Calmer Rooney should keep some of old devil of days past
Striker’s change in personality seems to be setting him up for life after football
El Nuevo Diablo was how the local newspaper in Vigo on Friday described Marcus Rashford, a moniker so good that if the boy from south Manchester has a commercial operation then they should be waiting outside the intellectual property office tomorrow morning to register it.
A New Devil for a new era although it should be said that Rashford has barely shown a flick of temper so far. No one performs in the high-stakes world of modern football under its 24-hour scrutiny without having to develop some kind of psychological carapace to deal with it and as the 19-year-old turns into a man in an unforgiving business, he will find his own ways of coping.
And what of the old devil at Manchester United? It has been a long time since Wayne Rooney was regarded as El Nuevo Diablo but no one quite fitted the description as he once did in those edgy years when his two default settings were angry or incandescent. The debate in those days was whether he could prevent the fire from eventually engulfing him, to muster the smile that Nike and Coca-Cola wanted him to wear, or carry on occasionally threatening to knock people out.
My preference was for the unPhotoshopped Rooney, which is not to say the occasional nihilist who could do himself more harm than good, but the one who snarled when he felt like snarling and took most obstacles in his way as a personal affront.
On Thursday, in the closing minutes of United’s victory over Celta Vigo, an injury to the substitute Ashley Young left Jose Mourinho reshuffling his team and one short of a central midfielder to shore up the key areas for the last few minutes. The man he alighted upon was Chris Smalling, who had not played a minute for United for 46 days previous and is, as if it needed pointing out, very much a centre-half.
Alongside Smalling on the bench was Rooney, club captain and a man adjudged little more than 12 months ago to be the future for United in midfield, albeit that feels a long time ago. Perhaps Rooney will play against Arsenal today with Mourinho having vowed to rest the big hitters in preparation for Thursday’s second leg against Celta: at the Emirates it will be a case of a once A-list player, against a once A-list opponent.
When Rooney joined United in that summer of 2004, Arsenal were the champions of England and he was one of the men destined to see off that great Arsène Wenger trophy-winning era forever.
Almost 13 years on and Rooney is one of only two in the United squad who played at Highbury, an elder statesman of English football at 31, with two major goalscoring records, a charitable foundation in his name, a restored head of hair and more than half his life to lead.
Let us hope in the years to come that Rooney can manage the transition to normal civilian life with a smooth landing. The working of the prospective Chinese Super League move still feels difficult to imagine but perhaps he will flourish there rather than simply exist, like many other an expensive acquisition from the West, to be gawped at and snapped on millions and millions of smartphones.
As for how he might surprise us, who knows? I keep thinking of Rooney imitating that moment in
Wayne’s World when his namesake, played by Mike Myers, unexpectedly turns out to be fluent in Cantonese.
Of all the consideration given to mental health in footballers this week, you wonder how Rooney has coped at times over the years. Writing in these pages yesterday his old team-mate Ryan Giggs said that, for some at the top of the game, the final curtain is a relief. If, having seen his whole career, it is possible to observe a change in Rooney from a distance it is that he has looked more composed in recent years, more likely to shrug off the vicissitudes of the game as he has done after the last two England tournament failures.
There is still a small chance that there will be a glorious end to it all, perhaps in Stockholm later this month when Mourinho needs a goal at the Friends Arena and decides that of those on the bench it is Rooney who might be the man for the moment. The likelihood is that three days later it will be Cristiano Ronaldo, Rooney’s sometime running mate and occasional bête noire, who takes centre stage in the bigger of the two European finals.
Their careers will always be compared because of the five trophyladen seasons they played alongside each other at Old Trafford, and Ronaldo will always come off the better even if there is a mitigation in Rooney’s defence that could fill a page, not least United’s recent decline. As for their places in history, Ronaldo’s is secured ahead of Rooney’s long before last week’s hat-trick and at the age of 32 he is on the brink of his fourth Champions League title with no thought yet given to a lucrative China retirement.
These, however, are becoming the battles of the past, arguments long settled and Rooney does not linger on them with too much regret. One day he will take into retirement two of English football’s most cherished goalscoring records along with a stack of medals bigger than most in the game but not, unfortunately, as big as some of those he once played with. Once he walks out of English football for good those numbers that have ticked ever upwards his whole career – goals, games, caps, honours – will be frozen in time forever. Then the challenge is to make peace with the kind of career you had, and the life ahead which, it should be said, the man of recent years seems at least on his way to doing. Let us hope he manages it, without completely losing touch with the old devil of days past.
The debate then was whether he could prevent the fire from eventually engulfing him