Craig Bellamy has paid tribute to the players who secured Wales’ place at the European Championship finals by backing them to qualify for more major tournaments and saying they deserve praise for the way in which they recovered from the tragic loss of Gary Speed.
Bellamy was particularly close to Speed and played under him in a Wales team who included many of the players who have triumphed with Chris Coleman in charge. Speed’s last game as manager was a 4-1 friendly win over Norway in November 2011 and Bellamy said he felt so encouraged by the performance that day he was convinced Wales were going to the 2014 World Cup finals.
Fifteen days later Speed took his own life and, reflecting on how the dream of qualifying for Brazil started to unravel, Bellamy said that no one should underestimate the extent to which the players struggled to deal with the death of their manager.
Bellamy remained confident that with Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey part of a squad who have been described a golden generation, it was just a matter of time before Wales would go on to reach their first major tournament since the 1958 World Cup finals.
“It’s been a lot of years of hard work,” said Bellamy, who retired from international football two years ago at the end of the 2014 World Cup qualification campaign. “I remember a lot of these players coming through, seeing their debuts and seeing the quality. They had a lot of bad years; this has not been overnight. I remember playing with these boys and we lost a lot of games. We weren’t really competing but I would always try to say: ‘It’s not about now, it’s about where you are going, and you are going to qualify.’ I was hoping I might stay around but it didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t write your own scripts.
“But I was always conscious this was a special group. It’s different to Welsh teams from before. I was close to qualifying once or twice but this group is different. The quality, the age, with Ramseys and Bales, we were different.
“We had an incredible human being [Speed] come in and probably the best Welsh team I ever played for. I remember coming off from a game against Norway and I thought: ‘We are going to go to Brazil.’ We were that good. Unfortunately, we all know what happened and it knocked us. It knocked us as a group.
“Seeing this group of players qualify, celebrating in Bosnia, it was difficult because part of me was thinking: ‘We have been close to qualifying, we have had one or two good teams.’ But there is not a group of players who deserve it more than this group, there really isn’t. To go through what this group of players had to go through, the circumstances, to pick themselves back up … to see them qualify, the joy and the hard work they have put in, for me it was a really happy moment.”
Bellamy, who was speaking at the 2015 Welsh Community Football awards, plans to go to Euro 2016 next summer and is optimistic that watching his nation at major tournaments will become a regular pastime. “I’ve been lucky enough to work with the under-17s and 19s and the players coming through … we’ve really got to embrace this. This is not going to be our last tournament. We have to look to the next World Cup and hopefully we can build on it because the players coming through are of a standard we never had.”
