Craig Bellamy - GoodFella by Craig Bellamy Page B

it, going 2-1 down early in the second half. But we equalised and then Kit Symons got the winner five minutes from the end. For a few months, there was an unfamiliar feeling of optimism about our fortunes but that was punctured the following March when we lost 2-0 to Switzerland in Zurich. Next up was Italy in Bologna in June. That was when the fun and games started again.
    We prepared for the game in Rimini on the Adriatic coast, about 80 miles away from Bologna. Gould tried to change his approach. He let us do what we wanted to, basically. He abandoned the playing of charades. Even he had begun to realise that wasn’t working. You’d see boys trying to sneak out of the door while it was going on. In Rimini, we were out most nights.
    It was hot in training. When the sessions started to get serious, it began to look as though the front line would be Giggs on the left, Hughes in the centre and me on the right. That meant Mark Pembridge, Saunders and Harts would miss out. All three of them had probably been expecting to play. They weren’t impressed and they weren’t shy about showing it.
    There was one full-scale training match where one or two disaffected players got the ball and then just booted it into touch. They spat their dummies, basically. I’m not judging them. It was just a way of showing their frustration. I wasn’t going to say anything because I was a 19-year-old kid but I knew things were going to get interesting.
    Gould caved in. He moved things around to accommodate the established players and now it looked as if I was out. It didn’t bother me too much but it upset a few other people. So now the ones who felt they were being discriminated against started not to try in training. Gould had had enough of it. So he called everyone in.
    “I tell you what, you lot can pick the team,” he said, “and when you’ve done it, come and let me know what it is.”
    “You’re paid to pick the team, not us,” Speedo said.
    “I’ve just picked it,” Gould said, “and nobody listened to me.”
    People started laughing. Maybe Gould was trying to play a mind game but it felt like we were in chaos.
    I went back to my room and before long, there was a knock on my door and Gould came in. Neville Southall, who was his assistant, had seen me play in central midfield in a game for Norwich when we had gone down to 10 men and I had run the game. He had mentioned that to Gould, who had now decided he was going to play me in central midfield.
    We travelled to Bologna. The day before the game, he sat us all down, got a clipboard out, flicked over a page and showed us the team. Sure enough, I was in a three-man midfield with John Robinson and Speedo. Giggs, Hughes and Saunders were up front. I felt excited. I was going to play against Italy, one of the best teams in the world. I felt quite good about myself.
    Then Gould flicked over another page. It was a diagram of the Italy team. Except it wasn’t just their names. Underneath every Italy player, he had written their age and the amount of caps they had won. When he came to Christian Panucci, he mentioned that he had won the Champions League with Real Madrid the previous summer. He also mentioned that he had won it with AC Milan in 1994, too.
    Then he moved on to Cannavaro and the goalkeeper, Buffon, and what unbelievably good players they were. He pointed up to the roof. “Cannavaro could jump as high as this ceiling,” he said. Then he got around to Maldini. “Paolo Maldini,” he said, reverently. “Need I say any more?” It went on and on and on like that. He went through every single Italy player.
    I was an admirer of the Italians, too, but I started thinking ‘how on earth am I going to make any sort of impression at all against this lot, we’re going to get murdered’. I hardly slept all night.
    We got to the stadium the next day and the pitch was beautiful. They were a great team. They even looked incredible in the warm-up. I looked at them in the tunnel