I went to my little girl’s first birthday party, and she didn’t know who I was. I got out of there and started crying
Heartfelt interview with Craig Bell amy on the battle for his mental health
IN August last year, Craig Bellamy came home to Cardiff from Belgium. It was only a brief visit. That was all it could be. That was all it ever was in those days because of Covid. By then, the separation was starting to gnaw at him and wear him down. This was a special occasion, too. It was his youngest child’s birthday. Orla was one year old.
Bellamy knew he had to be gone the next day. Back to Anderlecht, back to a football environment that was everything he wanted, coaching the club’s Under-21 side, working closely with manager Vincent Kompany, immersing himself in the game for 14 hours a day, educating himself, spending hours on the training pitch with the former Manchester City captain, plotting and planning.
Bellamy loved everything about working at the club but he also knew himself well enough to realise that the dislocation from his family was starting to tear him apart. He had dealt before with what Kompany was later to call the ‘monster of depression’. He knew the signs of its approach.
He had shut himself down emotionally before for football, at a cost, and now he was trying to do it again and it was destroying him again. He had been open about mental health issues in the past and now he could feel them assailing him once more.
‘I came back in August after pre-season with Anderlecht,’ says the former Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester City star, ‘and it was my daughter’s first birthday and there was a party for her and she didn’t know who I was. I held out my arms and she wouldn’t come to me. Why would she? She had only seen me on eight or nine occasions and even then I was only around for 24 hours at a time. I wasn’t really a part of Orla’s life.
‘Family members were all around, celebrating her birthday. If I went anywhere near her, she didn’t want to know. But she was going to her cousins and people like that. Which is fine, honestly. I didn’t even want to go up to her because it looked embarrassing. I got out of there and I started crying. What do I do? Do I walk away here and don’t come back? Do
I go to football and leave someone I love? Do I stay in her life?’
BELLAMY had accepted Kompany’s offer of a job at Anderlecht in the summer of 2019 and had thrown himself into the role. He lived in an apartment in the centre of Brussels and thrived alongside his former City team-mate as they began the process of rebuilding Belgium’s most famous club side by using their youth system to resuscitate them. The average age of their first-team players in that first season was 22.4 years.
‘I had always wanted to work abroad,’ says Bellamy, 42. ‘If you don’t know anything about the Anderlecht youth system, you don’t know football. The talent they are able to produce is off the scale. What a club to go into. I needed to do it. Just to see if I could. I was good enough to be a coach, I knew that, and I always wanted to learn but I needed to take the next step. We decided I would take the U21s. That was great. We rely on young players, anyway. The club’s motto is ‘In Youth We Trust’.
‘We had some great young players. There were financial problems and we knew it wasn’t going to be an easy ride but the youth system was going to get them out of it. Player sales would fill the well back up.
‘I absolutely loved it. Getting to spend time with Vinny one on one was such an eye-opener. How he deals with people, how he makes decisions, how calm he is. He showed me a different world. What we had in common was our work ethic. We worked 12 or 14 hours a day. I got in at 7.30am and we were leaving the training pitch at 8pm. We were out under the floodlights with mannequins, just us two on the pitch. “What happens if we move there, can we press there?”
‘I had my team at the U21s and so I would try something with them first so Vinny could see if it would work with the first team. It was the best football decision I’ve ever made. It was that good. It was that educational. For the first six months, it was brilliant. It was brilliant until Covid hit in March.’
Then things changed. Just as they did for so many people. Bellamy is
Mental health is not a taboo any more. That belief has to go. This is normal, not a weakness