobby even higher in my eyes.

  So when I first found out he wanted to sign me, I thought of all the players he had signed and all the players who had played for him and I knew what an honour it was to be joining that number. What a huge compliment for a player. That was so important to me as an individual. It was huge. I was joining men like Ronaldo, Figo, Stoichkov, Muhren, Romario and Guardiola.

  Another idea has been allowed to take hold that the players at Newcastle viewed him as a soft touch and took advantage of his kindness and his age. Again, that isn’t true. He could be kind and he was the best man-manager I have ever come across but he had a ruthless streak, too. He wasn’t soft. No one who lasts in management as long as he did can be weak.

  He was clever. He could be really cute in the way he dealt with the media. When the cameras were out at the Newcastle training ground, he was coaching. When the cameras were gone, he would stand on the sidelines and watch. He was aware of the importance of image and appearance as well as reality. He knew all about media management.

  Whether he was coaching or standing on the touchline, he was out there every day, no matter what the weather. He was 66 when he took the Newcastle job but he never took it easy.

  He never put his feet up and handed over to others. He saw everything. People used to make fun about his recall of names but he had been doing that for 30 years.

  It wasn’t about him being old. If you have managed as many players as he had, you are going to get people mixed up. We didn’t think of him as being old. We didn’t really take his age into account. You knew he was switched on because he knew everything about the game there was to know. If you didn’t do your job, he was on you straight away. He didn’t miss a thing.

  Maybe it is part of the British culture that we have this inflexibility about how everyone must be treated the same. If you are hard on one person for a failing, you must treat another person in exactly the same way. Robson wasn’t like that. He had learned, he said, by being abroad to treat every individual differently. He was such a clever man. Way above any other manager I have worked with.

  He judged you on how you were as a character and how you played on Saturday afternoon. If you didn’t want to do a run at a certain time, you didn’t have to. But you better make sure that if there’s something he needs you to do during the game, you have to be able to do it. He trusted you like that and his trust was repaid.

  I’ll give you an example of his man-management skills. In March 2004, towards the end of my last full season at Newcastle, I had a well-publicised argument with Robson’s assistant, John Carver, the day we were due to fly out to a Uefa Cup fourth round second leg match against Real Mallorca. At the time, it was seen as a symptom of Robson’s loss of control over a troublesome squad but to me the episode proved the opposite: he was a master of control.

  What people never quite grasped is that John Carver is one of my best friends. He was at my wedding. As a coach and player, we used to go out in the evenings together. I liked him a lot. The row before the Mallorca game had started at training a few hours earlier when I parked in his parking space at the training ground.

  I was being mischievous really. A little provocative perhaps. I arrived at the training ground and he wasn’t there. He’s a coach. He should have been in before me so I parked in his space. I knew it would wind him up. I walked past him later that morning and said ‘hiya’, all proud of myself because of my little stunt, and he just walked straight past me without saying a word. It made me smile. I thought ‘job done’.

  My problem sometimes is that I don’t know when to stop. So I kept winding him up. I wouldn’t let it go. So by the time we got to Newcastle Airport to get the flight to Majorca, he was at snapping point and we had a confrontation. I was talking to someone else and I mentioned ‘JC’ loudly enough to make sure he heard me poking fun at him. He snapped and came marching over.

  He had a real go at me. We had a shouting match. I thought he had turned it from a joke into a proper argument. People had to keep us apart. So, suddenly I convinced myself that I was the wronged party. I was fuming. All my light-heartedness disappeared and we got involved in a real row.

  The reports said I threw a chair at him in the departure lounge that had been set aside for the players. That wasn’t entirely true. I was angry and I threw a chair out of the way so I could go and argue with him. It nearly hit Shay Given, actually, but that was an accident.

  A fight isn’t just fists. It is what it is. Whatever you can get hold of, you get hold of. If you lose your temper, anything goes. But this wasn’t a fight. This was just silly stuff. It was very childish from both of us. I was yelling at him and he was yelling at me but we were mates, basically, so were never going to start throwing punches at each other. We ended up wrestling stupidly on the floor. I didn’t know at the time but Bobby was giving a press conference on the other side of the screens from where we were grappling and the press could hear that a kerfuffle was going on.

  Someone went to get the manager and he came in and yelled at everyone to get out and get on the plane, which was waiting at the gate and was ready to board by now. I had lost my rag totally by that point. I was saying “I’m not going, I’m not getting on the plane, I’m going home to see my missus.”

  Bobby told Carver to get on the plane. He gave him a real rollicking and asked him what the hell he had been doing, confronting me like that. JC trudged off with his head down, like a naughty schoolboy who has just had a telling off. I was still saying I was going home. I was adamant. The manager put his arm round me. “Walk with me, son,” he said.

  So I walked with him and he started asking me about how my kids were, how they were doing at school, how was my missus. He phrased all the questions so I had to answer them even though I didn’t feel like saying a word. The next thing I knew I was on the plane. I was thinking ‘how the fuck did I get here?’ If he’d told me straight that I had to get on the plane, if he’d ordered me to get on, I wouldn’t have got on.

  The news got out straight away. I could see some of the lads texting away furiously when we landed in Majorca.

  That evening, I was in my room at the team hotel in Majorca and still not happy. It didn’t take much in those days to put me on edge. So Bobby came round to my room and brought Carver and Alan Shearer with him.

  I thought they had come to gang up on me so I was ready to have a right go back. I was building myself up for it. I was like a coiled spring, just waiting for the opportunity to get int
o another row and sure they were going to give me the prompt any second.

  But then Sir Bobby sat us all down and started blaming everything on John Carver and made him apologise to me. JC started apologising profusely and saying how much he thought of me. He said he was my biggest fan. Then Sir Bobby told Alan what a great player I was and Alan had to agree. Alan had to say how much he rated me, too. I could tell Alan was saying that through gritted teeth. It was killing him. So Sir Bobby gave me no room to argue. I was just sitting there taking compliments. I had been desperate to have an argument but I had nothing to go against.

  The next thing I know, I’m shaking everybody’s hand and we’re all friends. I ended up apologising to John Carver as well. Suddenly, everything was sweetness and light and we were all mates again. Sir Bobby put me on the bench for the game the next evening, I came on and scored with practically my first touch and we won 3-0.

  So, yes, he was a great man. Soon after he died in July 2009, I read a newspaper interview that my friend Kieron Dyer had given about Sir Bobby’s strength of character and his handling of the players, particularly me. It made me smile when I read it. It brought back a lot of happy memories. It went like this.

  “There was a lot of talk about the brats, the likes of me and Craig Bellamy,” Kieron told the interviewer, “but Sir Bobby knew how to put us in our place. He never lost the dressing room. We played Leeds at Elland Road once and Bellers was having a great game. We were 1-0 up at half-time and after about 60 minutes the manager put Craig’s number up and Craig came off.

  “We won the game 3-0 but when we got back to the changing room, Bellers was cursing and raving about how he did all the running, how everyone else profited from his efforts, how he needed goals, how he was judged on goals and so on and so on.

  “The gaffer said ‘will you shut up’ but Bellers kept jabbering on. And then Sir Bobby went: ‘I’ll squash you, son, like an ant’. Bellers was a bit taken aback but he mumbled something else and this time the gaffer let him have it. ‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘Ronaldo, Romario, Stoichkov, Hagi, Guardiola, Luis Enrique, Gascoigne. These are the people I deal with. Who are you?’

  “The changing room went quiet and Bellers went quiet. And then Bellers looked over at me and said: ‘He’s got a point, hasn’t he’.”

  I love that story. It exposes a lot of the myths about Bobby Robson as lies. It disproves this idea that he had lost the dressing room, that he could not cope with us, that he was out of touch, that he was weak, that we were running rings around him. He was very sharp and he had not lost his authority. Don’t worry about that.

  Kieron was the one who got most of the blame for the supposedly disrespectful attitude the players had towards Sir Bobby but in many ways, he was closer to him than any of us. Some of it was to do with their shared Ipswich connection. Sir Bobby had managed very successfully there and Kieron had grown up there. Sometimes, I felt they were too close. Because they were so comfortable with each other, they would have disagreements in front of everybody that others misinterpreted as serious differences.

  Sir Bobby was a remarkable man. He could read characters very quickly and because he had been brought up in the area, because he was the son of a coal-miner from the village of Langley Park which is 15 miles south of Newcastle, because he had been taken to see Jackie Milburn when he was a kid, because he loved the city and the club, he knew exactly what the supporters wanted.

  Freddy Shepherd knew that, too, which explains some of the buys Newcastle made when I was there. They seemed to me to be crowd-pleasing buys, signings that would take the heat off the board if things were not going well. They were not necessarily buys that served the best interests of the team in terms of getting the results we needed.

  Sir Bobby knew the crowd, too. There were games when he attacked when we shouldn’t have attacked. He would leave the defence bare at times in the name of attacking football. I felt for the back four at times but he knew what the public wanted. From his experience of being one of them, he knew how to build a team for them.

  Maybe because of their shared affinity for the area, there was a kind of unspoken tension between Sir Bobby and Shearer. It wasn’t that Alan worked against him or anything like that. But they were both local heroes and they were both idolised by the crowd. They were working towards the same goal but they were in competition, too.

  Sir Bobby would put me in my place if needed but sometimes, if I was having a go at certain individuals, he would back me up.

  Once, after a defeat, I expressed my irritation with a couple of the other players because of things I thought they had failed to do. He backed out of the argument and walked away. He wanted me to have a go.

  He wanted an individual in the team to raise the issue because he knew it couldn’t always come from him. I knew where I was with him. I knew he liked me as a player. I knew I fitted in to how he wanted the team to play. A fair number of my performances for Newcastle were exceptional and I put a lot of that down to him.

  Before games, I made a point of coming out at the back of our team, the last man into the tunnel.

  Sir Bobby had his own pre-match superstition which was to make sure he shook every player’s hand. So before most games, we’d end up at the back of the tunnel together, having a chat about what lay ahead and the opponents we were facing. He’d stare at their players.

  “He’s shit scared of you already, that one, son,” he’d say.

  Or it might be: “Get him on the turn today, son, and you’ll kill him.”

  Or: “Look at him, son, he’s not even fit to be on the same pitch as you.”

  I felt like I was the quickest player going, I felt strong, I felt invincible because of him.

  There is a lot to be said for managers who give you that kind of confidence, managers who build you up rather than try and hammer you all the time.

  He would talk to me like I was the best player in the world and I went out at St James’ Park feeling like I was going to play like the best player in the world.

  I am 5ft 6 or 5ft 7ins tall but I am telling you this: when I put that kit on and I was standing in that tunnel with Bobby Robson, I felt like I was Didier Drogba.

  11

  Off To A Flier

  My arrival in the north-east didn’t exactly fire the imagination of the Geordie Nation. I had the radio on as I drove to St James’ Park for my first day of training and the phone-in was discussing my signing. It was being interpreted as an indication that ambitions weren’t high. I was a symbol, they were saying, of low expectations and a difficult season ahead.

  My first job was to get in the team. If I could do that, I thought we had the players to do well. There was Alan Shearer up front, of course.

  When I first met him, he managed a cursory ‘hiya’ and that was it. He struggled even to muster a handshake. I think Al’s attitude was that you had to win his respect before he started being nice to you. He didn’t acknowledge me that much. He probably didn’t think that much of me as a player, which was fine. It didn’t matter anyway.

  There was a great bunch of lads at Newcastle. On the pitch, I hit it off with players like Nolberto Solano straight away. He was such a clever player and he made it so easy to play with him. He would put his head up and disguise the pass as if he was going to play it wide and then he’d play it in to your feet. He was always available for a pass but when he had the ball, he would always give it to you at the right time and he was always available to get it back off you.

  If you wanted to make a run, he would pick you out even when you thought he hadn’t seen you. He had that ability. His set-pieces were incredible. He was such an immense player. The movements I had learned from Gordon Strachan all came to fruition at Newcastle and stood me in good stead. Too late for Coventry, but in time for me to excel at my new club.

  Then there was Gary Speed. Speedo set the standards at Newcastle, even in warm-ups. I wanted to copy him as much as I could. He would be at the front in warm-ups so I would be at the front
too. He would go and do weights after training so I wanted to go and do weights too. He was a talented player but his attitude made him an even better player. He was the type of guy that if there were a war tomorrow, you would want him next to you because he would do anything for you. I admired his character immensely.

  We had Shay Given in goal who was a terrific keeper. Kieron was a superb midfielder, at his best through the centre. Rob Lee was still there, although he was coming to the end of his time at the club. Carl Cort and Shola Ameobi were promising young forwards, Laurent Robert, the French winger, came in just before the start of the season, and Sylvain Distin arrived from PSG at the start of September to bolster a defence that had Nikos Dabizas and Andy O’Brien.

  The previous season had been disappointing for Newcastle. They had finished 11th in the Premier League, 10 points away from qualifying for the Uefa Cup. So they had entered the Intertoto Cup to try to get into Europe by the back door. It meant that my pre-season was blissfully short and free of the hard running that had characterised many others. We were straight into matches.

  First up was Belgian side Lokeren in the third round of the Intertoto. The first leg, my first game in a Newcastle shirt, was away. It was low-key, a summer’s day in the middle of July that felt absurdly early to be playing competitive football. There were only 6,000 people there and Shearer was missing because he had just had an operation for tendinitis. I set up the first two goals for Wayne Quinn and Shola and we cruised to a 4-0 win.

  A week later, we played them in the second leg at St James’ Park. It was always going to be a formality but it was still special for me because it was the first time I’d played for Newcastle at the stadium and I felt like I had really arrived. There were nearly 30,000 people there for a game in late July when we already had a 4-0 lead. That tells you everything you need to know about Newcastle’s support. I scored after an hour and we won the game 1-0. It was the perfect start.

  The way Bobby wanted to play was perfect for me. He wanted the ball on the deck, for a start. He liked me dropping deep but he also wanted me to play on the shoulder. He wanted me to mix it up. He said an influential player like me should be on the ball as much as possible. That was music to my ears.