Rooney casts off the mask at last to reveal wit and charm
Striker was astute, candid and funny on an acclaimed Sky Sports debut – it is just a shame the modern game’s constraints mean we had to wait so long to see his true personality
The clue to Wayne Rooney’s fascinating contribution to Monday Night Football on Sky Sports came at the end. “I’ve enjoyed tonight and I’m sure I’ll do a lot more TV work in the future,” he said, “but ultimately, I want to go into management.”
In his previous appearance on live television, Rooney had been hunched in the rain at Arsenal: an unused substitute as supine Everton succumbed 5-1.
In the context of Sam Allardyce, Everton’s manager, calling his team “pathetic”, it was easy to imagine Rooney scanning this rain-soaked fiasco and asking himself: “What am I going to do with the second half of my life?”
Forty-eight hours later, he stood in the Sky Sports studio with Jamie Carragher and Dave Jones, suited, booted and entirely at ease under the interrogatory gaze of the cameras. As he spoke interestingly about Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester City and Harry Kane, social media lit up with surprised delight. Rooney, who has endured a kind of social or class condescension for the whole of his working life, had abandoned what I call the “captured airman” stance of modern footballers being interviewed. (“Give them name, rank and serial number – but absolutely no more.”)
To connect Everton’s wretched form directly with Rooney’s impressive punditry debut may seem a leap too far. But the comment about doing “a lot more TV work” and going into management told a story. As a rule, retirement is not too far away when top sports people start to open up in the broadcasting world. Cricket’s James Anderson is another case. Anderson’s seamless transition to Test Match Special analyst after the Ashes was his first step into a media career.
Rooney’s good display on Monday night has not been overstated. This, for example, was his view on Kane: “The problem that Tottenham are going to have is that his motivation is goals, but his motivation is going to change from goals to trophies. And if Tottenham don’t win trophies in the next year, maybe two, he is going to want to move elsewhere to win trophies.”
From goals to trophies might sound a simple point, but it expresses Kane’s dilemma through his own eyes, not those of Tottenham supporters or commentators.
Rooney’s claim that Pep Guardiola is trying to recreate Barcelona in Manchester was also sharply conveyed: “City are getting to the level Barcelona were at four or five years ago. It is not nice for me to say, but it is almost perfect football at times. Guardiola is putting the foundations in place to try to emulate that Barcelona team, and they are well on their way to doing that.”
There were some crowdpleasing anecdotes too: the kind of tales business folk pay £500 a head to listen to at black-tie dinners: of Rooney switching the rugby over to The X Factor when Roy Keane left the room to get some food
– and then hiding the remote when his highness returned.
Also intriguing was the revelation that Ferguson would shout at Rooney at half-time when it was Nani he was really cross with. United’s manager knew Rooney could take it; Nani could not, but he would take note of the “shouting match” between those two strong personalities and return to the pitch more motivated.
Rooney also told us why his United teams were “asking for trouble” trying to play silky football from the back in the first half-hour at Anfield, because Liverpool would press them high up the pitch and ignite the passions of the home crowd. Apparent throughout were two of Rooney’s greatest assets: his self-confidence (he was never scared of provoking Keane), and sense of how good he was. “I knew at 16 years old I was the best player in the team,” he said of his first spell at Everton.
Through outside pressure (mockery, snobbery), and his own policy of concealing his real personality behind a shy, mumbling exterior, Rooney has spent the past 15 years in our huge gallery of misconceptions about who famous people really are. In company, he is entertaining, expressive and shrewd about the game and players.
One of his talents is sniffing out impostors, or showboaters, in a squad, and indeed in management. Equally, he stopped short of monkish dedication to the task of becoming a truly great player, at Cristiano Ronaldo’s level.
His logic seemed to be that he wanted a good life as well as a grand career. Some would call that a win-win, if you overlook the drink-drive conviction and assorted social and gamblingrelated scrapes.
Those of us who broadly share a press area with ex-footballers of Rooney’s calibre just wish sometimes that this candour would arrive a little earlier. In fact, it is heading in the opposite direction, with many managers, especially, noticeably more indignant about perfectly fair questions. This hostility to the very idea of cross-examination is apparent across society.
Football – modern sport, really – has made many players petrified of their own voices. They live in permanent fear of making an error, or having their words distorted, which they sometimes are. This unhealthy defensiveness is both understandable and regrettable. It suppresses personality and smothers debate.
In Sky’s studio, Rooney abandoned circumspection and showed his real self, partly as a career move. And the public liked this “new” Wazza – who was there all along, hiding in plain sight.