ROBINHO will have to fight for his place back in the City team, with feisty little Craig Bellamy standing in his way.

That was the message from manager Mark Hughes, who this week hinted that Bellamy is in full possession of the wide left berth for the Blues after a series of scintillating performances.

Bellamy has been in the form of his life, according to Hughes, who has a long history of mutual respect with the player.

"He is playing exceptionally well at the moment, as good as I have ever seen him play," said the manager, savouring his supreme effort at Villa Park on Monday night.

His equaliser in that game put him level with Emmanuel Adebayor as leading scorer on four goals, and Hughes believes Bellamy, far from being daunted by the sight of big-money superstars appearing around him, is revelling in it.

Splashed

"He enjoys playing with the guys he has got playing alongside him," said the manager. "He is just enjoying his play at the moment, and you can see that out on the pitch."

There were those who felt Hughes had taken leave of his senses when he splashed out around £10m to bring in the former Liverpool man from West Ham during the last transfer window.

He was a 29-year-old with dodgy knees, a reputation as a dressing-room loose cannon, a man who threw a chair at a Newcastle coach, swung a golf club at team-mate John Arne Riise, and whose mobile phone was used to send abusive text messages to Alan Shearer.

The ex-England striker threatened to "knock his block off" if Bellamy ever returned to St James' Park - a statement which will have helped quite a few football fans warm to Bellamy.

Hughes knew Bellamy better than any of the snipers, having worked with him at Wales and then Blackburn.

He knew that there is far more to the Cardiff steelworker's son than suggested by the lurid tabloid headlines, or by former Newcastle coach Terry McDermott, who labelled him "an upstart".

He knew that, while Bellamy is argumentative, opinionated and forthright with team-mates, he is also fiercely self-critical - and that firecracker personality comes from a desire to drive himself and his team on to greater things.

Put him in a group of players with a soft underbelly, and someone gets hurt. Place him in the kind of dressing room which Hughes is moulding at Eastlands, and you have a real team.

Hughes may have to rein in Bellamy's headstrong impulses sometimes, but you sense he enjoys dealing with someone who displays the same kind of Welsh passion which the manager himself had in his playing days.

Asked ahead of the West Ham game whether Bellamy had given him any advice on his former club, Hughes broke into a broad grin: "Craig is always giving us advice," he said.

And this week, after scoring the equaliser at Aston Villa and turning in a display which defied his long-standing knee trouble, and which spoke of immense stamina and drive, Hughes was grinning again.

"Irrespective of whom he is up against or who's on his team, he wants to be the best player to pull a shirt on and for most of the games this year he has been.

Challenge

"I think he's used the guys coming into the team as a challenge. He wants the shirt and the shirt is his by rights now."

That may well have pricked up Robinho's ears as he continues his rehabilitation from a stress fracture of the ankle.

The Brazil superstar has had the pot taken off the injury and is possibly a fortnight away from a return. But Bellamy will take some shifting, and he is occupying Robinho's favoured left-sided slot at the moment.

The pressure is not just on Robinho to earn his place back, but also on Carlos Tevez, Adebayor and Shaun Wright-Phillips, as Hughes made it plain he would be happy to play Bellamy in any of their positions.

One of the reasons Hughes cites for bringing in Bellamy was that his dressing room was "too quiet".

It worked. Less than a month after signing for the Blues, Bellamy tore a strip off Robinho when the British record signing had a poor game in the 2-0 defeat at Portsmouth.

That led to a heated exchange of words between the players, something which Hughes encourages - within reason.

"Craig is really demanding of himself and his team-mates, but that's why he is the player he is," said Hughes.

"He is 30 and still has that drive and inner purpose to him, and that's why he can affect games at Premier League level."

Bellamy is a complex character. There is a side to him that is rarely revealed, a man who spends a chunk of his summer holidays supervising the Craig Bellamy Foundation which he set up to bring football and health education to Sierra Leone, a country devastated by civil war.

He talks little about it, simply because he is doing it for the right reasons, rather than simply lending his name and gaining kudos.

He has pumped in £650,000 of his own money and insists on going to see how it is being spent. His former club Liverpool advised him not to travel to the country, still perceived as dangerous so soon after a brutal conflict.

Bellamy went anyway, and that fearlessness is serving the player well on the football field as well as off it.

He is no respecter of reputations - respect has to be earned and sustained in his world.

And the man who everyone said was going to be trouble with a capital `T' is already well on his way to becoming a Blue legend. With a capital `L'.