A Liverpool trial ...in his Everton kit!
Rooney secrets revealed by BBC
DESPITE the impressive cast of football glitterati scattered through the BBC’s forthcoming Wayne Rooney documentary, the most enduring impression is the sheer quality of his football as a young man.
Rooney, at the age of almost 30, remains a very talented footballer. As of earlier this month, the Manchester United captain is England’s record international goalscorer.
Footage shown in Rooney — The Man Behind The Goals reminds us, however, of a talent that at one time was almost unique on our shores.
We have had other promising players since then. Jack Wilshere and Ross Barkley have caught our attention. Nothing like Rooney, though. Nothing like the teenager who once turned up for a Liverpool trial in an Everton kit, the one shown on footage here rampaging through the junior ranks and into the Everton, United and England first teams.
It is this that gives this programme an intriguing and slightly melancholic edge. We should be careful before we suggest Rooney will retire with potential unfulfilled. He has endless domestic medals, a Champions League and now an England record that eluded even the programme’s narrator, Gary Lineker.
Rooney is a different player now, though. He has a different physique, a different style and skillset, even if Zlatan Ibrahimovic remains a dedicated admirer.
‘ I would love to have played with him,’ said the great Swedish forward. ‘I will just have to continue watching him instead.’
Ibrahimovic joins a cast list that also includes Steven Gerrard, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ryan Giggs, Frank Lampard and Gary Neville.
Lineker also talks to Sven Goran Eriksson, Roy Hodgson and David Moyes, even if there is a huge Sir Alex Ferguson-shaped hole in the programme, a legacy perhaps of the discord between player and manager that marked the end of the Scot’s Old Trafford reign.
Lineker says the programme is ‘ revelatory’ and that it would change the nation’s image of its captain. That may be overstating things but access to the Rooney home in Cheshire and to his family and friends was clearly generous.
Rooney shows Lineker the waste ground in Croxteth he returned to play on with his mates after scoring as a 16-year-old against Arsenal and the wall outside wife Coleen’s childhood house he used to sit on hoping to snatch moments with her.
Their first date was at the cinema and while we learn that he proposed marriage on a garage forecourt it was a rather unromantic gesture atoned for by regular verses of poetry. ‘The poems have died down a bit now,’ shrugs Coleen.
During the programme, Rooney’s occasional appearances on the front pages are briefly referred to. Credit to Lineker for seeking balance. ‘He was young and did some stupid things like most lads,’ says his wife.
It is, though, the football for which this programme should be remembered. Giggs, now Rooney’s assistant manager, recalls the first time he faced him, at Old Trafford more than a decade ago.
‘He knocked the ball past me,’ says Giggs. ‘And I was like, “Woah! What happened there?”’
Neville, meanwhile, talks with his England coach’s hat on to reveal how Rooney is now very much the glue holding a typically eclectic national squad together. ‘He is everybody’s mate,’ said Neville.
One of the hour-long programme’s highlights is the moment Lineker and Rooney meet Sir Bobby Charlton in a suite at Old Trafford. Watching England’s top three goalscorers (48, 49 & 50) talking is moving stuff.
Charlton played for United until he was 35. It is hard to see Rooney doing likewise and it is tempting to wonder if an early start in the professional game and a career doing the hard yards normally outside of the forward’s resume will eventually take its toll.
‘ When he was playing with Cristiano Ronaldo, all the work was done by Wayne,’ says Ibrahimovic, a rather different kind of striker. ‘But he didn’t get the credit because Ronaldo was scoring all the goals.’
This isn’t a programme designed to celebrate hard work, of course. It’s a programme about much rarer gifts.
Towards the end there is mischief, too, when Ronaldo says: ‘Maybe we will play together again. Who knows?’
That line in itself is sure to get this production the publicity it craves and perhaps deserves.
Rooney — The Man Behind The Goals will be shown on BBC1 next Monday at 9pm.