Sol Bamba was a colossus on the pitch and a beacon of humanity in private life | Football

It’s not often that journalists are invited to footballers’ promotional parties, but Sol Bamba immediately approached me.

It was May 2018 and Cardiff City had just made history, winning promotion to the Premier League in Bamba’s first full season at the club. He had just helped the Bluebirds to a home draw against Reading, enough to secure second place in the Championship and spark wild celebrations across the city. There was an explosion of joy and Bamba, in harmony with his old mentor Neil Warnock, had made it all possible.

Later that evening, after the club’s end-of-year party, the players were booked into a private bar in Tiger Tiger in the city centre. It could have been (and perhaps should have been) an exclusive affair, but Bamba made a special effort to spread the invitations a little further. It was a moment of bliss in his life, perhaps the highlight of his playing career, and he wanted others to enjoy it with him. He pushed aside the bouncer and lifted the rope: all were welcome. I brought my Cardiff supporter friend along and Bamba introduced us to the squad and poured the drinks.

You couldn’t help but warm to Bamba and his “radiant smile”, as Warnock called it in X. He made time for fans and the media in a way so rare for modern footballers, talking with exuberance, on and off the record, about the game and life. After an hour-long podcast recording during that 2017-18 campaign, he’d stay for an extra cup of coffee and talk about his favourite Italian restaurant in Cardiff, Stefano’s, where he regularly took his wife Chloe and kids. He’d ask how work was going, how the family was.

Bamba was a gentle giant, but he also had a steely determination that made him a colossus on the pitch, an old-school centre-half who Warnock once regarded as a better pure defender than Virgil van Dijk. He became a leader in every dressing room he entered.

It was the force of his personality, and that of Warnock, that propelled a hard-working Cardiff team to the promised land. The pair could have had fiery dressing-room rows after a defeat – on one occasion at half-time at Norwich, Warnock even feigned anger at Bamba before bursting out laughing – but each time they would make up on Monday morning and reconnect to raise training standards. Had Bamba not suffered an anterior cruciate ligament injury in March 2019, an unpopular Cardiff side tipped for a bottom finish could well have remained in the top flight.

Even after Bamba achieved his lifelong dream of playing in the Premier League, he remained down to earth and never lost his sense of humour. Who can forget that interview after he scored the winning goal against Brighton, when a reporter reminded him that he should have been booked for taking his shirt off? His cheeky reply, in that trademark half-Parisian, half-Scottish accent – ​​brought to you by his time at Dunfermline and Hibernian – was classic Bamba: “I know, I know – don’t tell anyone! We’ll keep it to ourselves.”

Bamba approached his diagnosis with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in January 2021 in the only way he knew how. He greeted it as if it were an opponent: with a brave challenge, still sporting that trademark smile. He was rightly praised for raising awareness of the disease and campaigning for club medical departments to carry out more cancer checks. He even returned to the field to play for Middlesbrough, cementing his cult status by scoring the fifth penalty in an FA Cup shootout win at Manchester United. He was desperate to play at Old Trafford, having missed Cardiff’s league match there through injury.

The tributes that followed his tragic death this week spoke for themselves, a sign of the man as much as the player. Bamba played just 52 league games for Leicester, 51 for Leeds, but left an indelible mark on the two big clubs; he played even fewer games for Boro, but is beloved on Teesside.

For Warnock, his “perfect manager” and a father figure to Bamba, his death has hit him particularly hard. “Sol was a ray of sunshine and I will miss him so much,” the veteran coach said. “I’m so glad Sol was part of my life and that we had such great memories together.”

Some footballers are immortalised for what they did on the pitch, creating magical memories that last a lifetime. But Bamba was different. He will be remembered not only for his piratical performances as a centre-back and the incendiary fist bumps to the crowd, but also for his humanity, greeting everyone with a warm grin and a hearty laugh.

Those qualities will live long in the memory of all who were fortunate enough to know Sol Bamba. He was a gentleman.