Craig Bellamy was back in the headlines again this weekend. Fresh off his acquittal for assaulting a teenage girl in a night club, the walloping Welshman was reportedly at it again. Dismayed at teammate John-Arne Riise’s refusal to participate in a late night karaoke competition, Bellamy reportedly goaded the Norwegian left-back resulting in some strong words and male posturing. After feeling he got the worst of the altercation and lost face in front of his teammates, Bellamy allegedly tracked Riise down and attacked him with a golf club, causing numerous bruises on his legs.
In the wake of the latest incident, Craig’s future at the club remains uncertain. The Times is reporting that Bellamy will in fact be sold over the summer, as Benitez attempts to regain control of the lockeroom form unruly players.
With all of the money going into the Premiership with the new TV, how about some counseling for these guys? Bellamy is an extreme case, who would probably be in prison had he not been a talented footballer. Attacking someone with a golf club is the work of a maniacal nut job, but the normal every day footballer deviance can surely be avoided.
Is it really that hard to impress on someone that they can go out to a nightclub without getting into fisticuffs with a local tough who tries to have a go at them. Does one really need to explain that one can enjoy coitus without three of his teammates cheering him on and treating their body like an amusement park, while filming it on a cell phone?
This stuff should be common sense. These guys are plucked out of normal society as young teenagers, and miss the normal maturity process associated with adolescense. In addition to immaturity, the culture in England encourages copious amounts of alcohol consumption adding fuel to the fire. The least that clubs can do is have a therapist on staff, to help these poor young men deal with the immense stress of getting a mid-season 8-day respite at a beautiful Portugese resort.
19 February 2007 at 7:04 pm
1. male posturing is a hilarious phrase
2. do you think that maybe men who are successfull in sport might have a higher than normal level of testosterone - which allows them to be faster, stronger, etc., but also may cause them to have anger issues?
20 February 2007 at 11:38 am
I think that the competitive mentality may contribute to anger issues, but I don’t know enough about the biology where I would definitively pin it to an excess of testosterone.
I would say that the environment, however, definitely contributes to it. Either in America or Europe, top athletes live in a sheltered world from a young age, in which it appears to them at least that rules no longer apply. Living in that bubble, many of them don’t develop a maturity and life experience that the rest of us normal folks would. I think that that immaturity combined with alcohol consumption, may be more of the problem.
9 March 2007 at 8:31 pm
Thank for making this valuable information available to the public.