Free Craig Bellamy - GoodFella by Craig Bellamy Page A

that he wanted him to use it to vent all his frustration, to rid himself of the resentment he was feeling by expressing himself in the wrestling. I suppose it was the equivalent of getting a kid to hit a punchbag, except in this case the punchbag was the manager of the national team.
    Harts was reluctant. He felt awkward about it. For obvious reasons. But the rest of the players were urging him on and telling him he had to do it and that he couldn’t back down. So in the end, Harts went to the middle of the circle. He’s a big bloke and after a few seconds of grappling, he gripped Bobby Gould in a headlock and then flung him across the circle on to the floor.
    Everyone was roaring and shouting. I almost had to pinch myself that this was happening. It was a bizarre sight. When Gould got to his feet, he was holding his nose and looking aggrieved. Blood was streaming out of it. He muttered to everyone that they should go for a jog so we set off around the pitch. I couldn’t believe what had just happened.
    I came to understand that it wasn’t actually that unusual. I liked Bobby Gould. He was a well-respected man in the game and he was generous to me. I also understood that he was trying to bring new, young players in and that Wales at that time were a comparatively weak football nation but a lot of the new ideas he tried, on and off the pitch, didn’t always work.
    He would do things like organise games of charades in the evening. The players didn’t like it. Footballers can be conservative, cautious people in a group and charades never went down particularly well. The only occasions it got animated were when Gould became the object of ridicule in some of the mimes. It was comical but it was heart-wrenching, too, because it was your country. The training, frankly, didn’t impress me.
    I made my debut against Jamaica at the ground where I had watched my first football match and seen Wales play for the first time. I was still only 18 and I felt I had achieved something special. At the end of the 1997-98 season, Wales played a couple of friendlies in Malta and Tunisia and I was included in the squads for those games, too.
    I started the game against Malta. I played in a three-man midfield alongside Gary Speed and Mark Pembridge and scored my first international goal to put us 1-0 up in a game we went on to win 3-0. The next evening, we were allowed to go into the town for a night out and I went out with Chris Llewellyn and Simon Haworth. Bobby Gould had allowed it but he had asked us to be back at a certain time because we were 18.
    We kept our distance a bit from the senior players. Harts was on the trip, too. He was five years older than me and he was out with the senior players. I always thought he was a great guy. He had been in the team when I made my Under-21 debut against San Marino and it was clear then that he was too good to be playing with us. He was at Arsenal and he should have been in the first team. In fact, he was better than three quarters of the first team.
    His relationship with Bobby Gould was already poor back then. He scored against San Marino and then booted an advertising hoarding so hard in frustration that he broke it in half. Gould asked him why he had kicked the board, which started a big row about why he had been selected for the Under-21s instead of the senior team in the first place.
    Harts is Welsh through and through. He’s a hard boy and confident, too. He would always be on the karaoke and whenever we went out with him, he wouldn’t let anyone else buy a drink. He got every round. Maybe one of the reasons for that was that few others seemed to drink at his pace.
    There were a lot of Cardiff fans in Malta that night and there was tension between them and Harts because he was from Swansea. Even though he played for Wales, it sometimes felt there was a chance that the Wales fans might attack him if they bumped into him on a night out. To a lesser extent, it was the same with me. I come from