I know there isn’t much point in crying over spilt milk.
But I couldn’t help but sigh after watching Craig Bellamy make a really positive start to his career at Liverpool.
We know that Bellers is far from an angel and we know that he was out of order to go live on Sky to tell the whole world what he thought of Graeme Souness when the Scotsman decided to boot him out of St James’ Park.
There can’t be a Geordie alive who doesn’t believe that Bellamy is very much Liverpool’s gain and our loss after signing for the 2005 Champions League winners from Blackburn in the summer for a bargain £6million.
Bellamy’s psychological deficiency to say non-controversial things at times when he really needed to bite his tongue often cost him dear.
And when he needed keep cool at times he just couldn’t help himself.
Whether it was in the dressing room, on the training field and worst of all on the pitch, particularly when he lashed out at serial wind-up merchant Marco Materazzi against Inter Milan in 2002 and got sent off, Bellers just couldn’t shut up!
And yet despite all of that there are some of us that would still take him back.
Looking at the good times, there are a few of them, Bellamy helped to put United back into the Premiership’s big five category after he and Alan Shearer linked up tremendously under Sir Bobby Robson with Big Al providing the goals and Bellers the pace and power.
Would it have been fair on the rest of the squad and Souness to allow back such a disruptive influence when he’d been farmed out on loan to Celtic?
Or did the Scot dig himself into such a hole it ended up costing him his job in the end?
That we’ll never know but Blackburn certainly enjoyed his talents last season and I suspect Liverpool will do exactly the same this year after a debut goal in Europe for the Reds and then yesterday’s superb cross to allow Peter Crouch to head home the winner against Chelsea.
Hopefully we will have Michael Owen back firing on all cylinders at some stage but I certainly did not enjoy it recently when a Liverpool fan joked to me that Bellamy had been a great swap for Owen even though it was never that straight forward.
Ironically we used to hate the sight of Owen and now it could end up being the same with the man we were once so grateful to at times in the shape of Bellers.
Bellamy’s reception at St James’ Park is sure to be an interesting one when he comes back to Tyneside later in the season.
But in a perfect world how many Toon fans would have given Bellers a second chance given the current striking options at St James’ Park?
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