Free Craig Bellamy - GoodFella by Craig Bellamy

could see I was a goalscorer but that he felt I left too many gaps and the team had to adjust to me. He said I sometimes left the team exposed because I was looking to get forward all the time. He was right. He wanted an all-round midfielder.
    I had been getting away with playing in central midfield when we were a poor Division One side but he knew I wasn’t what we needed there if we were going to try to press for promotion. He asked me where I wanted to play and I said that if I had a choice, it would be up front. So I started in attack against Spurs. I scored and I played really well. Rioch wasn’t there because he had gone to scout another game but Hamilton was and when the new season started, I was up front.
    I scored seven goals in the first eight league games and never played central midfield again. I was the name on everybody’s lips for a while and Norwich moved quickly to head off interest from other clubs, including Spurs. They offered me another new contract, my third in a year. This time, I would be on £2,000 a week. It was a five-year deal that was structured so that, by the fifth year, I would be on £7,000 a week. I signed it straight away. No fuss this time.
    And Claire and I went house-hunting. We went to look at a show house. It had four bedrooms and it had two garages. It was the kind of place I had never imagined that I would live in, not in my wildest dreams. We were both still teenagers and we were looking at a house that was miles better than the houses our parents lived in. It was a strange feeling.
    Claire fell in love with that house but she thought it was beyond us. I didn’t tell her but I went back to the estate agent and bought it. I took the keys home and pressed them into Ellis’s hand and told him to go and toddle over to mummy on his walker. Claire looked at the keys and they had a tag with the address of the house on them. She thought I’d kept them from the appointment.
    “You’ve got to go and give those keys back,” she said.
    “No, I haven’t,” I told her. “It’s our bloody house.”
    To tell the truth, there was another house I’d liked better. When we first started looking, they took us to look at John Polston’s place.
    Polston’s career had fallen into decline since the days when I used to clean his boots and watch him throw the tea I’d made for him down the sink. He’d only played a handful of games for Norwich in 1997-98 and now they were shipping him out to Reading, who were a league below Norwich in the old Division Two, on a free transfer. He wasn’t there when I went round to look at his house. I don’t think his wife enjoyed showing me around too much. She had probably heard a few stories about what an arrogant little prick I was. And now the arrogant little prick, who was only 19, was coming round to look at the house Polston had grafted his whole career for.
    I liked that house. I was going to buy it. But then I decided against it. It was odd really but I did it out of respect for Polston, even though I felt he had shown me absolutely none. It felt like it would have been me laughing at him if I had bought his house and I didn’t want to do that. I had no interest in trying to score points over him any more.
    I thanked his wife and walked away.

6
    Goulden Start
    W hen I first started playing for Wales, it often felt as if I had stumbled into a black comedy. I was incredibly proud to be involved with the national team but when I joined up with the squad for the first time before a friendly against Jamaica at Ninian Park, I spent most of the days leading up to it in a state of wide-eyed bemusement.
    It was well-known that there was friction between the manager, Bobby Gould, and John Hartson, who I had got to know quite well from playing with the Wales Under-21s. At my first training camp, Gould got everyone to form a big circle and then told us all that he and Harts were going to go in the centre of the circle and wrestle each other.
    He told Harts