‘Red, Red Wine’ Claims Craig Bellamy as another Victim

By: Bob | March 2nd, 2007

When I first heard about it I couldn’t quite fathom why Craig Bellamy would go after his own teammate with a golf club over a karaoke bar dispute. I assumed that Bellamy was just another drunk footballer with some serious anger management issues. But now that I have read Bellamy’s account of the incident in Portugal, I am a little more sympathetic towards him. It wasn’t his drunken anger doing the talking and golf swinging it was that devil known as UB40.

Bellamy talked about the incident in Friday’s Mirror:

“It started when we were all doing a bit of karaoke,” Bellamy said. “I only sang one song and that was Red, Red Wine by UB40. That was because Jerzy Dudek was drinking it. That’s how silly it all was.

“A lot of the other lads wanted Riise to get up there next because he hadn’t turned up at the dinner earlier and I tried to get him up, too. I wasn’t that bothered whether he wanted to sing or not so I sat back down but he wasn’t too happy about me trying to get him to sing so he let me know about it.

“The situation was calmed down then but when I was walking back to the hotel with Steve Finnan, who I was rooming with, I lost control for a few seconds.

“I went and confronted Ginger and I said to him ‘don’t be doing that in front of the players again’.

“And that was really about it. I didn’t want to cause a scene in front of everybody else. I just wanted to talk to him about it alone. But you know, John’s been great about it, really. Straight away the next morning, we were training together. There’s no problem now.”

UB40’s catchy tune, originally written by Neil Diamond as a somber ballad, has undoubtedly led men to do worse things than to take a golf club to their teammate. When I was younger I was exposed to a hazing ritual where I had to listen to ‘Red, Red Wine’ and ‘Blame it on the Rain’ repeatedly for a week. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment. I was almost ready to reveal those secret state nuclear plans but fortunately did not crack. I did, however, feel compelled to take a golf club to my stereo and an ice pick to my ears.

Bellamy, by the way, also says he is embarrassed to be a footballer. Guess he could always try his luck on the PGA tour instead.