Tension and excitement as Act 2 of the Bellamy era kicks off

Leon Barton

There are many questions to ask about Wales manager Craig Bellamy ahead of the Nations League campaign kicking off in Portugal.

Will Act 2 of the Bellamy reign also be the final act? Or will the Wales manager get to enjoy an Act 3 home Euros before leaving for a club job? (I feel pretty confident in saying there won’t be an Act 4).

As a youngster at Norwich, apparently Craig Bellamy’s boss Bruce Rioch told him ‘whenever you go on the pitch, remember there might be someone watching you for the very last time’. It stuck. Bellamy once told football writer Henry Winter that he thought about Rioch’s comments before every game he played; ‘give everything, entertain, go for it, make the day special for every fan watching’.

It’s an attitude he’s also taken into his fledgling management career. ’We’re going all out, we’re going all out’ he insisted ahead of the World Cup play off against Bosnia-Herzegovina. We did go all out – when central midfielder
Jordan James was forced off with an injury early in the second half, instead of bringing on another midfielder (Josh Sheehan being the obvious choice) Bellamy instead replaced James with Liam Cullen, nominally a forward. So, yes, we went all out. We also went out.

Winter speaks glowingly of Bellamy, someone he’s ‘always found a very thoughtful interviewee; strong in his opinions, passionate, engaging, self-critical, intelligent and flawed… a very human individual’. When the two spoke over the phone
during Covid, ‘Bellamy insisted on having the TV on in the background, almost for additional company as we spoke; his mind is always racing’.

Which leads to one of the issues regarding his current job as an international manager – not having the day-to-day involvement in the game he would enjoy if employed by a club, something that would clearly a plus-point for someone as football-obsessed as Bellamy. This summer, in talking to Burnley about their vacant managers position, he was obviously tempted to walk away with the Wales job only half done, business unfinished.

Former Welsh international Nia Jones told the Feast of Football podcast that ‘I honestly think, in his ideal world – and this is just a guess – he wanted to get Wales to that World Cup, get out of the group…and then he would have left and got a top job in the Premier League. I think that’s how he probably wanted to play it. The reason we saw him so despondent and quiet, which is unlike him, is because it threw his summer plans up in the air’.

Noel Mooney, Chief executive of the FAW, in his appearance on the Business of Sport podcast recorded ahead of the Bosnia game, almost seemed to be setting up the likelihood of such a scenario playing out, and the nice juicy compensation the FAW would receive as a result. Mooney described Bellamy as an ’absolute genius.. on a different level’ before going on to say ‘we’ve absolutely no doubt that Craig will go on to manage the top teams in the world in the future, no question about that for us’, adding ‘we’re so lucky now that he’s doing his national duty’. What’s that Robert Burns line about ‘the best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men…’?

Head having been turned, there’s now a mixture of excitement and trepidation amongst Welsh fans. How will Bellamy’s ‘all in’ personality type cope with persevering in a job he, by all accounts, came so close to quitting?

Personally, when I first heard that Bellamy was talking to Burnley, I was disappointed that he appeared content to continue the pattern of his playing career, where, quite frankly, he didn’t see anything through: Join a big club for a couple of years, win nothing, move on. Rinse and repeat. As John Toshack put it ‘if you look at the managers Bellamy played under – Benítez at Liverpool, Bobby Robson and Graeme Souness at Newcastle, Roberto Mancini at Manchester City – all were trophy winners, but none of them ever won anything with Bellamy in the team’.

A League Cup with Liverpool (ironically, beating Cardiff City in the final) and Scottish Cup with Celtic was a poor return for a player of Bellamy’s exceptional quality. Toshack was scathing of his former player’s meagre trophy haul: ‘I don’t know anyone who’s played for Celtic and not won anything. Considering his ability, that says it all for me’.

For Wales – to my mind at least – qualifying for tournaments is equivalent to winning a trophy with a club like Newcastle United (which Bellamy didn’t manage in his four years there) or, say, Aston Villa or Tottenham Hotspur.

The big one, the World Cup, has gone. But the Euros is still there. As with so many other great Welsh players, he never experienced an international tournament with his nation but, as manager, redemption still beckons and now it would be a double dose.

The talk of tripling his salary was surely appealing, particularly in light of Bellamy’s financial problems. In 2023, while assistant to Vincent Kompany at Burnley, he announced that he had been made bankrupt, having received bad investment advice during his playing career. But while insisting he’s ‘never done anything for money’ in his press conference this week, he also said it felt right to turn the Burnley job down: ‘I had a sleepless night because I knew it had become real. I have to be honest, I woke up in the morning and it wasn’t there. I didn’t have that feeling of going into a meeting and grabbing it’.

Considering how Burnley’s Championship season has started, might Bellamy have dodged a bullet anyway? Their squad is a mishmash of Sean Dyche, Vincent Kompany and Scott Parker players, three managers who favoured wildly different styles. The fans at Turf Moor seem pretty despondent, and besides, in the 21st century, there are limits to what a club like Burnley is able to achieve anyway.

REDEMPTION

When Bellamy was appointed two years ago, I wrote an article detailing how the position gave him a shot at redemption in
Welsh context and the excitement of that tantalising possibility. And, right from the start there was excitement, even in a 0-0 draw with Türkiye, a game that was roughly one million times more fun than the 0-0 draw against Gibraltar a few months earlier that hammered a 12 inch nail into Rob Page’s coffin.

Türkiye was the first game of a Nations League group B campaign that ended with promotion to the top league, giving the manager an outstanding start. The World Cup in the US/Canada/Mexico was always the bigger prize though. That qualifying campaign was a mixture of huge highs (7-1 against North Macedonia) and crushing lows (losing out to Bosnia despite being 1-0 up five minutes from full time). The two games against Belgium probably sum it up best; five goals scored, a thrilling comeback from three goals down in Brussels, a huge buzz of excitement after taking an early lead in Cardiff. But ultimately, it was eight goals conceded and zero points.

As for where we’re at right now, it depends how you want to look at it. Glass half full: Belgium are the only side we’ve lost to in competitive matches in the two years since Bellamy took over. Glass half empty: Only two wins in the past nine games. And it’s not about to get any easier. There are four extremely difficult games Nations League to come in one window: Portugal away, Norway home, Denmark home and away. Wins will be hard to come by, especially as the manager will be without his first choice Centre Backs Joe Rodon and Dylan Lawlor.

Many fans blame Bellamy’s substitutions against Bosnia for Wales blowing a winning position and the nation not reaching the World Cup. Opportunity ungrasped, the managers’ standing amongst the fanbase is certainly not what it was. But, of course, it’s a results business. Staying in group A would represent a successful Nations League campaign, something which will be difficult but feasible. The previous time Wales were in group A we didn’t win a game but at least competed in all of them, drawing one and losing five by just the one goal.

Realistically, it’s going to mean targeting third place in the four team group. After that, the good news is the next Euros will be easier to qualify for, with second place enough for automatic qualification.\ Third in the Nations League table, followed by second in the Euro qualifying table and everyone’s happy.

But now there’s real pressure, coming in from different angles. The Euros in two years kicks off in Cardiff and there would be a certain level of embarrassment if Wales aren’t there. Bellamy’s stock will fall to the point where it would seem unlikely he’d get a job as big as Burnley if that happens. Equally, the chance is there for Bellamy to get offered a much more appealing job than Burnley if the next couple of years goes well with Wales.

The manager’s medium-term future is on the line. And quite frankly, at this point, that line resembles a tightrope.

---

Get more trusted Welsh news

Choose Nation.Cymru as a preferred source in Google News to see more of our journalism.