How Craig Bellamy made a triumphant playing return with SK Londerzeel
“My body can’t take it anymore,” Craig Bellamy said on hanging up his boots in 2014.
After playing through pain for four seasons with the help of daily anti-inflammatories, injuries accumulated over a 19-year career finally forced him into retirement.
Six years later Bellamy has just won only his second ever league title at the age of 40.
The 78 cap Welshman last seen scoring against Chelsea in the Premier League can now be found playing for SK Londerzeel in the Flemish Brabant Veterans League.
Just for fun – albeit alongside seven other ex-pros for what could be the best vets team in Europe.
The veterans of Londerzeel, a town in north Belgium with a similar population to Bangor, started to overshadow the club’s first team (fourth tier strugglers) in the same year that Bellamy retired.
After finishing a playing career that saw him capped by Belgium with four seasons at Londerzeel, Tom Caluwe decided to keep playing for the club’s veterans side.
He persuaded his friend and former Metz goalkeeper, Gunter van Handenhoven, to join him and other ex-professionals like former Anderlecht striker Nicolas Frutos have been recruited since to create a Belgian legends XI. But Bellamy is their biggest signing yet.
His comeback is the silver lining to the cloud under which he left Cardiff City last year.
Shortly after making a new start as Anderlecht under-21 manager last summer, Bellamy overheard van Handenhoven, then a coach at the club, talking about playing veterans football and got an invite.
He immediately started training with the team nicknamed the “vette hanen”, a pun on the Dutch word for veterans which literally translates as “fat c***s”.
“He’s cool, composed” van Handenhoven told Sporza TV when asked if his new teammate was still as feisty on the field as fans remembered.
“A lot of ‘f**k this’ and ‘f**k that’. But for the rest of it, not too many mistakes, he’s a great player.”
In September, Bellamy ran out at the 500-seater Eeckelaers Stadion to face KFC Meise in his first game of competitive football since playing for Cardiff City in front of a crowd of 27,000.
Initially, he struggled with the change of pace. As well as being technically better even than his fellow ex-pros, Bellamy is one of the younger players in a squad ranging right up to 59 years old.
“It’s true that he can lose it because of a mis control by one of his teammates or because he feels things aren’t going quickly enough for him,” Londerzeel vets coach Laurence Verbelen told Sport Foot magazine.
In Bellamy’s defence, Verbelen pointed out he hasn’t played at such a low level since leaving home to join Norwich City as a 15-year-old and added: “I feel like he’s getting used to it. He understands that not everybody can have the same level as him.”
In his second match, Bellamy scored two goals and created six more in a 10-0 win.
He was back to terrorising Belgian defenders just 10 miles from the Heysel stadium where he had finished his international career in 2013 by setting up a last-minute equaliser for Aaron Ramsey.
Word started to get around that a former Liverpool star was running rings around ageing amateurs.
And the decisive match of the season against archrivals – the veterans of Wolvertem Merchtem who were unbeaten in over four years – was played in front of a healthy crowd and local TV cameras.
“Bellamy didn’t disappoint. Highlights show him delivering a slide rule through ball on the turn for the opening goal in the first half, before his pinpoint cross for Frutos in the second secured a 2-1 win that sent Londerzeel on the way to the title.”
Londerzeel had failed to win just one of 22 matches, scoring an average of five goals a game and building an unassailable 12 point lead, when coronavirus cut the season short eight games out.
Club records show Bellamy contributed nine goals and 11 assists in the 12 games he managed to squeeze in between guiding Anderlecht under-21s to a top of the table finish.
“Most of the time he has played in midfield, but Craig is one of few who can play every position on the pitch,” Verbelen told Y Clwb Pel Droed.
He can and he does. On one occasion, Bellamy put in a shift at left-back to avoid being subbed off.
After five years out, he has no intention of spending more time on the sidelines, especially when veterans matches are only 70 minutes long.
“It’s great that I can play again because I didn’t touch a ball for five years,” Bellamy told Sport Foot.
“At home, it was impossible for me to play like this, just for pleasure. Being an ex-pro, I would have been killed every touch of the ball. There’s more respect here.”
After home matches, played on Friday nights, Bellamy usually joins his new teammates and a growing number of supporters for a few glasses of the Bock Pils beer brewed in Londerzeel.
Sometimes, the squad continue celebrations at a winter sport themed nightclub in the town centre where their league title celebrations were due to take place.
Bellamy is clearly enjoying being part of a team again, on and off the pitch. “I believe that as long as he is in Belgium, he will be playing with us,” Verbelen says.
But he may not be the star of the show next season. One of the most recent posts on the club’s Facebook page shows a teammate of Bellamy’s with Diego Maradona.
The caption reads: “We have sent out our scouts to attract new vets.”
(Featured Image: Jon Candy)
