16
Graeme Souness was the new boss. He was like this iron fist. Bang. Straight down. Everybody said he’d been brought in to deal with the trouble-makers and sort out the lack of discipline at the club. He was the hard man who was coming in to sort out the spoilt little rich kids. That’s what they said. He was a good manager but it felt like he came in to Newcastle with the wrong mindset. He came in wanting a fight. He wanted to make an example of somebody. I was bitter about what happened to Sir Bobby and I appreciate now that my feelings affected the way I treated the new boss. That was a bit unfair on Souness. It wasn’t his fault.
Souness had been offered a great opportunity to manage a big club. He had done well at Blackburn. He was one of the most immense players there has ever been. He deserved his shot at Newcastle, but that didn’t alter the fact that I struggled to deal with the change.
Training was different. We had a great sports scientist and he was sidelined. Souness didn’t use him. John Carver was sent straight back to the Academy, too. I felt those guys deserved better. But I suppose that was none of my business. I wasn’t the boss. It wasn’t my decision. As a player, you have to adapt to a new manager because if you don’t, you’re gone. And I didn’t adapt.
I wouldn’t say I was actively resentful towards Souness. But I wasn’t engaged. I wasn’t very approachable when he was around. We would snap at each other at times over the silliest things. Like a decision in training, a foul he might give against me in a five-a-side, something innocuous like that. He tried to wind me up, messing about like it was fun. But I wasn’t getting involved in any of his attempts at jollity and he could sense it.
I felt my time at the club was over. I felt I needed to improve as a player and I didn’t think Newcastle offered me that any more. My restlessness was kicking in. It wasn’t just losing Robson, I had lost Speedo as well and I still felt a bit bitter about that. Speedo was like a yardstick for me. He was an authority figure who gave me unstinting support. It was different without him and not in a good way.
I needed to do something different. I started to feel disgusted with myself. I didn’t like how my life had become at Newcastle. I didn’t like the person I had become. When you play well for Newcastle, it is an incredible city and it offers you incredible opportunities. Off the pitch opportunities, I mean.
Imagine being a young kid doing really well, playing at the top of your game in a city that worships its football team. I was going out once or twice a week and you can’t do that if you want to keep playing at the top level. My body started toremind me of that. I began picking up more and more niggling injuries.
But I had also started to believe a bit of the hype that now surrounded me. People kept coming up to me and telling me how great I was and I had begun to believe it. All my old self-doubt, all the worries about my deficiencies that used to torture me, floated away on a tide of flattery. I allowed myself to start thinking I was an incredible player.
I didn’t like the individual I became then. I became arrogant. I hated the way I was behaving off the pitch. All the temptations that were thrown at me, I didn’t turn my back on them. I began to hate myself and I began to push the people close to me even further away.
I have always been a little bit of a hermit. I have always kept myself at arm’s length from everyone. It’s nothing personal. It’s just how I deal with situations. If I’ve got a problem, I won’t come and talk to you about it. I keep a lot of things to myself. Because I was full of self-loathing, that got worse.
If I did have a problem with my knee, it would send me into a spiral of depression. There would be weeks, sometimes months, when I couldn’t get myself out of it. I didn’t want to speak to anyone. I didn’t want to socialise. Claire often couldn’t get two words out of me. I feel for the kids because I should have been more approachable but I didn’t know any other way to deal with it.
I suppose that was one of the indicators of my self-loathing. There were others. There were no pictures of me in the house where we lived in Newcastle. I couldn’t walk along a corridor and see myself in a picture. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. I didn’t like what I saw. I looked into that face and saw a man I really didn’t like.
I knew my life needed to change. I knew I needed a different avenue. I didn’t like some of the things I did off the pitch. I didn’t like some of the decisions I made. I have never touched drugs since my boy was born, I am not a gambler, booze can come or go. I can go months without it. But I like other things as well. There have always been women and I didn’t like that. I hated that weakness in myself.
I felt I was not being honest, not just with the people closest to me but with myself too. The realisation of that was difficult for me to grasp. I was cutting corners and I hate cutting corners and it was leading into my personal life and eating into me.
The adulation of the fans seeped into every part of me. My wife was ready to leave me. She was aware of what was going on. This wasn’t the father I wanted to be. It wasn’t the individual I wanted to be. I wanted a future with my children. I wanted my children in my life constantly but I was behaving in a way that was jeopardising that.
I wanted to leave. It wasn’t to do with Souness or the club. I just didn’t like who I had become and the strain it put on my partner and my children. I needed to get out of Newcastle. I could feel myself losing my own discipline. If I wanted to be the best I could be, I knew I had to take another step. I knew the nights out and the womanising had to stop and I had to take a proper look at myself. It wasn’t the path I wanted to go down.
I hate it when I look back on it because it seems boastful and boorish but you want to know how it could sometimes feel living the life of a footballer at that time? It felt like this. It felt like the scene in GoodFellas where Henry Hill takes his new girlfriend into the Copacabana Club. The soundtrack has The Crystals singing ‘And Then He Kissed Me’. Henry Hill leaves his car with a valet. Then he walks across the road, skirts a long queue of people waiting to get into the club and walks in through a side door.
“I like going in this way,” he says to his girlfriend, “it’s better than waiting in line.”
Then they go down a flight of stairs and doors swing open as if by magic. And he presses some money into a guy’s hand and walks through some more doors and everybody’s smiling at him and joking with him and they walk through the kitchens and out into the club. The maître d’ stops talking to the guests he’s with and comes straight over. A waiter appears carrying a table with a clean white tablecloth already laid out on it. And the table is carried to the front of the stage.
Henry Hill and his girlfriend sit down. Everybody’s still smil- ing at him. Guests at other tables get up to greet him. Then somebody sends over a bottle of champagne. His girlfriend smiles this kind of smile of wonder. She can’t help but be impressed. It feels like he’s some sort of royalty in here. And then a comedian called the King of the One Liners comes on.
And that was what it could be like for me in Newcastle when I got carried away with it. An anglicised version of the Copacabana Club. I knew it was wrong and I’m not saying I behaved like that all the time. But it was easy to get caught up in it.
English football was still in the midst of its post-Taylor Report explosion. Football was king. It felt like we could do what we liked, go where we liked. Not queue for anything, ever. Not play by the rules normal people played by. It was intoxicating. But it was also corrosive.
Reality has to check in at one time or another, though, and then you’re probably going to be in trouble. I’d got the balance of my life totally wrong. I didn’t trust anyone. I had good friends but I hadn’t seen them for ages. I have always dealt with my issues on my own, probably because I moved away from home at such a young age. I had no one else around me. I didn’t address any of the issues that were eating me up behind all the false smiles and the laughter.
I should have spoken to someone. My partner, perhaps. Or rung my parents up. I didn’t do any of that. Psychologists would say I internalised everything. I didn’t share anything. Ever. I was thinking ‘because I am not bringing football home with me, I am a good man’. But I did nothing but bring it home. I might not have talked about it but it was eating me up.
If something had happened in training that I thought should not have happened, I wouldn’t sleep. I thought that was what gave me the edge or made me a better player because I had that self-criticism. I was trying to suppress the fear that one day, someone was going to find me out. They’re going to point and say ‘actually, he’s not very good’.
In Newcastle, for the first time, I felt I had been found out. I had been found out as an individual and as a player. I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was and I wasn’t the man I thought I was. Nowhere near. I didn’t have Robson to give me the confidence any more, I didn’t have Speedo who could check me in discipline-wise. I thought ‘shit, I’m done’.
I thought I was being transported back to the player I was in my year at Coventry. I began to think that was the real me, the real player. I worked hard there but I didn’t make much of an impact. So maybe the last couple of years at Newcastle, the good years, were just a fluke. I thought my mask had slipped and that people would start to see that my excellence was just an illusion.
My love for Newcastle ebbed away. I didn’t like the chairman. I had lost Robson, who I thought was the best manager in the world. I had lost Speedo. My professionalism had come from him. I had watched him, trained with him, enjoyed trying to copy him. I just stopped enjoying it. I felt I was adrift.
Souness did things differently to Robson. Of course he did. Again, that wasn’t his fault. But it added to my sense of dislocation. He was actually a lot less strict than Robson had been in many ways. He was relaxed about a lot of things off the pitch. He had a great aura about him, too. Sometimes he could be a little bit too derogatory about the opposition and to you as well. He could put you down and question you as an individual.
It must have been difficult for someone like him to coach players like me because he was such a good footballer himself. He didn’t join in training with us, which was probably a good thing as far as my physical safety was concerned. I think he stopped that after he had a disagreement with Dwight Yorke during a five-a-side at Blackburn and left him with a badly gashed shin.
He was accused of threatening to break Yorke’s leg. I can believe that. If he’d still been playing, I think I would have got the full treatment in training. He would have had a lot of fun with me. If he could have caught me. Generally, we were at loggerheads but I played my part in us not getting on. And if I met him now, I’d shake his hand.
He played me on the wing at Newcastle. He made it clear to me he didn’t see me as a striker. He called me in and said his idea of a striker was Didier Drogba, big and strong. He wanted Kluivert and Shearer as his two forwards. He asked me to play wide. He was trying to fit me in until an opportunity came for me to try and take it.
In the middle of October, we played Charlton at The Valley in a live Sky Sunday game and he gave me a chance to play up front with Alan because Kluivert had got injured. Charlton has always been a good ground for me and I scored six minutes before half-time to put us ahead. Then, midway through the second half, Souness made a substitution and I saw my number come up.
I was furious. I just didn’t expect to be coming off. They had equalised by then but the game was open and I thought we could win it. The Newcastle fans weren’t happy when they saw I was being taken off. Shola Ameobi came on for me and when I got to the touchline, Souness was staring out at the pitch. I looked over at him and muttered ‘fucking prick’ in his direction. I didn’t exactly say it to him. Not really loud enough for him to hear anyway. But the cameras caught me doing it. I had no right to say it. It was stupid.
Souness didn’t see it or hear it but when he spoke to the journalists from the daily papers after the game, they told him about it. He looked surprised at first, apparently, and then he began to look angry. I don’t blame him, really. I would have been angry, too.
Nothing was said on the journey back to Newcastle but when we went back into training on Tuesday, there was a team meeting. Dean Saunders, who was one of Souness’s backroom staff, told me that if Souness had a go at me in the meeting, I should take it on the chin. I didn’t like Saunders but it was probably good advice. I didn’t take it.
Sure enough, at the meeting Souness started yelling at me. He mentioned a few of the trophies he had won, for a start. And he listed a few of the clubs he had played for.
“And then someone like you calls me ‘a fucking prick’,” he said. “I’ll fucking knock you out.”
He was absolutely raging. He came over to where I was sitting and tried to grab me. I pushed his hand away and he lost his balance slightly and stumbled. That made a couple of the other boys laugh which made Souness even more furious than he was anyway.
“In the gym now,” he said. “Me and you.”
I couldn’t believe what was happening. He was going nuts.
“What are you on about?” I said. “I’m not going to go in the gym to fight you.”
He didn’t say anything else. He just stormed out.
I apologised later for what I’d said to him at Charlton. I meant it, too. I was out of order. He told the press he had taken me off because I had played two games for Wales the previous week and he wanted to save my legs. He said he wanted to persevere with me. He said I was ‘a cracking little player’. It was good to hear but we flew to Greece the afternoon after our row in the team meeting for a Uefa Cup match against Panionios and we never really spoke properly again.
I just wanted to get to January so that I could move away and begin my career afresh somewhere else. I knew Souness wanted me out and I wanted to go. It was a shame. I do have a lot of respect for him as a manager. He has given a lot to the game and I still think he has a lot to give even now.
Freddy Shepherd consistently said I was not for sale and I wasn’t going anywhere on loan.
But I got a different impression from the manager. January came around and one day I was sitting in the canteen at the training ground reading the newspapers before training. There was a big piece in one of them claiming Newcastle would listen to offers for me during what remained of the transfer window. It was confirmation I could leave, as far I was concerned. I knew who the journalist was and who he was friends with. It was a well-sourced story, put it that way.
Even though I wanted to go, I felt I was being badly treated. I was playing out of position and I was being cast as the villain. I was bewildered but I was angry, too. I said as much to some of the players in the canteen. I went out training but I was a shadow. My head was gone. I felt betrayed. I had my own issues as well at that time, as I’ve said. I felt worthless. I tried to train. Shay Given went to throw me a ball and I sort of turned my back on him.
I have never done that. I just said ‘sorry, mate’ and walked off. I told the coach my hamstring was killing me. I went in and Souness passed me on the way out. I saw the physio. I told him I wasn’t injured. I said I just needed to get off the training pitch because I had a chance of getting an injury because I wasn’t mentally right to train.
When training finished, Souness came to find me.
“Me and you,” he said, “we are going to see the chairman right now.”
So we went to his office at St James’ Park. He sat on one side of his desk. Souness and I sat on the other.
“Did you walk off the pitch with an injury?” Freddy asked me.
“Yes.”
“Are you injured?” he said.
“No.”
There was a pile of newspapers on Shepherd’s desk. I told him to get the Daily Mirror out and look at the article that claimed the club would listen to offers for me.
“I know it’s come from someone in this room,” I said.
“It’s nothing to do with me,” Souness said.
“I don’t even know this journalist,” Shepherd said, looking at the byline. “I’ll ring him now. But don’t believe what it says. You’ve got a lot of years left here.”
Souness butted in.
“Only on my terms,” he said.
We all agreed to agree on that. I shook their hands, apologised for walking off the training pitch and walked out.
That Sunday, we were playing Arsenal at Highbury. Souness named the team before we left and I wasn’t in it. He was making a point. I was fine with that. It was right that the other players should see that I had been dropped for walking off the training pitch. On Saturday, I travelled down to London with the rest of the squad.
When we got to Highbury on Sunday, Souness came over to me in the changing rooms.
“You’re not getting changed today,” he said.
He hadn’t even put me on the bench. There was always one player who was brought along and would be surplus to requirements unless somebody pulled out right at the last minute. This Sunday, he had decided it would be me. So he had made me travel all the way down to London for a high-profile match that was live on television and I wasn’t even on the bench.
People were surprised. A couple of the Sky reporters came up to me and asked if I was injured. I told them I wasn’t. Sky started reporting that I had refused to play. I was astonished. I began to feel like this was some sort of stitch-up. Why would I travel if I had refused to play? Highbury was a tight little ground. There was nowhere for me to get away from the spotlight and the questions. I felt exposed.
We lost the game 1-0 to a Dennis Bergkamp goal. It meant we had only won three of our last 10 matches. I got on the coach outside the ground and waited for the rest of the lads. The radio was on. They were reporting that Souness had implied I had refused to play. Actually, I think he was probably dropping hints about me walking off the training pitch but the message got lost in translation. Anyway, I was fuming. I wasn’t ready to accept that. I had a decent rapport with the Newcastle fans and I didn’t want them to think I had refused to play.
When we got back to Newcastle, I went out and drank like you wouldn’t believe. My head had gone. I ended up in a club somewhere with Patrick Kluivert. I woke up the next morning with a shocking hangover, rang Alan Shearer and had a go at him. That turned into quite a big argument and I said things I shouldn’t have said. Then I had the bright idea that I should do a television interview to put my side of the story.
It was one of the most ridiculous things I have ever done. I thought it was me against the world, which was rubbish, but I was in a mess by then. I did the interview with Sky and accused Souness of telling ‘a downright lie’ about me. I said it was part of a plan to hound me out of the club. There was a lot of confusion about exactly what I was being accused of and maybe if I had kept my counsel, it would all have blown over. But the interview put paid to that.
Freddy Shepherd was livid. He made a statement to the media then, in which he accused me of breaking a promise to apologise to the rest of the players for walking off the training pitch. “In my book,” Shepherd said, “this is cheating on the club, the supporters, the manager and the player’s own team-mates. Craig Bellamy is paid extremely well by Newcastle United and I consider his behaviour to be totally unacceptable and totally unprofessional. The player will now face internal discipline by the club.”
I was fined two weeks’ wages, £80,000, but I was not put on the transfer list. Shepherd phoned me and said I had to go and apologise to Souness. Only if I did that could I play for the club again, he said. I couldn’t do it. It was too far gone anyway. It was done. There was no way back.
So when I went into training the next day, I wasn’t allowed to go outside with the other players. I was told to stay in the gym and forbidden from mingling with the rest of the lads. People I thought I knew at the club, people I thought were my friends, wouldn’t be seen anywhere near me. They were worried that might be construed as taking my side. I did a few weights and then went home.
Birmingham City offered £6m for me and Newcastle accepted it but I didn’t feel ready for a permanent move. I wanted to see out the season on loan somewhere, repair my reputation a bit and then see what happened in the summer. I knew people would be looking at me as damaged goods after what had happened with Souness and I didn’t feel good about myself either. I was deep in self-loathing. I was low.
Then John Hartson rang me up. He had moved to Celtic after we had gone our separate ways at Coventry and he said Martin O’Neill wanted to take me to Scotland. I loved the idea. I fancied the chance of chasing the league and trying to win a cup. I knew all about Celtic and their terrific support. I thought it would be a good experience.
Things began to get a bit frantic. Celtic approached Newcastle about loaning me but Newcastle turned them down. It came to the last day of the transfer window and things didn’t seem to have moved on. I went in to training at Newcastle. I wanted to show I was committed and willing to play. I didn’t want any more stories about me refusing to play.
I had only been there two minutes when I got a phone call saying the loan deal to Celtic had been agreed. I drove north straight away.