Are you there Sol? It’s me, Massimo - The Square Ball 9/10/21

CALL ME, BEEP ME

Written by Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman

We already knew that Sol Bamba did a lot in his short time at Leeds. He was the solid defender we needed on the pitch to rescue us from Scott Wootton, and the leader off it who looked most likely to oust Massimo Cellino.

While all around him danced their asses off at the end of season dinner of shame, Bamba was tearing the arse off Cellino, and de-facto chair Andrew Umbers, and anyone he could think of who was in charge of Leeds United but not acting in its best interests. Sol had only signed on loan, but in May 2015 we were all doing some back of an envelope sums to work out if Bamba could afford to buy the club and run it right. He cared too much to care about his own playing future:

“I don’t know what is going to happen with me. But it doesn’t matter if I am staying or not. The club deserves better and I think the person in charge has to do better for our club and the supporters because they deserve better. I want to stay at the club but not for the wrong reasons. If he [Cellino] decides not to keep me because of what I am saying, that’s up to him, but I can’t just hide my feelings, and when I think someone deserves something, I say it. If he thinks I shouldn’t say it, that’s up to him, I speak the truth.”

Bamba was motivated because he’d come from Palermo and seen things at Leeds, as he put it when explaining the Sick Six episode to BBC Radio Tees this week, that were “poor, to be honest. I remember having a proper go at them because whatever you do, you respect the club. Like the manager [Neil Redfearn, who the Sick Six were revolting against] you’re here to do a job, a professional for a reason.”

We may never get to the bottom of that ‘proper go’ but the popular rumour around Leeds at the time was that Bamba had chased Giuseppe Bellusci around Thorp Arch and put him up against a wall by his neck. True or not, Bamba didn’t blame the players involved:

“The problem with this was because Cellino allowed them to do so, and that’s the problem. You know, if you let the players talk to you and say, ‘Oh, he’s no good, or he’s this or this’, and you let them do what they want, really, that’s what’s going to happen.”

Hence Bamba bringing it all home to Cellino at the end of the season, because it was easy to talk about the players but the culture was being set from the top. Bamba didn’t know if he’d be back the next season, but for some reason he did willingly return, and new manager Uwe Rosler made him captain.

That, Bamba told Radio Tees, did not make his life any easier.

“[Cellino] was very difficult on a daily basis, because there was always something wrong,” says Sol. “He was always coming in for something. Obviously after games, especially when we lose, he wasn’t happy. Calling you silly hours, early in the morning, turning up to your house as well.”

Oh now, here we go! Bamba says Cellino used to turn up at “three, four” in the morning, when he had no option but to open the door to his boss.

“He used to ring me just before midnight and say to me, ‘I’m coming’.”

Three hours later…

“I’d wait for him, midnight, half past midnight. Nothing. Call him. He’s not picking up. Text him. No, no [answer from] his phone. And I go to bed, and my phone rings. ‘I’m at your door.’

“He’d come in, we sat in the kitchen and had a talk. He was not happy with Uwe Rosler, he was not happy with him. He knew I was close to him. He’d just made me captain. So he was saying to me, I’m biased because I’m defending him, and this and that, and I said, ‘No, you just appointed him! You have to give him a bit of time!’ Any manager, I would have said exactly the same thing. And that was him all along, you know, coming in, silly hours in the morning, getting [me] involved with the club’s decisions, and that is not easy and is difficult to deal with.”

No, that would not be easy to deal with, having the club chairman turning up in your kitchen at four in the morning to rant at you about ‘defending’ the manager he’d just appointed. Especially when you can predict the criticism after the next game: ‘Ey, look at Bamba, supposed to be captain, why’s he looking so tired!’

It’s definitely not what Sol signed up for, but that’s what he got for caring: dragged into the heart of the psychodrama that was Cellino’s Leeds. It’s novel, but not actually surprising that Cellino should seek Bamba’s shoulder in the lonely small hours after Fibre kicked out and Terry George fell asleep. There was a pattern at Leeds of Cellino causing trouble, then crying to anyone who would listen about all the trouble he was in, and hiring but immediately wanting to fire Uwe Rosler is a perfect example. Who could he turn to but Rosler’s loyal captain? Whether it was Terry George, Verne Troyer, his children, or the execs clinging to their jobs, Cellino was surrounded by sycophants, no use to a character geared for conflict. Sol Bamba was the one person at Leeds who was willing to have a go at Cellino, to tell him the truth. Sol Bamba was his enemy. Therefore Sol Bamba was his friend. His only friend, his best mate, the one guy he can call at any hour, go round any time, tell him anything. So Sol Bamba was not allowed to sleep through the night.