Craig Bellamy - GoodFella
and everyone started having a go.
    Harts sensed an opportunity to salvage something from a pretty dire afternoon and had a go, too.
    “Why did you take me off, by the way?” he said.
    “Because you looked overweight, the sun was way too much for you and I thought I was doing you a big, big favour,” Gould said. Harts just looked at him. There wasn’t much of an answer to that and he knew it.
    “Okay,” he said.
    At least it was never dull with Wales. The following season, I found myself sent back down to the Under-21s squad when the qualifying tie against Italy came around at the beginning of September, 1998. That was fair enough. All the top players who had missed the summer friendlies were back and this was Italy. It was a glamour game. Even the Under-21 match had a smattering of superstars.
    We lost 2-1 to our Italian counterparts but that was hardly a disgrace. They had Andrea Pirlo, Gianluigi Buffon and Massimo Ambrosini in their ranks, so they weren’t too shabby. I scored the Wales goal and after the game I was drafted into the senior squad for the match at Anfield the following evening.
    We were staying at the Carden Park Hotel, south of Chester, and when I went into the team meeting at 10am, I noticed that Robbie Savage wasn’t there. That didn’t make me particularly observant, by the way. Sav was such a loud presence that you noticed when he was absent. I thought maybe he had been injured in training the previous day.
    I have always liked Sav. Behind all the bluster, he’s actually a pretty insecure guy. Because I’d been playing well for the Under-21s and I was creeping closer to a place in the first team, I could tell he was threatened. I wore the number 4 shirt during the friendly in Tunisia and Sav collared me soon afterwards. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll be giving that back to me soon enough.” That was typical Sav. He knew I was a better player than him and he knew he was going to be under the cosh for his place.
    Bobby Gould walked into the meeting room and went straight into a rant about how he had been watching television the previous evening when he saw Sav doing an interview with Sky. Sav was holding an Italy number 3 shirt, Paolo Maldini’s shirt, and then he scrumpled it up for the benefit of the camera and threw it away. Bobby Gould was appalled by that. He said it showed a complete lack of respect for one of the world’s greatest players.
    He told us what he had done. He had rung Sav in his room in the middle of the night and told him to leave the hotel and that he would not be playing any part in the Italy match. He had sent him home. Sav himself said later that the call came at 5am and that Bobby Gould had threatened to call the police if Sav refused to leave. Sav was insistent it was just a prank and he thought Gould was overreacting. Once again, we were lurching into farce.
    Speedo spoke up straight away. He asked Gould what he had sent him home for. He said we needed him for the game.
    “What can I do?” Gould said. “I’ve sent him home and the media knows I’ve sent him home.
    “Well, then go and get him back,” Speedo said. “Ring him. We need him back in the squad.”
    Chris Coleman backed Speedo up and Bobby Gould began to retreat. It didn’t make him look very clever. It was another fuss about nothing and it was overshadowing a massive game. It was obvious to me, obvious to everybody, that Sav respected Maldini. It was just Sav’s idea of a joke, his tongue-in-cheek effort at saying the Italians didn’t scare us. It was obvious it was meant to be funny, not derogatory, but now we had made a big drama out of it.
    By then, Gould had already given a television interview explaining why he had sent Sav home. “Players must realise that they have a duty to put-up on the field of play and shut-up off it,” he said. “This type of ‘set-up’ interview has caused problems in the past and is totally alien to the true spirit of the game which was so

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