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Bellamy on Benitez

When I walked into Melwood, the Liverpool training ground, I felt as though everything in my career had been leading to this moment. It was the first time I had ever been there and it was like being in a dream.

This was where Bill Shankly had worked. This was the turf that Bob Paisley had walked on. This was where Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush and Robbie Fowler had trained. The facilities might have been new and state-of-the-art but the place reeked of glorious history.

A lot of things went through my mind. It was only a year ago that my name was mud and everybody had been branding me a troublemaker and saying I was untouchable.

I had undergone four operations on my patella tendons and two on my cruciates. I had suffered from episodes of depression.

I even thought of sitting in my garage in Norwich on Christmas Eve, doing my leg presses. This is why I did it. To get here. To get to Melwood. To sign for Liverpool.

I did my medical stuff and then I went upstairs to see Rafa Benitez in his office. I sat down. He was business-like.

He produced a cutting from a newspaper. The page was dominated by a picture of me with a snarl on my face. Most of the time back then I’d have a snarl on my face. It was nothing unusual.

“Why are you looking like this?” he said. I told him I couldn’t remember.

“You can’t play like this,” he said. “This kind of aggression is not what you need as a player.”

I told him I understood. The memory of the game where the incident had happened started to come back to me. It was a match against Sunderland the previous season. Sunderland’s goalkeeper, Kelvin Davis, had shoved me in the back. I had a bad back anyway at that time. I didn’t take too kindly to being shoved in it.

I didn’t mention any of that to Rafa. I could sense it probably wasn’t the right time.

Then he got a board out and started quizzing me about footballing systems. What did I think about this formation or that formation, the positives, the negatives, the benefits of playing between the lines.

Where would I run if a teammate had the ball in a certain position. He asked me about every scenario under the sun. And every answer I gave, even if it was correct, was twisted into another answer.

“When you play up top,” he said, “if this player has it, where would you go?” It was like a multiple choice test. “I’d run to the left,” I said. “Yeah, but run right first, then go left,” he said. The other players told me later that was just typical Rafa.

I was a bit taken aback by his attitude. It was like being in the presence of an unsmiling headmaster. The atmosphere at the club seemed strange, too. It was a place of business and a place of work. There weren’t very many people smiling. There wasn’t a lot of laughter around the place. Even the physios were on edge when they were doing the medical. Everyone seemed uncomfortable and wary.

The next day, I met Pako Ayestaran, Rafa’s assistant and the fitness coach. The fitness routines were not that imaginative.

It was army style, really. Long, plodding runs mainly. It was very professional with heart monitors and fitness belts but there was no camaraderie while they took place. It was all double sessions, tactical work, standing in position, walk-throughs of tactical play. Rafa oversaw it all.

A lot of Rafa’s tactical work was very, very good. He was impressively astute and I learned a lot from him in that area. But he could not come to terms with the idea that some players need an element of freedom and that we express ourselves on the pitch in different ways. He was very rigid.

He worked on specific moves over and over again. It was a bit like American Football in that respect.

Rafa wanted people running designated routes when the ball was in a certain place, just as he had been explaining the first time I spoke to him in his office. The winger comes inside, the full-back overlaps, the forward has to run near post every time.

There was no allowance for the fact that your marker might have worked out what you are doing after a few attempts. You had to keep doing it because it might make space for someone else. I felt like a decoy runner half the time.

But I did learn a lot. Defensively, Rafa was exceptional. He was very good on the opposition and how to nullify their threat and stifle their forward players.

He would use video analysis to go through the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses. Our preparation for games was extremely thorough. Nothing was left to chance. He was the first foreign manager I worked under and I learned quite a bit.

But there was no scope for spontaneity. None. He distrusted that. Of all the managers I have worked with, he trusted his players the least. That’s just how he was. There was not much enjoyment. There were no small-sided games or anything like that.

Everything was tactical with timed drills and routines.

It was a bit like Groundhog Day. You came in and did the same stuff over and over again.

Sometimes strikers like to do finishing at the end of a session but once the whistle was blown at the end of training, Rafa would personally collect the balls and put them in the bag and no one was allowed to do any extra work. He was a total control-freak.

Rotation was something else I had to get used to under Rafa.

One week you would play, the next you wouldn’t. None of the players would ever know until an hour before kick-off who was going to start. I found that hard to adjust to. I found everything about it difficult.

I prepared as if I was going to start because I felt that was the professional thing to do. But I need to get myself into a certain frame of mind when I play. I cut myself off from everybody around me on the day of the game. I get intense about it. In those circumstances, it is very difficult if you are then told an hour before the match that you’re on the bench.

By preparing as though I was going to play, I was also ensuring that the disappointment would be even greater when I didn’t play. So then I started telling myself I had to change tack. I stopped building myself up too much so that it would be easier to deal with the disappointment of not being selected.

But then when I did start, it almost came as a shock to me. I had an hour to get prepared. That was it.

Rafa said he would not release the starting eleven until an hour before kick-off because he didn’t want to give the opposition an advantage. What he meant was that he didn’t want anyone to leak the team early and he didn’t trust players to keep it secret.

He didn’t trust the players on the pitch so he certainly wasn’t going to trust them off it.

Bellamy on Dalglish

People talk about Kenny Dalglish being the greatest Liverpool footballer of all time. He probably is. But you know what, he is the greatest man who has ever played for Liverpool Football Club.

There is no shadow of a doubt about that. To be involved with him was just a huge honour. He was brilliant to play for.

He had such a calming influence over everyone at the club. He was just The King. He was a true man. The humility he shows constantly on a daily basis to everyone was overwhelming. When I say ‘everyone’, I don’t just mean the players. I mean all the employees of the club.

The impression you get of him on the television, defensive and monosyllabic, is the exact opposite of what he is like when the camera is turned off.

Before the Carling Cup final, the manager showed us a short film that illustrated what Wembley meant to Liverpool and what it meant to the club being back there.

I sat there watching Shankly talking and Kenny scoring that magnificent winner against Bruges in the 1978 European Cup final.

And I thought about all my years of growing up and wanting to be part of this club. When the film ended, there were tears in my eyes.

For someone like me, you don’t get much better than playing for Liverpool under Kenny Dalglish.

When Kenny was fired a few months after bringing Liverpool their first trophy for six years, I knew for sure it was time to go.

Craig Bellamy's autobiography Goodfella is out now. RRP £18.99, but only £15.99 at merseyshop.com or by calling: 0845 143 0001. Bellamy is donating all his proceeds from the book to the Craig Bellamy Foundation, which offers children in Sierra Leone the chance to fulfil their sporting potential