Craig Bellamy - GoodFella

by Craig Bellamy

  I want the academy to be self-sufficient. I want it to be run by people in Sierra Leone. I want to see kids from it playing in Belgium or in Norway or in the Premier League because that fits the romantic idea of football for me. I would love to be able to see them playing the greatest game in the world and be able to think that I had played a part in enabling them to do that. But like I say, I would get as much satisfaction if one of my students became a doctor in Sierra Leone, saving people’s lives.

  In October 2012, one of the lads from the academy, Sahid Conteh, was awarded a scholarship to study at the Dunn School in California, a couple of hours north of Los Angeles. He is playing a lot of football but he is also studying English, Algebra, Conceptual Physics and Ancient World History. Even if it all collapsed tomorrow, I have made a difference to his life.

  That’s what I wanted to do – give kids an opportunity that we all take for granted but which they have never been able to have because of the poverty and the wars that have gone on. I am hoping that it carries on for years to come and gets bigger and bigger.

  I have put about £1.4m of my own money into it. It is not an investment. It is not about making money. Say my academy discovered the next Didier Drogba, if a club wanted him, they would have to cover the academy’s costs for the education he had received. But that would be it. It’s not about making profit. I hope that one day the national team of Sierra Leone will be drawn from players that grew up in my academy, much like the national team of Ivory Coast is largely populated by players that came up through the famous Académie MimoSifcom.

  We have about 30 boys at the Craig Bellamy Foundation Academy now. They wake up at 6am and do their chores. Train at 7am. Finish at 8am. Have breakfast. School at 9am. Finish at 12pm. An hour break. School again at 1pm. Finish at 4pm and then training again at 5pm for an hour. Shower. Homework, reading and bed early. They will do two to three hours a day training. It’s a long day but they are progressing well.

  There have been difficulties along the way but we have got there in the end. I’m pleased I’ve done it but I wouldn’t necessarily call it unselfish because it’s been a huge benefit to me as a human being. I hope my own children will feel proud of it, too. I hope one day they’ll be able to go to a place in Sierra Leone to see a school that has provided a lot of young kids with a better start in life than they might otherwise have had. And I hope they will feel proud that their dad has been able to do that.

  As far as I’m concerned, what I’m doing in Sierra Leone will be my legacy. Not how many goals I scored or how many medals I won or how many Premier League appearances I made. I’m proud of those things, too, but they don’t really matter. I hope I’m remembered more for the work of my foundation than for anything I ever did on the football pitch.

  23

  Striking Out

  By that summer of 2007, the summer that I made my trip to Sierra Leone, my family were living in Cardiff after we had made the decision that Claire and the kids would live there on a permanent basis, rather than trailing around after me from club to club and city to city. We’d realised it was getting too hard on them and too disruptive to the kids’ schooling. By then, we also knew that Claire was pregnant with our third child and that it was going to be a girl.

  So wherever I moved to, I knew that Claire and the kids would not be with me full-time. I had interest from a number of clubs after it became apparent that Rafa wanted to sell me.

  Sam Allardyce had just become manager at Newcastle and he wanted me to go back there in a swap deal with Michael Owen. Newcastle rang Liverpool and Liverpool said they would not even think about it. It was a non-starter. Everton were interested again. So were Aston Villa, where Martin O’Neill was the boss.

  And then there was West Ham. An Icelandic consortium led by Eggert Magnusson had taken over the previous November and the club was throwing money around. Scott Parker, Julien Faubert, my mate Kieron Dyer and Freddie Ljungberg were all arriving on big money. Before I left for Sierra Leone, the West Ham boss, Alan Curbishley, came down to my house to see how I felt about moving to Upton Park.

  He outlined his plans and talked about the money the owners wanted to pump in, the players he wanted to sign and the targets they had set. It seemed quite exciting. London intrigued me as well. I had always fancied living there. I liked the idea of West Ham, too. It was proper London. It was a tough environment to play in as an opposition player and I knew they would probably be a tough crowd for me to break if I went there as a new signing.

  West Ham offered me a five-year deal and fantastic money. It was an exceptional contract. I was encouraged by the signing of Parker, in particular. I thought it had a good feel about it and that it would be a realistic goal to try to get into the top six. I knew that if I stayed fit and played well, the crowd would really take to me. They loved grafters and scrappers there. I thought we might be made for each other.

  I made up my mind about West Ham as soon as I came home from Sierra Leone. I went to London to have my medical and signed. I didn’t want a big fuss or a news conference. I was a week behind everyone else because they had started pre-season already. There were a lot of British boys there and the atmosphere was good.

  The facilities at the training ground at Chadwell Heath weren’t quite what I was used to. There were Portakabins everywhere and the training pitches weren’t the best, either. But part of me didn’t really care. It was okay. If it was good enough for Bobby Moore, it was good enough for me. A few people made sure they pointed that out to me. “If Bobby Moore could train here, you shouldn’t have a problem.” I got that a lot.

  There was a good group of lads there. The camaraderie was first class. Players like Anton Ferdinand, Carlton Cole, Bobby Zamora, Scott Parker, Lee Bowyer and Mark Noble, they were just a really good group of funny boys. They trained hard and wanted to do well but they had great humour about them as well. There was a good atmosphere about the place.

  Dean Ashton was already there and I was looking forward to playing with him. He was an exceptional player. He was intelligent and quick off the mark. He had broken his ankle while he was on England duty in August, 2006, and had been out since but I thought if we could get him fit, he could be a great player to play with and that excited me, too.

  All in all, we had the basis of a very good side if our first-choice players were fit. But it was as if we were cursed at West Ham that season. Faubert ruptured his Achilles tendon in a pre-season match and only played eight league games during the whole campaign. Parker was out for a long time with a knee injury. So was Ashton. Kieron suffered an horrific leg break early in the season. It was hard work because the top players who were going to make the difference weren’t playing.

  I started the season quite well. I scored both goals in a 2-1 away win at Bristol Rovers in the League Cup and got another in the Premier League win at Reading a few days later. But in the game at the Memorial Stadium, I started getting a sharp pain in my groin. I had a fitness test before the game at Reading and played but it was still very sore.

  I was really worried about the injury. It wasn’t going away. But then events pushed it into the background. My daughter, Lexi, was born and a couple of days later, there was an alarm about her health and she was rushed back into hospital in Cardiff. She was in a special unit for a little while, hooked up to all sorts of tubes and machines. It’s a terribly helpless feeling to see your baby like that and Claire and I slept at the hospital for a few nights.

  I missed Wales’ Euro 2008 qualifying tie against Germany because of it but gradually she began to get better and the concern about her began to ease. She was released from hospital and I flew off with Wales for a match against Slovakia in Trnava. It was just about the best game I ever played in a Wales shirt. I think it was partly that I felt this great wave of relief that Lexi was okay and it took all the pressure off me. I played without a care in the world. Football wasn’t as important any more and I just breezed through the game. I scored two and should have had a hat-trick in
a 5-2 win. It was quite a night.

  I got back to Cardiff after the game and it was hard to set off again for London. I had a new baby and I struggled with the idea of being away from her so much. I started to fall prey to some of the homesickness problems I had experienced at Norwich as a kid. They took me by surprise a little bit and brought back bad memories of some of the miseries I went through when I first left home.

  The situation wasn’t helped by my injury. There was clearly something wrong with my groin. I started the next West Ham match against Middlesbrough at Upton Park but I had to come off after about 25 minutes. My groin was just too sore. I had injections and tried to come back two weeks later but I was nowhere near fit. The club sent me to Germany to have a hernia operation.

  I came back quickly and played for Wales in a defeat to Cyprus. I felt okay in that game but the next match was against San Marino and I was in a lot of pain again. It’s a condition called arthritis pubis, apparently, and I was starting to worry about its persistence. West Ham just tried to shut me down. They rested me. I did loads of gym work to try to build up my core strength. We went to see loads of different groin experts and every single person proposed different solutions.

  West Ham decided I needed to keep doing the strengthening work so I stayed at the gym, which was at Canary Wharf. It was tough, mentally as well as physically. West Ham had put a lot of faith in me, they had paid a lot of money for me and they had given me a handsome contract. I was 28 now. It wasn’t the time I wanted to be injured for a long period.

  I started to sense the depression that I had suffered at Newcastle coming back. I felt so low. I wasn’t able to contribute to West Ham. I didn’t know if the course of action they had decided upon was going to work. I missed my family. I couldn’t see an end to any of it. West Ham advised me not to opt for surgery. I felt beholden to them. I abided by what they said.

  I was still out in December. I drank my way through Christmas, which wasn’t particularly clever. By the end of January, they finally allowed me back outside and on to the pitches. I started to do some running and my groin felt terrible straight away. I couldn’t move. Anything involving going side-to-side or challenging for possession just hurt way too much. And don’t even think about shooting, because it was agony.

  We all tried to pretend I was recovering all the same and I came on against Wigan in a game at the JJB Stadium at the beginning of February. Antonio Valencia squared me up at one point and I was thankful he ran inside because if he had run at me, I think I would have collapsed. I played a reserve game after that and I had to come off. I was in too much pain.

  Being on my own wasn’t good for me, either. I brooded and sulked and bemoaned my fate as I sat on my own in my flat at Canary Wharf. But then if I had my family around me, I would have dragged them down, too. I didn’t want to speak to anyone, didn’t want to look at anyone. I always had that tendency to lapse into self-pity and I didn’t know how to deal with it.

  At that point, my treatment took a slightly macabre twist. West Ham were getting desperate. They suggested that I might be suffering from bone-bruising and they sent me for treatment that was akin to chemotherapy. So I found myself sitting in a ward at London Bridge Hospital, attached to a drip and surrounded by people suffering from cancer.

  I struggled with that. I was sitting next to a poor woman who was praying that her next set of results were okay so that she could go on one last holiday. I tried to tell myself how stupid I was to be in a dark mood about a football injury when I was being confronted by the sight of people who were dealing with life and death. I knew I was being pathetic but I couldn’t get myself out of my dark mood.

  And that played on my mind a lot, too. Why am I feeling so sorry for myself when I have just seen these people suffering with cancer? I felt selfish. I felt worthless. I was supposed to go back for another session at the hospital in the chemotherapy suite. I couldn’t do it.

  I was reeling. I went to see a physio called John Green who I knew by reputation and whose opinion I trusted. He took me to see a surgeon who said I needed another hernia operation. I agreed to it. I had a nagging issue with my patella tendon, too, so I thought if I was going to be out for a little while, I might as well have that done as well. So I had a knee operation and two days later, I had a hernia operation. Then I started rehab.

  I have always worked really hard to get back after injury. Like a demon, actually. Like somebody who cares about nothing else. I’m capable of blocking everything else out. And everybody, too. It becomes an obsession for me, a desire to get back something I’ve lost, a manic determination not to lose my career before I’m ready to let it go.

  Now, at West Ham, it made me unbearable to be around. But I didn’t want to end my career like this. It wasn’t going to happen. So I threw myself into what felt like a ridiculously hard rehab regime with John Green which was all built around strengthening work for my groins. I had been out for a long time and I was 28 years old, so it was the flip of a coin whether I came back the player I had been before.

  If I didn’t give it everything, I knew I would return diminished. So my days consisted of spells on the rowing machine and boxing, swimming or spinning classes. Tough cardiovascular stuff. The programme was designed to batter you. I dreaded it but I knew I needed it. I did so much boxing, I actually began to believe I could fight after a while.

  Kieron was working with me as well. He had broken his leg and we were pushing each other. He knew I was watching how hard he was working and trying to beat him. He’s my best mate in football but I still wanted to be better than him. Better than him at getting better. Once we got outside, we told each other we would be kicking balls again soon. But even on a gentle jog, Kieron pulled up in pain. There were problems with the rod that had been inserted in his leg. It was too long. It took him four operations before his leg was right. His problems dwarfed anything I had suffered.

  After a while, I began to enjoy the rehab. I got so, so fit. Running has always been a strong point of mine but even I felt quick. Because of the work I had done in the gym, I pushed the running, too. Towards the end of the season, I was able to train with the boys which was like a dream. I even thought I could have played the last couple of games but they told me not to push my luck.

  I trained all through the off-season with John. I went down to the Algarve, where he was spending the summer, so we could keep working together. I took my family down there too as a kind of holiday but they didn’t see that much of me. I worked with John in the mornings and the evenings. Football came first for me. I was determined I would be fitter than anyone for pre-season, ready to make up for all the time I had missed.

  The first suggestions were beginning to surface that the owners of West Ham might be facing a financial crisis. The collapse of the Icelandic banks was only a couple of months away and the club went on a selling spree.

  Bobby Zamora and John Pantsil were sold to Fulham. George McCartney and Anton Ferdinand went to Sunderland. Freddie Ljungberg and Nolberto Solano were released. I couldn’t let any of it deflect me. I had to focus on my own fitness and making a flying start to the new season. Then I pulled my hamstring at Ipswich in a pre-season game.

  How on earth was that possible? I felt fitter and stronger than ever. But after what I’d been through, I could cope with a few weeks out with a hamstring pull.

  I came back for the third league game of the season against Blackburn Rovers and scored in a comfortable victory but the club was suddenly in turmoil. Alan Curbishley quit a few days later. I don’t know why. I wasn’t exactly his confidant. He’d hardly set eyes on me the whole time I had been at the club. But there weren’t a lot of funds available and a stream of players were leaving. You don’t have to be too bright to work out that must have had something to do with it.

  I felt sorry for him and I felt guilty that I had never been able to justify the money he had spent on me. Sometimes managers are the victims of bad luck as much as anything else and that certainly applie
d to Curbishley at West Ham. He got lucky in so far as the club had stacks of cash. But the players he bought were injured most of the time. And then the money ran out.

  The people who were making the decisions at West Ham called me in and asked who I thought would be a good manager. I said I’d play for anyone. I was grateful for my contract and I wanted to try to start to justify the money they were paying for me. I told them they could get who they wanted and it wouldn’t matter to me.

  Ten days later, they appointed Gianfranco Zola as Curbishley’s successor. I liked him straight away. He was brilliant. He had a clear vision on how he wanted to play and it very much revolved around keeping the ball on the deck. Almost immediately, we started playing really well under his management but despite our performances, we just couldn’t get the results.

  Gianfranco just told us to keep playing as we were and that the results would come. That’s difficult sometimes when you are losing because confidence can seep away. But his training was first class. He brought in Steve Clarke, who was a top coach and Kevin Keen, who was innovative and clever.

  There was one problem player he had to deal with fairly soon: himself. He still trained with us and the problem, basically, was that he was too good. It is difficult to be the manager while you’re lobbing your goalkeeper from 30 yards one minute and trying to tell him he’s the best in the Premier League the next. He could still have played for us and made a big difference. No question. He was embarrassing some of the players in training, he was that good.

  In the end, he made the decision to watch from the sidelines instead. He was a great guy and an outstanding coach. It was no surprise to me when he took over at Watford and did so well. He is a terrific man-manager as well as a clever tactician.

  Not long before Curbishley resigned, the agent, Kia Joorabchian, phoned me. He was working closely with Manchester City at that time when Thaksin Shinawatra was the owner. He said that City, who were managed by Mark Hughes, wanted to sign me. I didn’t speak to Sparky but City stepped up their interest. They approached West Ham and I was pulled aside at the training ground to talk about it.