REBORN IN THE USA
England’s record goalscorer is thriving on the challenge of his new life with DC United
THE sky over America’s capital is different shades of grey and black and the newspaper headlines say the storm of a lifetime is closing in on the eastern seaboard. The DC United training pitch is marooned in the middle of a giant parking lot. A couple of hundred yards away, Metro trains rise up into the gloom from the darkness of a tunnel and rumble away towards the suburbs. The rusting, decaying hulk of RFK Stadium squats nearby.
It is Tuesday morning and before training, Wayne Rooney and his teammates change at the stadium. It carries the air of a condemned building. Plastic buckets line the dank corridors, catching water leaking from the ceiling. It’s a short drive across an urban no-man’sland of pooling water and potholes and weeds to the training pitch.
A new training ground is promised next year but for now, this is it. Some staff arrive on golf buggies. Rooney and most of his teammates make the short journey in a white mini- bus. They wander through a gap in the fencing, which is covered by frayed black sheeting. One local newspaper reporter stands on the sideline.
Rooney comes over to say hello. Not quite Carrington but that doesn’t bother him. England’s greatest goalscorer is not that type, never has been. We always said he was the last of the street footballers. This feels a bit like he’s come home. In DC they keep telling you they like their sportsmen gritty and blue-collar here. Rooney’s made to measure.
‘ When Wayne arrived in the summer,’ says Dave Kasper, the club’s general manager, ‘the team was away on a road trip on the west coast so his first training session was a really hot day, 12 academy kids and Wayne. At the end, Wayne picks up the cones and starts walking in with the equipment. There wouldn’t be a lot of first-team players doing that.’
Rooney fits in. He’s always done that. When he arrived on a three-and-a-half year deal from Everton to start his American adventure in July, he didn’t make any special demands. He flies in economy with the other players to away games. He shares a hotel room for the first time in his career when they’re on the road.
‘ I share with our centre- half, Steve Birnbaum,’ he says with a wry smile. ‘ If we’re watching something, he leaves his lap-top on when he goes to sleep, which is a bit annoying. I wake up in the morning and it’s still on.’
The players jog a lap of the training pitch. They play a practice match. Things start to break up. Rooney pings pass after pass to a young player standing on the edge of the area. The kid barely has to move an inch for any of them. Rooney wanders back to the minibus, back to RFK, back to the buckets in the corridor.
Since his first appearance in mid-July, DC United have gone from rock bottom of the MLS Eastern Conference to within touching distance of a place in the end- of- season play- offs. He is popular here, thriving. He is playing like he did in his pomp. After the travails of the last couple of years in England, Rooney wears the air of a man who has had a burden lifted from his shoulders.
‘ Yeah, I think I’m happy,’ he says. ‘Not that I wasn’t happy, but the last couple of years... it was difficult to be captain of Man United when you’re not playing, to walk in the dressing room. You get out of the car in the morning and you’re, like, oh... It was difficult period for us so you put your strong face on to keep the players up, keep their spirits up. You’re almost putting an act on, which was tough.
‘Then to go to Everton, different managers, a tough season for us all. Now, to come here, knowing it was going t o be challenging to make the play-offs and seeing the way the team has responded to me arriving, and the way I’ve responded to them, has been great. If we can continue like that, we’ll all be happy.’
Ben Olsen, the DC coach, is sitting in a small room at RFK. He is a bright, articulate man. When he was a player at Nottingham Forest, he had a reputation for never shirking a confrontation. Rooney has transformed his season, as well as the club’s.
‘ In a lot of ways, he is more impactful with this group than even I can be ,’ says Olsen candidly. ‘That’s the harsh reality. When a guy like Wayne comes in, he is a selfless guy, he’s about the group, he’s about winning. To have those three attributes when you’re captain — then you add in that he’s of high quality from a soccer standpoint — he has been a real blessing, for the group and myself.’
He mentions The Play, too. Everybody mentions The Play. Everybody knows about The Play — 20 seconds of action that proved DC United hadn’t signed a 32year-old guy who had come to the States to pick up a last pay-cheque. It tells fans their club have not signed Rooney at Rest. It tells them they have signed Rooney Redux.
It starts with DC United desperately pressing for a winner in the dying seconds of a tied game against Orlando City on August 12. Olsen sends DC’s keeper up for a corner and when the ball is cleared, it appears Orlando’s Will Johnson is going to be able to pass it into an empty net as he advances beyond the halfway line.
But Rooney gives chase and as Johnson is about to shoot, tackles him and sends him flying. Rooney gets up and sets off back towards the Orlando goal. Three touches and he sends a raking 50- yard pass into the path of Luciano Acosta, who rises to head past the Orlando keeper for a 3-2 victory. Footage of the goal goes viral.
‘ How Wayne Rooney won over his doubters in 20 seconds,’ says a headline in the New York Times.
Rooney comes out of the RFK changing room, past the leaks in the ceiling
and the buckets in the corridor, and climbs into the passenger seat of a black SUV. It takes us out of the stadium, across the lot and out on to Washington’s concrete freeways. It’s September 11 and American flags line the bridge across the Potomac River.
We drive past the Pentagon. Rooney mentions the plane the terrorists crashed into it. The next day, at DC United’s brand new Audi Field stadium, they hand out team caps in army camouflage before the game against Minnesota United.
Rooney half-turns round so he can face us in the back seat. Nearly three months after he arrived in the States, he’s still grappling with the idea that he has more freedom.
The first act of his life was childhood. The second act was superstardom. There was no in-between. Now scenes from the third act steal from his lips like the story of a man who has recovered something that was lost.
Rooney says that once or twice, after home games, he and a couple of team-mates have gone to a nearby restaurant popular with fans for something to eat. No one bothers them. He says that, earlier in the week, after his sons had been dropped off at their new school, he wandered round the Washington National Cathedral, enjoying its peace and gazing up at its stained glass windows.
He says a couple of months ago, he walked from Capitol Hill, down the National Mall to the Washington Monument then to the White House and on to the Lincoln Memorial, then across the Arlington Memorial Bridge to the other side of the Potomac River and along the Mount Vernon Trail, past the Pentagon and back to his hotel. Before he knew it, he had walked 18 miles.
He’s taken his family 10-pin bowling and to the cinema. He went to a store to buy his eldest son Fortnite. Small things but things he could never take for granted in England. ‘I’ve loved it,’ he says. Another time, near the Washington Monument, he came across a festival paying homage to Catalonia, with folk music and Catalonian food. How strange it seemed to him to be allowed to be free. ‘It was nice to be able to chill out with everyone else,’ he says, ‘and be part of society again.’
The SUV pulls into an underground garage. Rooney gets in a lift that takes us to the top of the 31-storey CEB Tower, the tallest building in Washington. He poses for pictures. Arlington Cemetery fans out below. We gaze out to the south. Way out there somewhere, they’re saying, Hurricane Florence is ready to wreak havoc. The television screen says DC has declared a state of emergency.
Rooney talks about the third act. Why Washington, for a start? Why not follow the Beckham-GerrardZlatan star trail to the LA Galaxy or the bright lights to New York City? Rooney shakes his head. His wife, Coleen, and their four sons arrived in Washington last week, the boys have started at school and the family have settled into a new home 45 minutes north in Maryland.
‘If you take London, I’d find it difficult to live there,’ says Rooney. ‘It’s too busy. I wouldn’t want to live somewhere that busy. It’s similar to New York. LA obviously has its quieter areas but there is a lot of partying and a lot of things going on, whereas I felt here, it’s got a good mix of everything.
‘It’s the capital but it doesn’t feel like London or New York. It feels spacious. On the outskirts, where I’m living, there’s nice greenery, which I’m used to. I felt it was the right place to move my family.’
He is reminded that he once said he would never play abroad. He smiles at that memory. ‘ When you’re younger, you never really look that far ahead,’ he says. ‘Once, I would never have imagined playing abroad. Life changes. You need to make decisions in terms of your career as well. The more I looked at it, the more I thought it was a good thing for me to do.
‘The only way I was coming out here was if the family was comfortable doing that. It’s a good thing for us. Something different. A new challenge. A new school for the kids, make new friends, different lifestyle, so it will help them and help us as a family.’
Rooney speaks for an hour. He is distrustful of any suggestion he was marginalised at United or Everton. He is distrustful of ego. He will sacrifice himself for the team if it means success for the team but he will admit he found it hard not playing as much when Jose Mourinho became manager.
He refuses to criticise Mourinho even though he knows it’s open season on the Portuguese.
‘I still think they’re title contenders,’ he says. ‘Mourinho has taken a lot of stick, but the players have to stand up. He puts them on the pitch, sets the team up and he can only do so much. The players have to stand up and do it for themselves.’ Rooney goes down to the parking garage. He wants to get
home in time to catch the second half of England-Switzerland on TV. He enjoyed watching the World Cup as a fan and was impressed with the job Gareth Southgate did. Like Southgate, he is worried by a lack of first-team opportunities for England stars.
On Wednesday night, Rooney starts at centre forward against Minnesota United. Adrian Heath, another former Evertonian, is the Minnesota manager. Rooney tells him his dad wanted to call him Adrian i n his honour, but his mother forbade it.
DC United aren’t at their best but watching Rooney is still a joy. His passing range is still breathtaking. His awareness of what is going on around him is still other-worldly. His touch is still beautiful. Some of his exchanges with Acosta, the diminutive Argentine whose own play has been transformed by Rooney’s arrival, are the best moments of the match. The standard of play is not the same as the Premier League, of course. Maybe that is why sometimes it feels as if we’re watching Rooney in his prime. It is easier for him to dominate but after his struggles, it is good to see him bestriding a game again. DC go a goal behind early in the second half. Olsen brings centre forward Darren Mattocks off the bench and Rooney drops back into midfield. DC United rally. They get an equaliser and four minutes later, Mattocks scores the winner. It brings them within two points of Montreal Impact in the race for the last play-off place. Six of DC’s last seven games are at home.
At the end, Rooney and his teammates walk over to where the Barra Brava, District Ultras and Screaming Eagles fans groups congregate. Rooney gives his boots to a couple of kids in the front row. Then 15 minutes after the final whistle, the locker room is opened up to the press. The level of access for reporters in the States still amuses Rooney. A towel round his waist, he stands up to answer questions. When the reporters have melted away, he sits in front of his locker and gets ready for the journey home.
‘He has endeared himself to the fans here not just because he scores goals and makes assists,’ says Steven Goff, the Washington Post’s respected soccer writer, ‘but because he works his ass off.
‘ This is a city where the ice hockey team, the Capitals, has just won the Stanley Cup and have the best player in the world, Alex Ovechkin, there are superstars on the NBA team and the major league baseball team and where the Washington Redskins suck the oxygen out of the room whether they’re doing well or not. In that context, DC United have been invisible recently. They were a forgotten entity but the signing of Rooney has changed that.’
Rooney climbs into the passenger seat for the drive back to Maryland. He has a driver. He is halfway through a two-year ban for drink-driving and completed 100 hours of community service that were part of his punishment. The punishment was actually, he says, something of a privilege.
‘I deserved the community service for what I’d done, but I did wonder how it would go. I went to a garden centre at Macclesfield, working with adults with learning difficulties, so I was just helping with different things, whether it was planting seeds or making Christmas decorations with them.
‘To do something with people who aren’t as privileged as we are was great. They sent me a video last week of them dancing. It was something I never thought I’d do.
‘I’ve never worked. I went straight into football after school. The staff were really good and I finished it just before I came here. When I came back from holiday, I had three days before flying out here and I went to see them, took some cakes and stuff. When I’m back in England, I’ll go and visit them. They were really good to me.’
The torrential rain, which was promised for this evening in the American capital, never came. On the car radio, it says the hurricane might not affect Washington at all. The storm is passing.
It’s not like London or New York. It’s nice to chill out with people and be part of society again