Craig Bellamy the wayward star provides light for extended family
Owen Slot, Chief Sports Reporter, Sierra Leone
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/ ... 144288.ece
The setting sounds pretty splendid, but do not be taken in. We are sitting poolside, the Atlantic Ocean is breaking on the rocks below and the drinks are cool. But, on the other hand, the climate is tropical humid and the hotel air con is apathetic; plus, the fish is good but Craig Bellamy’s stomach concedes defeat every time he comes here.
The point is this: he need not be in Sierra Leone at all. For starters, it is half-term, the only week of the year when he and his children have overlapping holidays, yet he is missing the first three days of it.
Two days previously, we had met his “other” family. He has scouted 16 of the best under-12 footballers in the West African country, he has built them a first-rate school here — and playing fields — and has promised to treat them like his own.
Soon, he will start recruiting the second-year intake. Soon, too, his spending on the Craig Bellamy Foundation Academy will near £1 million. And now he is telling me that he plans to fly Year 1 to England before Christmas for a week’s training. “I hope to bring the kids, the coaches, everything,” he says. “Give them the chance to stay in a hotel; give them an idea of Europe that is totally foreign to them.”
But each flabbergasting detail returns to the essential disconnect in the story. How do you marry the football philanthropist with the man more broadly recognised as the “Nutter With The Putter”?
Clearly, pigeonholing does not work. I offer the observation that he has a complex personality and it seems we are getting somewhere. “Completely,” he says. “If you [a manager] sign me, you’re taking on more than your normal. I am simply not like other people; I have always been fully aware of that. I’m very demanding, I’m demanding of the people around me, I want the best, I want everything to be right. If you want a comfortable life, you don’t want me. But if you get me right, you have a good player.”
He says that only two managers have got him right, Sir Bobby Robson and Mark Hughes. You wonder, then, why he does not change tack, try demanding less and fitting in more. “I’ve done that once at a football club and they never got anything out of me,” he says. “I was a shadow of a player. So I thought, ‘Sod it. I’ll go about it my way.’ If it rubs people up the wrong way, so be it.”
This might be the time to go into the crime sheet, but he has no appetite for denial. He acknowledges his mistakes, but what he will not do is apologise for who he is.
Even when we discuss John Arne Riise and the famous eight-iron, he will say, “Does it look great to be wielding a golf club? Of course it doesn’t,” but he will also tell you how much Riise was asking for it. He will add, too, that the mud started sticking to him long ago and that he cannot lose it. He reads a lot but says, sarcastically: “Don’t tell anyone about the books because it would spoil my image.”
On another occasion, we are by a river whimsically discussing the odds on the following headline — “Bellamy attacked by crocodile” — and he says: “They [the media] would say I provoked it. They’d take the crocodile’s side and say I was asking for it.” Bellamy does take himself seriously but he can laugh at himself, too.
He holds an educated debate as well. He can move with ease across different subjects, from poverty patterns in Africa to the moral vacuum in Premier League football. But you suspect that his distinguishing characteristic is the one, as he tells us, that says: sod it, I’ll go about it my way.
His formative years are a case in point. He came from working-class Cardiff, took the teenage thing seriously, “made every wrong turn you could imagine”, and, at 14, started absconding regularly from school. Norwich City, who had already signed him, identified the problems and moved him up to East Anglia before he was 15. Then he got worse.
“I was homesick,” he says. “I spent a year and a half trying my best to get sacked. I’d get involved in incidents, fights and a lot more. It was two warnings and you’re out, but I definitely went past that. For me, it’d have been a great excuse to go home; it’d have been the coach’s fault, I could have blamed everyone else so I wouldn’t have been a failure.
“My wife then became pregnant, we were both 16. That was the turning point for me. It was either: do you want to raise this child in a flat doing God knows what? Or, do you want to give him the best opportunity possible? So I trained my balls off. I found that the more I trained, the less homesick I got. I only got homesick when I went back to my digs. I got shingles; that was why I used to cry myself to sleep every night.”
At that time, Bellamy was earning £45 a week and he says that “the fear of not being able to provide for a child was the greatest fear I have ever experienced”. It was also the making of him. “If it wasn’t for my son, no way would I be here. Until fatherhood and that responsibility, I was going down that [wrong] path.”
The right path has been a fascinating one: eight clubs in 13 years. His reputation among team-mates is of as determined, hard-working and ambitious a player as you will find, but his complexities have made him one of football’s most unsettled souls. Even now there is uncertainty over whether he will remain at Manchester City next season. And he has been left with a diminished view of the game.
“Football is the greatest game in the world, don’t get me wrong,” he says. “I love playing it, but I’m not in love with it. Playing on a Saturday, there is no better feeling. But in football clubs you now have this survival mode. It’s too much.
“For every individual, players or kitchen staff, it’s all about survival, staying in your job. If someone says jump, people jump. There are individuals who will shake your hand one minute and as soon as you’re out of favour the next, they won’t look at you. Loyalty? In a football club? You’ll never see any such thing. It’s people interested in looking after themselves. I find it very tough to be around.”
And no doubt when the team are told to jump, Bellamy is the last player with two feet still on the ground. In Sierra Leone, though, he can move to his own tune. As unlikely as it is, the academy project seems ideal for him, a channel for his energy and determination; when he believes in something, he is not interested in the half-hearted approach. He has effectively taken on responsibility for the futures of 16 young boys. As he says: “I have to make it work.”
So this is no millionaire footballer buying off his own conscience. He gets mobbed here, but is uneasy with adulation. Neither is it a grandiose PR campaign because he does not court publicity — although he does get a kick out of proving the doubters wrong. “The first thing I got told by people in African football was that it can’t be done,” he says. But it can.
“I don’t think anything else in my life can give me the feeling that this does,” he says. “This gives me self-satisfaction in abundance.”
There is, you suspect, some reassurance here, too. It also demonstrates for him — not for anyone else — that he is not the character he reads about in the press. But actually, for a complex character, it is quite simple: it is about 16 boys. And soon there will be more.
Man with a history . . .
His future post-football “I’d like to be involved at youth level. Being a manager? I have no interest in that. But I’d like to work in an academy within a club.”
Popularity issues “I understand the way I play may not endear me to people, but if you see me playing for your team, I’m sure you would appreciate the effort I make.”
Sierra Leone “There’s a stigma about this country — people still think it’s a war zone. I think that plays on people’s minds about coming here. They still think you’re going to see nine-year-olds walking around with AK-47s, but that’s not the case. Having been through such a war, it amazes me how happy and friendly they are.”
Reading “I like non-fiction, history. Whether its about the war in Kosovo, Chechnya; it has to be non-fiction. My favourite book is Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah; incredible.”
Reading on the team bus “Being on a coach with 30-odd players is not the time to get into a book. We have a guy at Man City called Vincent Kompany. He takes a lot of the stick that I would get. He is the next Nelson Mandela. If he ain’t on his laptop studying, he’ll have a Mandela book open. He’s very aware, very articulate.
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