Celebrating Craig Bellamy & the most brutally honest post-match interview ever

 

The post-match interview is one of football’s more flawed traditions.

As the demands of television have encroached upon what began as a weekend leisure activity, microphones are thrust under the noses of players and managers while the emotions of the recently finished match are running higher than a Worcestershire floodplain.

 

Expecting glowing insight, reasoned takes and magnanimity is a fool’s errand. Although, in an age where emotion is packaged into bitesize clips and used to gather clicks from the braying hyenas of the internet, perhaps that was never meant to be the intention.

In this particularly tedious game of chess, clubs have sought to offset any potential controversies by media coaching their employees to within an inch of their lives.

You get the impression that, in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, Harry Kane would stand in front of a camera and encourage the lads to ‘go again’ and ‘take defeat on the chin’. Zeus, it is not.

 

While spontaneity has largely been coached out of modern players, reflecting an increasingly systemised sport at elite level, nobody could’ve accused Craig Bellamy of following any pre-written script.

The first XL Bully to play in the Premier League, Bellamy scurried around the pitch with a fury that burnt with the heat of a thousand suns as opponents and officials scrambled for cover.

He was an excellent player too. Quick, committed and capable of stretching defences to the limit, Bellamy scored 19 goals in 78 appearances for Wales and was appointed captain of his country in 2007.

This was a very different era for Wales, before prime Gareth Bale and regular appearances at major tournaments. In March 2009, Bellamy led the side during an insipid 2-0 defeat to Finland at a third-full Millennium Stadium.

Any prospect of Wales playing at the World Cup appeared more remote than the UK choosing economic suicide by leaving the European Union. An earnest Sky reporter asked Bellamy for his thoughts, unaware he’d lit the blue touch paper