I have always liked Bellamy and think this incident is a storm in a tea cup - read this articdle today which reaffirmed why I like him:
World in motion: Craig Bellamy is deeply misunderstood - discuss
His inability to handle the red mist is legendary, but his professionalism with a project in Africa tells a different story
The Bellamy most people see on the pitch is far removed from the character he is off of it
(Carl Recine/Action Images)
The Bellamy most people see on the pitch is far removed from the character he is off of it
Owen Slot, Chief Sports Reporter
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Insufficient use of Google means that I don’t know if this is the first. I hope it is, but with wrath and fury being heaped in large spoonfuls on Craig Bellamy, someone somewhere soon enough was going to try to be a smart arse, turn against the tide and construct an argument that actually Bellamy is deeply misunderstood, that his public profile is plain wrong and that in many ways he is a model footballer.
The time I met Bellamy, he didn’t want to do the interview anyway. My argument was that if he was going to sink nearly £1million of his own money into a project that would, without any remotest doubt, transform the lives of a considerable number of African kids, then it was a) a story that the public would like to know and b) a story that would shed him in good light. As for b), he didn’t give a stuff, didn’t have any interest in public profile, it was as if that was a door he had closed long ago. And he was so cold and frank about that, he seemed genuine. Eventually, he was persuaded that it would be good for his Africa project if he at least publicly acknowledged that it existed, but would he have his picture photographed for the newspaper? No, he wasn’t interested in photographs. That would be bordering dangerously on self-glorification.
A quick précis is in order here. In the summer’s close season of 2007, Bellamy spent two weeks in Sierra Leone. He went there because two mates of his were in the timber business there and advised him that it was a fascinating country. So he took them at their word, arrived unheralded with no fanfare, no media welcome, nothing apart from a large number of footballs and the intention that, whenever he saw a bunch of kids playing football – usually with a rolled-up ball of socks or a taped-up ball of newspaper pages - he would stop, give them a real ball and join them.
He left inspired and certain in the belief that this beautiful country, brought to its knees by a savage civil war, could be helped by football.
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And yes, this does all sound too good to be true and one’s instinct is to think: he’ll never see it through. But two years on, he has succeeded in putting in place the first ever structure for youth football in the country. He already has 1600 players, he employs 40 coaches and 40 managers on the payroll and this is just the start.
The next stage is the opening, next year, of the new state-of-the-art football academy outside Freetown, the capital, where the best young footballers will receive an elite football and academic education. The whole project was expected to cost him £650,000, but building projects always over-run the budget – don’t they? – and Bellamy has committed to spending a considerable amount more.
The key here is academic education. Those players in the Craig Bellamy Foundation League know the somewhat peculiar rules: that their teams accrue points in their leagues not only through their football match results, but also by their school attendance records and by participation in community development projects. Early figures, through Unicef, show that while the average secondary school attendance rate in Sierra Leone is 21 per cent, Bellamy’s 1600 footballers average over 80 per cent.
What does this tell us about Bellamy? Here are some answers from Tom Vernon, an Englishman from High Wycombe who booked his cloud in heaven a decade ago when he started his own football academy in Ghana. Vernon’s vision was always education before football, which is why, while he has a number of footballers at the foothills of the Premier League, he has had considerably more win scholarships to American universities. Bellamy saw this model, decided to copy it and brought in Vernon to help deliver it.
Vernon, who is not given to hyperbole, says this of Bellamy: that he is astonishingly professional in his approach, that when he makes his two-week visit every summer, he turns his phone off and dedicates himself entirely to the project “like he is turning up for a business conference†and that when he drives round the country to look at the prospective football talent for the academy, he talks to the players, eats with them and meets their families. And he says that Bellamy is so on top of the project that he insists on meeting every prospective new employee; before the new head coach was appointed, he was flown to England to spend a day in Bellamy’s company.
And no, Bellamy is not the only footballer to have given his name to an academy. African academies are the latest must-have fashion accessories which is why Vernon has been approached by a number of other players who want one for themselves.
Vernon says he often finds that footballers are keen to put their name to an academy believing that this alone will bring funding, yet putting in their own money is a different matter. And when Vernon’s management team convene to consider these players and their proposed enterprises, too often their conclusion is: “No, they’re not like Craig.â€
The Bellamy that you learn about through this African project is so far away from the footballer who put his hand in the face of a “fan†on Sunday, it is hard to work out where the two meet. At what stage does the responsible philanthropist turn into the short-fuse now facing a possible three-match ban?
That is one for the psychologists to answer. But while he is certainly guilty of ill deeds under the clouds of red mist, Bellamy is clearly rather different before they suddenly descend
