23
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 applied 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.
The club said they didn’t want me to leave. They said they had been waiting for me to get fit and now they were looking forward to seeing me start to flourish in a West Ham shirt. I told them the last thing I was going to do was ask to leave after being out for a year. I wasn’t like that. I wanted to get on with playing for West Ham. I wanted to prove myself at West Ham. I had it in my mind to stay there for a long time.
From the beginning of October until Christmas, we only won once in 12 matches. It was a terrible run but after Christmas, things really picked up and we began to get the results our standard of play deserved. I scored two goals in an emphatic victory over Portsmouth at Fratton Park on Boxing Day, then we beat Stoke, Fulham and Hull at Upton Park, squeezing in a draw at Newcastle in between. Those results were a fairer reflection of our ability.
But as January wore on, I became more and more aware that negotiations were going on about my future. My adviser had rung on Christmas Eve to say that Spurs had offered West Ham £6m for me and that West Ham had turned it down flat. That was fine by me. In fact, I was pleased that West Ham still held me in that much esteem after my injury problems.
Then things began to get complicated. Manchester City rang me. They said they had an agreement with Tottenham that Tottenham couldn’t sign me. They told me they had had an agreement with Spurs that they would not bid for Jermain Defoe if Spurs would not bid for me. They had kept to their side of the bargain and stayed out of the race for Defoe and now they felt Spurs were reneging on the deal.
Spurs and City started firing in bids to West Ham and arguing with each other. I was called in by the club before the FA Cup third round tie against Barnsley at Upton Park on January 3. “You must be aware of some of what is going on behind the scenes,” I was told. “Do you want to play?”
I said of course I did. The point was made to me that I’d be cup-tied. I said I was a West Ham player and I wasn’t bothered about being cup-tied. I said I wanted to play. I found it strange that I was even asked about it. I wondered if the club was thinking about whether the fee they might attract for me would be adversely affected if I was cup-tied.
Soon after that, it became clear to me that the club was now encouraging bids from Spurs and City. I asked them what fee they were looking for. I understood that, particularly given the club’s financial problems, they needed to get as much as they possibly could for me, but the situation was starting to unsettle me.
West Ham said they didn’t want me to go to Tottenham. They said they would like me to sign a new contract with them, which I was open to. I told them that they needed to speak to my adviser about it. Then they asked me who I wanted to join. It was getting bizarre. I said I loved living in London and I would prefer it if they would stop encouraging Man City.
As I was about to leave the office, there was a call from Spurs. I could hear someone from the club on the phone. He said Man City had ‘gone to 10’. Then he phoned Man City and said ‘Spurs have gone to 10, what are you offering?’ I felt exasperated by it. It was draining me. Gianfranco didn’t know what was happening either. It was a mess.
I played and scored at Newcastle on January 10 and came off eight minutes from the end. A few minutes after the final whistle, I had a phone call from Man City. “We heard you pulled your hamstring,” they said. It was bizarre. I told them I hadn’t pulled my hamstring. I had just come off as a precaution because my hamstring felt tight. They sounded reassured.
I went in to training the following Monday to be told that the Tottenham deal was done. They said they had agreed a fee with Spurs but that I had to put in a transfer request. I said I wouldn’t do that. I knew they were trying to make it look as though I had been pushing for a move when, all along, I had watched them conducting an auction for me.
I said if they wanted to sell me, they had to tell the fans they wanted to sell me. Otherwise I’d stay. I was happy there. It was obvious they needed the money but they needed the highest fee. I understood that and I didn’t resent them for it but they needed to be straight about it. They said again that the deal was done so I went in to the training ground to say goodbye to everyone and went back to my flat in Canary Wharf.
I was sitting in my apartment watching Sky Sports. They started reporting that I had walked out of training. I didn’t know what to do. We were at home to Fulham on Sunday but the way West Ham had been talking, I would be sold before that happened. I had City on the phone, too, angry because word had reached them that the deal with Spurs was done.
I decided to go back to Cardiff. If I had to come back on Saturday to be involved in the build-up to the game, that was fine. But West Ham had told me I was going to be a Spurs player. I presumed I wasn’t going to be involved in the Fulham match and I was loathe to sit around in an empty flat on my own, fretting about what was going on.
I woke up in Cardiff on Saturday morning. I got a phone call to say that the back page headline on the Daily Mail was ‘Bellamy on Strike’. You couldn’t get further from the truth if you tried. It got people angry, understandably. A lot of West Ham fans were disgusted with the idea that I’d go on strike after the club had been so patient with me. I didn’t blame them.
Again, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just ring up a journalist and say it wasn’t true. I tried not to get involved in that sort of stuff. But I was really angry about it. I knew the newspapers must have been fed the line about me going on strike from someone at West Ham. They were trying to turn me into the bad guy, which, given my history, wasn’t the most difficult thing to do.
Gianfranco rang. He said I wasn’t right to play. He said West Ham wanted him to put me in the squad but that he had refused. I suppose they wanted to strengthen the picture of me as some sort of contract rebel, a greedy player demanding even more money from a club that had behaved well towards him.
It reflected well on Gianfranco that he wasn’t willing to play that game. I imagine they had put him under a fair amount of pressure to play along. I just told Gianfranco I wanted it sorted out. I didn’t want to miss any games. I wanted to play. He said he was still hoping they would get me back.
The situation got even more complicated. The Spurs boss, Harry Redknapp, rang and said that they had just made an approach to sign Wilson Palacios from Wigan Athletic and that City were threatening to scupper the deal in revenge for Spurs signing me. City didn’t want Palacios, Harry said, but they were saying that they would try to sign every player Spurs targeted over the next two transfer windows if they persisted with their attempts to sign me.
I got a message from him later that day. “Fuck Man City,” it said. “We’re going to try to sign you anyway.”
It got very ugly. It began to appear that West Ham wanted to sell me to Man City because Man City would offer more money. So on the eve of the game against Fulham, I was told that the fee with Man City had been agreed and I had to go up to Manchester to sign the contract. I was on the M56, heading into the city, when I got a phone call saying the deal wasn’t done after all.
City had offered £12m but there was an argument about an extra £2m. City said they’d pay it if City won the league but West Ham wanted it if City qualified for the Champions League. City wanted me to stay up in Manchester until it was cleared up but I didn’t want to get caught up there if the deal hadn’t been done. That would have made me look really clever. I could have been the first Peter Odemwingie, knocking on the gates at Eastlands and being told to go away. So I turned around and drove back down to Cardiff.
It seemed West Ham had just been threatening City with the Spurs deal to drive the price up. They were still doing their best to make me look the bad guy, too, and when the game against Fulham kicked off that Sunday lunchtime, I got a thorough slating even though Gianfranco said publicly it was wrong to suggest I had gone on strike.
I was even more fed-up now. I rang one of the people at West Ham at half-time and told him I wasn’t going anywhere. I said I’d sign the new contract he had mentioned to me. I told him to make sure it was on his desk on Monday morning and I’d come in and sign it there and then. I told him I was happy with what I had got at West Ham and that I had never wanted to leave.
He sounded taken aback.
“Leave it with us,” he said.
My head was spinning. I didn’t really want to go to Manchester City. I knew it was an interesting proposition though.
Sheikh Mansour had taken over from Shinawatra the previous summer and their ambitions, not to mention their cash reserves, seemed limitless. But I was happy in London. I had a lot of friends at West Ham and Spurs. I think I would have found the transition to playing at White Hart Lane easy. My kids loved coming to see me in London because it was an exciting place to visit. I didn’t want to move.
I went out for a jog around the lanes near my house for half an hour. When I got back, there was a message on my phone. It was from the club.
“The deal with City is done,” it said. “All the best.”