4
At the end of my first year of YTS, all the second year boys I lived with at The Limes – including Tom Ramusat – had been called in for contract talks with Gary Megson and Keith Webb. One by one, they came out looking crestfallen. One by one, they said they had been released. Tom took it on the chin but I could see how down he was.
The image of their faces kept coming into my mind. It was my other motivation. I was desperate to do well for the child we were going to have and I was also determined not to hear the words of rejection that those other lads had heard when my time came to be judged.
I became very selfish and single-minded about that and the club loved it. I was supported fully in all the extra work I was doing. The reserve team coach, Steve Foley, was fantastic. He was strict but his football knowledge was brilliant and if I stayed late, he stayed late with me. I think it meant a lot to him that a kid like me was willing to do all this work, but I got so much out of him. I was educated so well at Norwich.
We had a good youth team in my second year. Robert Green was the goalkeeper and Darren Kenton, who went on to have a good career for the club, was also in the side. Green lived at The Limes, too, but he wasn’t for me. He liked to come across as someone who wasn’t your stereotypical footballer, but that wasn’t the Robert Green that I knew.
My determination to get a contract drove me on but it also brought me into conflict with people. I had been selected for Wales Under-21s in my first year and made my debut when I came on as a substitute in an away match against San Marino. We’d travelled out to Italy with the first team squad – players like Mark Hughes, Ryan Giggs and Gary Speed – and they must have looked at me, this kid who was so small in all my over-sized national team gear, and wondered who the hell I was.
That performance in San Marino made me the youngest player ever to appear for Wales Under-21s but when I found out I was going to be a dad, the next time I was called up, in November 1996, I told Norwich I didn’t want to go and asked them if they could tell Wales I was injured. It wasn’t that I didn’t love playing for Wales. I did. It was a real privilege to be around some of those senior players. But I felt it set me back at Norwich.
I’d go away with the Under-21s for 10 days and miss a couple of youth team games and when I got back, I’d find that somebody had played in my absence, done well and was suddenly ahead of me. I needed a pro contract. I was totally focused on that. It was my number one priority. And if going away with Wales was getting in the way of that goal, if it was harming my chances, I didn’t want to do it.
Norwich were sympathetic. I think they could see why the situation was difficult for me. And two weeks after the conversation about the Under-21s, they offered me a professional contract. They told me they wanted to remove any of the doubts and worries from my mind and reassure me that I had a big future at the club. What a moment that was. It was just an incredible relief. And I can still remember calling my parents to tell them. That takes some beating as a moment, I promise you.
But, quickly, other thoughts started crowding in. First of all, I told myself I had done nothing yet and that the hard work was just beginning. I wanted to get into the first team and make myself a regular. And even though I was so grateful to Norwich for offering me the contract, I was also determined to get the best deal possible for me, Claire and the baby.
That wasn’t the norm. The idea was that you were offered terms and you accepted them, no questions asked. In my case, the offer was £200 a week. If I played 10 games for the first team, it would be renegotiated and renewed. If it had just been me, £200 would have been great but it wasn’t just me. I had my girlfriend and my kid, too. And the way I looked at it, I was probably better off on £40 a week with my accommodation paid for.
Norwich were a bit taken aback. They called my bluff but I said I would play on until the end of my second year and then take my chances and see what was available elsewhere in the summer. Two other lads had said they were going to do the same thing but they buckled under the pressure straight away and signed. I was painted as some sort of renegade. Some of the senior pros regarded me as an object of curiosity. Other people at the club started to shun me.
I didn’t care. I’d made a lot of sacrifices. I knew I was going to have to make a lot more. I believed in myself and I thought that if Norwich did not improve their offer, I would secure a better contract somewhere else. It wasn’t easy, though. Norwich decided they’d teach me a lesson. I found myself on the bench for the reserves. It lasted four or five weeks but I didn’t buckle.
Then they called me back in. They offered me £250 a week and I agreed. That was funny. If I’d accepted the £200 a week straight away, I would already have had that and could have still negotiated a rise. I probably would have been better off. What an idiot I was. But at least I had got my way. And I felt satisfied that I had done my best. It wasn’t much money, not enough to move Claire up to Norwich, but it got the ball rolling. Next, I wanted to get in the first team, get more appearances, get another contract.
I was playing well for the youth team. We were sailing in the league and progressing in the FA Youth Cup and I was scoring hat-tricks from the position they were playing me in, as a free man in the centre of midfield. I had a licence to go wherever I wanted and it suited me. I found it very comfortable and I felt that I was getting closer and closer to a spot in the first team.
Then one day in late February, I came in from training and Terry Postle, the kit man, called me into his little room and asked if he could have a word.
He told me my dad had just called to say that Claire had gone into labour. I was just a kid. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know whether to be excited or afraid for her or what.They got me over to the station and I got the train to London and then on to Cardiff. I was on the train for five hours and I thought I’d probably miss the birth. But when I got up to Heath Hospital, the same hospital where I had been born 17 years earlier, I found the room where she was, with her mum and her auntie. She was still in labour.
I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be in the room. We were kids. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like a spare part. Then my nan rang. So I went outside and chatted to her and during that call, Claire gave birth to our son, Ellis. I froze a little bit. I didn’t know what to do. I was just praying she and the baby were both well.
It all seemed like a blur. It was amazing when I saw him for the first time, amazing when I knew everything was okay. I slept at my parents’ that night and then went back up to the hospital the next morning. There were other new parents in the ward and I felt embarrassed because I was still a boy. But I wasn’t going to have anyone looking down on us, thinking ‘we’ll have to pay for those kids’.
I knew I was going to provide for Claire and my baby. I was going to pay my own way. We were young and it was going to be difficult but I knew I’d do it. The first night Ellis came home, we were in Claire’s bedroom and we slept on a mattress right next to him. Just listening to him breathe…I didn’t sleep a wink. I was just listening to him, holding my own breath until he breathed again.
It was a magical couple of days but I knew I had to go. I had to get back up the road. Football doesn’t stop. I knew I needed to get back quickly because I needed to get into that first team. I knew that the task of providing for Ellis had started in earnest now and I had to move up to another level. It had to start with me going back to Norwich that day. Claire’s mum promised me they would look after them both. And so I left.
Nobody mentioned it much to me back in Norwich. Football’s football. Everyone’s looking after themselves. You’re here, you’re back, that’s it. No little gifts from older pros. Nothing like that. You just got on with it. That was how I approached it. I didn’t expect anything different. I went back to The Limes with Robert Green and Darren Kenton. I made Tom Ramusat the godfather. I threw myself back into training.
I was hardly at the digs because I was training all the time. The other YTS boys knew what I was doing. Maybe in other circumstances, some of the other lads might have thought I was being busy, trying to make myself popular with the coaches, being a teacher’s pet. But they had seen how I had behaved the year before and the change that had come over me since I had found out I was going to be a father and I think they understood. I think they were thinking ‘look at Bellers now’. They understood my focus.
I made my first team debut against Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park on March 15, 1997, less than a month after Ellis was born. Norwich were in the First Division, the second tier of English football, and by the time I broke through, we were no longer contending for promotion. We had started well under Mike Walker but we went 10 games without a win before Christmas which put paid to our ambitions of going up to the Premier League. We lost 5-1 and 6-1 in consecutive matches away at West Brom and Port Vale in December.
There were a lot of decent players at the club, though. Bryan Gunn was a good keeper, Ian Crook and Mike Milligan were fine midfielders, Darren Eadie had a lot of pace out wide and there was Robert Fleck up front. I got about two minutes at the end of that game against Palace. There was no question of a call to my parents so that they could get to the game to watch my debut. It all felt very last minute. I was wearing a kit that was about three sizes too big for me, I touched the ball twice, we lost 2-0 and it was over.
It wasn’t the proudest time in Norwich’s history. That had probably come a few years earlier when they led the Premier League for most of the season during its first year of existence. They finished third in the end but the following year, they beat Bayern Munich in the Olympic Stadium in the Uefa Cup before losing to Inter Milan.
Those were the years when I first started travelling over from Cardiff to play for the boys’ team but by the time I joined as an apprentice in the summer of 1995, it was very different. The club had been relegated from the Premier League at the end of the previous season and there was some brutal cost-cutting going on as the club tried to adapt to its reduced circumstances.
I found out how ruthless football was that season. Martin O’Neill left after a few months in a row over money. I saw kit men who had worked at the club for years and years sacked. And the same with tea ladies. That was my introduction to the reality of football. It is ruthless. Clubs don’t care. Money’s tight and if things have to give way, they will give way. It does not matter how many years you have been somewhere. There is no loyalty in this game. I saw that early doors due to all that. What is more important: players or the club’s existence? It’s the club’s existence. Not us. Players come and go.
I wasn’t under any illusions about that. I knew how easy it would be to become a victim of football rather a beneficiary of everything it could offer. I was disappointed with my debut at Palace because I barely got a touch and it felt like an anti-climax. But it was one more goal achieved. I was 17 when I made my debut, just like Ryan Giggs had been, and now I wanted to kick on.
The week after my first team debut, I was sub for the youth team. It was their way of saying ‘don’t think you’ve made it’. That was fair enough. It was my motto anyway. It was perfect for me. I didn’t think I was a professional yet, really. I wasn’t expecting that everything would suddenly start coming easily. I knew I had to go away and work even harder.
At least I could see some rewards for the effort I was putting in. The youth team won the South East Counties League and soon after we had clinched the title, I played for the first team again in the last home game of the season against Manchester City on a Friday night. I got 10 or 15 minutes this time and I felt like I made a contribution.
City had been relegated from the Premier League the year before and they still had some good players but I did okay against them. Ian Crook fed me the ball all the time and I played a couple of quick one-twos with him. I played centre midfield and I was roaming everywhere. The crowd took to me straight away, this little kid playing in a kit that was still way too big for him.
The last game of the season was Oldham away. I came off the bench again. It was all part of my education and a place like Boundary Park was a hard school. I nearly gave a goal away with a loose backpass and it gave me a real shock. I felt uncomfortable in that game.
The Oldham players seemed like giants. They were strong, direct and physical. It didn’t scare me but it did make me realise I was going to have to work hard that summer if I was going to impress in the first team. We lost 3-0.
I went home to Cardiff. I lived at Claire’s mum’s that summer, getting used to being a father and caring for Ellis. I was also coming to terms with the fact that I had an awful lot to lose and that I couldn’t afford to take any risks any more. I knew by that stage that I wasn’t too far away from getting a full cap for Wales, which would bring a new level of recognition, particularly in Cardiff.
It hit me with a jolt that I couldn’t really go round to my mates’ flats any more. What happens if I’m round there and they invite some other lads round and they start smoking cannabis or other stuff? I can’t tell them what not to do in their own place. And what happens if the police come running into that place? I’d get arrested and my name would be all over the papers even though I hadn’t done anything.
Not many people cared about Norwich City in Trowbridge. I knew that. In fact, interest in football generally in the area was at a bit of a low with Cardiff stuck in the Fourth Division. But people were aware that I was a footballer and I knew that, with my career looking as though it might be about to take off, I couldn’t afford any suggestions of bad behaviour to get back to Norwich. That would set me right back.
So I totally shut myself off from my old friends. I stopped going to the Hippo Club in Cardiff, a dance music place behind the train station, which had been one of my haunts. I knew then my life had gone in a different direction and even though they were my friends, my friends knew it too.
My life was different. My focus was different. Providing for Ellis was what really mattered to me. I couldn’t afford any mistakes. I felt that I had a genuine chance of making it to the big time as a footballer. I was close now, really close. It was hard but I knew I had to completely sacrifice my friends.
If I couldn’t speak to them ever again, I wouldn’t.