February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Then in a game program for the FA Cup game against Coventry at St. James’s Park Souness wrote: “Craig Bellamy has been a disruptive influence from the minute I walked into this football club with his attitude to the coaching staff, to me and to his teammates.”
Coaching staff member Dean Saunders also reported to Coach Souness that Bellamy had feigned an injury for the Arsenal training session and had told his teammates he was doing so. After the session, Souness took Bellamy to see the club chairman, where the player admitted he had indeed feigned an injury because he felt he was about to be sold. After reassuring the player that selling him was not the case, Souness told Bellamy to apologize to his teammates for what he had done. Bellamy did not call the players to apologize, so Souness dropped him for the Arsenal game.
In an interview with Sky Sports News before the Arsenal game, Souness told the press that Bellamy had a tight hamstring. This statement, the boss said, was in order to protect the player as rumors began to grow something else was going down. Souness did not want bad press for club and player. Trying to keep a lid on it backfired on Souness when Bellamy said the tight hamstring statement by his manager was a lie. Bellamy then went on to call Souness a liar.
Another big fallout with both player and manager was Bellamy’s reluctance and problems with playing out wide. While Souness insisted that Bellamy was there as a third striker, the player believed he was being played out of position as a wide workhorse — that, in essence, he had lost his place to other forwards perhaps not as good as him. It was only a matter of time for the two to reach boiling point — and then saving Bellamy was not going to happen on Tyneside under the guidance of Graeme Souness. Bellamy was fined two weeks wages,