Rooney still doesn’t get the credit he deserves
He has failed to lead England to glory and been paid millions by United, but...
WAYNE ROONEY is the best player this country has produced since Paul Gascoigne but it says a lot about our society, the recent history of our national team and our class-ridden attitudes to wealth and who should possess it, that if his career in English football comes to an end after the Europa League final on Wednesday, many of the farewells to him will be muted and coloured grey in disappointment.
In the last two years, Rooney has broken two of the most famous and celebrated records in our game by overtaking the all- time scoring marks set by Sir Bobby Charlton for England and Manchester United and yet his place in our football culture is surrounded by confusion and a stubborn refusal to grant him his due.
Yes, he earns hundreds of thousands of pounds a week but no amount of money can help a man outrun the inflated expectations we have foisted on him since he was 16. He was a sublime player in his prime but the truth is we have never stopped punishing him for not being Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo and maybe we never will.
He is still only 31 but his ability to influence matches as he used to is ebbing fast. It is hard to argue against that. But it is also true that for much of his career, he has been under-appreciated.
He was the selfless team player to Ronaldo’s virtuoso when t hey played together at Old Trafford. He loved the game so much he put others ahead of himself.
Rooney was the best paid and most prominent of a generation of English players who dominated our game at a time when there was a continual hum of resentment about the wages they earned, what they did with them and the perception that they erected higher barriers than ever between them and the normal fan.
He is a victim of the widespread disillusionment with England players and with footballers in general. When our Olympians succeed, when our rugby union team succeed, when any of our sportsmen succeed, we are told that the spoiled prima donnas of our football fraternity should learn from them how to train and behave. Rooney suffers for that as much as anyone.
And if Steven Gerrard, Paul Scholes and Frank Lampard were praised for being loyal to their clubs, Rooney was often characterised as a gun for hire, whose master was mammon, even though he is now nearing the end of his 13th season at Old Trafford. The gap between his recompense for playing football and what he achieved for England was a chasm many fans found impossible to bridge.
There has always been a feeling, for instance, that he twice held United to ransom over his contract — and maybe he did. But in other areas of work, we call that hard bargaining, or not being a pushover and we say it is to be admired. In football, it is considered a sign of disloyalty because it suggests there are limits to a player’s commitment to the club.
Rooney is a victim of our times, too. He has suffered from the fact that, in the social media age of compulsive sharing, there is no mystery about anyone any more. And so we see him sitting alone in a casino in the early hours of a weekday morning,
blowing absurd amounts of money on the roulette wheel and at the blackjack table.
And we see him smoking, we see him in a swimming pool in Las Vegas and lying flat on his back in his kitchen after being felled by a punch from a friend during a play fight. And we see him glaring into the lens of a television camera after another disappointing World Cup night, saying: ‘ Nice to see your home fans booing you.’ Sometimes, he looks like a bear at the stake.
Here’s the other thing about Rooney: he was too good, too soon. He has spent the rest of his life chasing the remembrance of things past. Remember what it was like when he scored t hat goal for Everton against Arsenal when he was 16 years old?
Remember when reports seeped out of the England camp before the European Championship qualifier against Turkey in April 2003, about how the teenage Rooney’s talent had left England’s senior players open-mouthed during training?
Rooney took Euro 2004 by storm, too. Many believe England would have won that tournament had he not broken his metatarsal against Portugal.
Then he joined United and scored a hat-trick on his debut in a Champions League tie against Fenerbahce — still aged just 18 — and all our English reserve went out of the window. We thought the world’s next football king was ours.
Luck has been cruel to him, too. First in Euro 2004 and then when he injured an ankle a couple of months before the 2010 World Cup in the midst of his most prolific season for United. It is easy to forget that he is one of our greatest ever goalscorers. It appears to be equally easy to forget that he was always so much more t han a goalscorer.
Perhaps to some it seems foolish to have ever believed he could be on the same level as Messi and Ronaldo but he was still the best we had. He was still a player who lit up so many games with a brilliant pass, a spectacular goal, a clever turn and unwavering and relentless commitment to the cause.
He might be an easy target now he is in the autumn of his career but those who seek to pour scorn on him when he is gone will have an uphill task. He is one of a select band of Englishmen to have won the Champions League, the Premier League five times and the FA Cup once. He was indispensable in all those triumphs.
His genes and his inability to dedicate himself to the game as completely and ascetically as many of his rivals at the elite level have hastened his decline. If today is the last time we see him play in this country, we will miss him when he is gone. He was one of our greatest players. It’s just he wasn’t as great as we wanted him to be.