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Even David Beckham could learn a thing or two from Craig BellamyCardiff City's new signing is painted as a pantomime villain, yet in reality football has far worse role models
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Louise Taylor The Guardian, Thursday 19 August 2010 Article history
Craig Bellamy insists on personally interviewing any new African staff at his football foundation in Freetown. Photograph: Paul Redding/Action Images
As the interview drew to a close and the tape recorder was turned off, the Premier League "enforcer" sitting on the other side of a canteen table reiterated an important point. "You'll make it clear I don't aim to hurt people," he said. "Except Craig Bellamy – of course." The coldness in his eyes suggested it was not even a half-joke.
In these boringly discreet days such candour is extremely unusual but pantomime villains are rarely painted in more stereotypical colours than Cardiff City's latest signing. With the possible exception of David Beckham, few British footballers arouse more powerful emotions. Were CS Lewis still around to redraft the Chronicles of Narnia as a 21st‑century football fantasy, Becks and Bellers would surely serve as evocative symbols of good and evil.
Or perhaps not. Beckham may have Princes William and Harry as well as politicians of all persuasions crowding in his corner, he may have helped win us the Olympics and look like helping secure the 2018 World Cup, yet Bellamy is a wonderful role model too.
True he has a few more character blemishes – if not tattoos – than Beckham but throwing a chair at the former Newcastle United coach John Carver, attacking John Arne Riise with a golf club, giving Roberto Mancini persistent headaches and sending Alan Shearer abusive text messages do not necessarily make the Wales striker a wrong 'un.
Instead they reflect admittedly immature manifestations of an intense hatred of hypocrisy, passionate, if sometimes brutal, honesty and an essentially healthy willingness to question authority.
On planet football such traits serve as shorthand for subversion but in Sierra Leone they are regarded as heroic. Amid the shanty towns of one of the world's poorest countries idols do not come bigger than the striker Sir Bobby Robson dubbed "the gobbiest footballer I've ever met".
It all started when Bellamy blithely ignored Liverpool's warning that a summer holiday in Freetown was really not a good idea and, out of glorious curiosity, boarded a west Africa-bound flight. Since then scores of children have seen their lives transformed beyond all measure by the hundreds of thousands of pounds the Welshman keeps pouring into his self‑founded Freetown football foundation. Much more than a mere glory factory, it makes stringent academic and social demands of those it rescues from poverty with standards maintained by annual fortnight-long visits from Bellamy.
"Sierra Leone's infra-structure is so weak everyone said Craig was crazy," recalls Tom Vernon, the inspirational founder of Ghana's famous Right to Dream academy and the man Bellamy chose to kick-start his project. "Fortunately he didn't listen – and I have to say Craig is one of the most businesslike people I've ever met."
Such rigour extends to an insistence that potential new African employees are flown to the UK for personal interview by Bellamy. Such diligence does not surprise Eddie Niedzwiecki. "Craig's a perfectionist – and he gets frustrated when others don't meet his standards," the former Manchester City coach says. "But the thing people often don't understand is that he's a team player. It's not all about him."
England's former captain is also a perfectionist, but the difference is that, all too often, "Mr Posh" revels in seeing assorted worlds revolve around Brand Beckham.
I'll never forget being in Beijing's Workers' Stadium – supposedly a citadel to communism – alongside thousands of adoring Chinese wearing identical Beckham T-shirts as he made his Real Madrid debut on a pre-season tour. Or, a few days later, standing in the lobby of Tokyo's Four Seasons Hotel as security guards strained to prevent hundreds of hysterical women from literally getting their hands on him. One girl had even brought her tiny baby along, in the hope Beckham might perform a "blessing".
Later that evening Luís Figo and company looked on askance as their new team-mate permitted a Japanese flunkey to protect his head from teeming rain by dashing on to the pitch with an umbrella at the final whistle.
Bellamy would have told "umbrella man" where to go – which probably explains why he lives in south Wales rather than southern California. Joining Cardiff may waste a very real, very precious, talent in much the same way that representing LA Galaxy has hardly enhanced Beckham's twilight years. Yet at least it is a loan move informed by the romantic idealism implicit in fulfilling a lifelong desire to play for his hometown club.
There are far worse role models.
_________________
"It felt like a really pointless version of ketamine: no psychedelic effects, no pleasant slide into rubbery nonsense, just a sudden drop off the cliff of wrongness."
"i'm gonna wreck you so bad we're going to have to change church"
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