Craig Bellamy - GoodFella Read Online Free Page A

look right. I wanted to make sure I had nice trainers. There were girls, loads of girls. I saw a lot of kids grow up quickly.
    Around that time, a guy called Stan Montgomery, who had played for Cardiff and been first team coach at Norwich City, scouted me for Bristol Rovers. I was training with Cardiff at Trelais School by then but the facilities were beyond poor and so when Stan approached my dad and we realised I would be given kit at Rovers and the coaching would be better, we went for it. It was about an hour’s drive but I didn’t mind. It was just another place to go and play football.
    I did well there and word got around. One night, the phone went at home and my dad answered it and I heard him talking for a while. He came back into the room and said that it had been someone from Norwich City. They wanted me to go and play in a game in Somerset. It was like a trial, I suppose. I went, I played well and then they asked me to go and play for them in a tournament in Denmark called the Dana Cup.
    I’d never heard of it. My horizons were not exactly wide at that time. But it is one of the world’s largest football tournaments and it takes place at the end of July every year in the town of Hjorring, way up in the north of Denmark, about 300 miles from Copenhagen. It felt like a massive jamboree when I got there. There were thousands of kids from all over the world. I had never experienced anything remotely like it.
    I’d been on the odd holiday with my parents. We’d been to Benidorm and Corfu but this was way outside my comfort zone. It was challenging enough just travelling with a football club. All the other kids were from places like Colchester and
    Ipswich and there was me, fresh out of Cardiff, a long way away from home.
    The people at Norwich could not have made me feel more welcome. Perhaps it was partly because I was a good player. That always helps when it comes to being accepted as a kid. I felt, even in that company, even at that age, that I stood out straight away. I played well in Denmark. I really enjoyed it and a month later, I started training with Norwich’s young development team, which was called Canary Rangers. I trained with them for a week and had a great week. I did well again and from then on, all my football development was with them.
    That was when my double life started in earnest. I would head off from Cardiff to Norwich or to a tournament somewhere abroad. We slept in dormitories or camper beds. Training was brilliant, the facilities were brilliant and I started to learn about what it meant to be a professional footballer.
    I learned a bit more about life, too. Norwich started to educate me about pleases and thank yous. I’m not saying that my parents didn’t but Norwich really did develop a professionalism in me that I managed to keep. We had a youth coach called Kit Carson, who was a big influence on me. He wanted us to keep the ball at all costs so I was brought up to pass the football, to play one-twos, not to hit it long but to be patient, to pass it across the back four. Kit Carson just stood there quietly, watching us play, never saying a word. Parents weren’t allowed to come and watch training or come to the games. We wereallowed to swear and, as long as we were responsible and respectful, we were treated with that kind of respect from Kit Carson as well.
    That was one half of my life but at home, I was still hanging around with kids who were two or three years older than me. We used to meet at the Trowbridge shops: me, Anthony, Gareth, Stuart, another Anthony, my brother, Paul, and Omar and Mohammed. Omar and Mohammed were new. They were refugees from Iraq and from day one, they could look after themselves. Omar was a hard bastard. Fearless. They were good kids to grow up with. There was a gang of 13 or 14 of us and we used to meet up at the shops down the end of my street and then wander into school.
    By the time I was 12, my mates who were 14 or 15 weren’t really