As the business end of the season is about to kick in with the quarter-finals of the Champions League, MARY HANNIGANlooks at how important Wayne Rooney is to Manchester United's cause
BY THE end of the 1996-97 season goalkeepers in the Liverpool Schools’ Under-11 League had had their fill of the striker from Our Lady and St Swithin’s Catholic Primary School, 72 times they’d had to retrieve the ball from the back of their collective nets after his work was done. The record, need it be said, stands to this day.
They’d be forgiven, then, for wondering if the lad from Croxteth has lost his touch, his return so far this season a mere 33 in 39 games. “Is that all,” they might shrug.
Wayne Rooney will, then, fall some way short of his under-11 tally, but if he maintains his scoring momentum between now and the end of the season – in a maximum of 12 games – he’ll be within reach of Cristiano Ronaldo’s 42 goal mark, and, at a stretch, Denis Law’s record total of 46 from almost half a century ago.
While neither Law nor Ronaldo’s feats could ever be diminished, both players benefited from stellar supporting casts in their peak goal-scoring seasons, George Best and Bobby Charlton among Law’s fellow workers, Rooney and Carlos Tevez two of the men who aided and abetted Ronaldo in 2007-08.
Rooney’s accomplishments, though, have been much more of his own making, even if there’s a certain folly to the suggestion that Manchester United have been a one-man band this season – they’d hardly be top of the Premier League and in the last eight of the Champions League if his 10 colleagues, on any given day, were wholly ineffectual.
On the limited enough occasions that they’ve featured this season the golden oldies, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs (look away now: when Giggs made his United debut Rooney was five), have, invariably, excelled; Dimitar Berbatov, whenever he’s woken from his slumber, has almost looked worth a slice of his weighty transfer fee; Antonio Valencia, once he shed that “deer blinded by the headlights” expression after his move from Wigan, has been a consistently superb supplier of ball from the right; Nani has, sporadically, lived up to his own self-regard; Darren Fletcher has, quite often, appeared to be Dalkeith’s own Roy Keane, and Ji-Sung Park, every now and then, shows why Alex Ferguson has such faith in him.
So, Rooney’s own supporting cast has not been without its merits, but as one of the club’s old-boys Paddy Crerand put it to the London Times recently: “I think without doubt this is the most important one player who has ever been to United.”
That, of course, is a precarious state of affairs, not least because of Rooney’s injury and suspension record, and this season’s statistics show just how calamitous his loss would be: Rooney has 26 league goals, Dimitar Berbatov has 10 – next on the list is Michael Owen (whose season is over) with three.
When Rooney limped off the Old Trafford pitch following last weekend’s win over Liverpool Alex Ferguson and Fabio Capello’s hearts would have skipped a beat or three, but yesterday the United manager dismissed rumours that he was suffering from tendonitis in his knee and would struggle to complete the season.
“He’s okay, there’s no problem,” he said. “He had some bad bruising for a couple of weeks but he’s played (since then) and there’s no problems with the knee.”
The United faithful will trust that this proves to be one of the more reliable bulletins from the manager because Rooney’s contribution to the campaign so far has been immense, his availability for the run-in utterly critical to United’s league and Champions League hopes.
Aside from the goals – if you can set aside 33 of them – Rooney has assumed an authority at United that has seen him develop into the team’s Keane-like driving force, their undisputed leader on the field. The 24-year-old has even taken to issuing the occasional Keane-like reprimand to underperforming team-mates, on and off the pitch, Nani, understandably enough, often the target of his ire.
If he isn’t quite the ticking time bomb that he once was he’s hardly become Mr Mellow either, frustration with himself and those around him still often pushing him perilously close to the edge. Against Fulham a fortnight ago, for example, the streams of invective he unleashed on Mike Jones should have earned him a red card, but the referee, as most do, let the verbal assault go.
But that temperament is, of course, part of the package, part of what fuels his all-consuming desire to win – the Keane comparison is, again, unavoidable. But since the departure of Ronaldo there has been much less cause for frustration for Rooney, who has effortlessly taken over as the fulcrum of the team, the days when he was played out of position to accommodate Ronaldo’s free role now gone.
It doesn’t stop him popping up at left-back or on the right wing or on the goal line when the need arises, like that star-of-the-school-team habit of roaming, for fear lesser team-mates fail to do their job, but now the choice is his.
He was hardly Ronaldo’s “water carrier”, as Eric Cantona so lovingly described the role of his French team-mate Didier Deschamps, but undeniably Rooney’s potential was blunted by how he was deployed by Ferguson in the Ronaldo years, often hopelessly stranded out on the left – as he was for much of last season’s Champions League final against Barcelona. The sight of him that night repeatedly dropping back to help out his full-back . . . it was akin to hiring Van Gogh to paint your hall, stairs and landing.
Ferguson, of course, can just point to the trophy haul in those seasons to justify his use of Rooney, and he could politely remind his critics that Ronaldo hardly squandered the freedom he was granted, but what’s done is done, Rooney, possessing a team ethic that was somewhat lacking in the Portuguese man, has the top billing at the club now.
And he is luxuriating in the central, forward attacking role he craved while marooned out wide. And how the goals have flowed for the player who remains the team’s creator-in-chief. “He is the complete player,” said Leonardo, coach of AC Milan, after the Champions League game at Old Trafford earlier this month, when Rooney, as he had done in the first leg, scored twice – the first his seventh consecutive headed goal.
“He does heading sessions after training and I think you get your rewards,” said Ferguson, explaining how Rooney has now reached double figures in headed goals this season, having managed just four in his previous seven campaigns. He’ll never reach perfection, largely because it doesn’t exist, but it won’t be for the lack of trying.
While he was always quick to lavish praise on Ronaldo Ferguson has, generally, been more restrained in his public appraisal of Rooney, wary of the unceasing eulogising of his player this season. And this being a World Cup year Ferguson knows better than most how sky-high expectations of an English player habitually end in grief.
Before they met Milan in the Champions League he was asked who he believed was the best player in the world. No hesitation . . . Ronaldo. What about his own fella? “World-class is a misused term,” he said, “but with Rooney, you have to say he is getting to the point where he is now one of the best players in the world.” After the second Milan game, though, it was “restraint be damned”, even Ferguson had to openly concede that Rooney had already reached the point where he could be rated as one of the world’s best. Top three, at least – with Lionel Messi, needless to say, right up there.
“Absolutely sensational, but he just continued tonight what he has done all season,” he said, perhaps even tempted to retract his earlier suggestion that the player, in terms of his finishing, had “yet to get to the levels” of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Andy Cole and Ruud Van Nistelrooy. “When that happens,” he had said, Rooney would be “the best in the world”.
If he has, though, attempted to keep a lid on the acclamation it’s hardly been because he fears Rooney will mislay the plot, as some of Ferguson’s previous charges have done, the manager always eager to stress how the player’s feet are firmly planted on the ground, and are unlikely, despite his growing stardom, ever to become airborne.
While the celebrity status of Ronaldo and, before him, David Beckham was a persistent source of irritation for Ferguson, Rooney’s lifestyle, certainly since he became a father, has been a more modest and private affair, “football and family” his only interests in life, according to his boss.
“There’s a growing maturity to the boy,” he said. “And he’s a one-off in terms of the modern type of fragile player we’re getting today, cocooned by their agents, mothers and fathers, psychologists, welfare officers. Rooney’s a cut to the old days.
“His attitude is: ‘Give me the ball, I’ll tell you how good I am’. What we’re seeing now is a terror of a player,” he continued, “he’s got an in-built hunger, in-built energy, in-built desire. Some people are just born with these things.”
That assessment of the player was echoed by Bayern Munich president Franz Beckenbauer when he was previewing the Germans’ Champions League meeting with United next week. Bayern, he admitted, feared Rooney, who he ranks as Messi’s equal in the “best player in the world” stakes.
“Anything is possible, but first we have to stop Wayne,” he said, “and no one has been able to do that very often this season. If he continues scoring and playing like that he can win the World Cup for England.”
Such a declaration could earn Der Kaiser the hairdryer treatment when he meets up with Ferguson next week, the last thing he wants to hear is hyperbolic talk of Rooney single-handedly ending England’s 44 years of hurt in South Africa this summer.
Still, he might be a bit tempted by those odds of 80 to 1 for Rooney scoring a hat-trick in the final – the same, incidentally, for him being sent off.
The Our Lady and St Swithin’s old boy seems, after all, to be capable of just about anything.
ROONEY FACTFILE GOALS
Everton
2002-03 – 8 in 37 games
2003-04 – 9 in 40
Manchester United
2004-05 – 17 in 43
2005-06 – 19 in 48
2006-07 – 23 in 55
2007-08 – 18 in 43
2008-09 – 20 in 49
2009-10 – 33 in 39
England 2003-10 – 25 in 58
FIVE HIGHS
At just 16 he came off the bench to score a sublime winner for Everton against Arsenal at Goodison Park, in 2002, ending the London side's 30-game unbeaten run.
He became the youngest player to win a full England cap against Australia in February 2003 and later that year, against Macedonia, became his country's youngest ever goalscorer, at 17 years and 317 days.
His Euro 2004 ended early with a foot injury, but by then he'd been outstanding, scoring four goals in two games, against Switzerland and Croatia, earning him a place in the team of the tournament.
The following month, at just 18, he joined Manchester United for €29 million, a record fee for a player under 20. He made his debut against Fenerbahce in the Champions League and somewhat eased concerns he'd take time to settle in by scoring a hat-trick.
This season. So far, an endless high.
FIVE LOWS
He's suffered three broken bones in his feet since 2004, the second of them just weeks before the 2006 World Cup finals. He made it to Germany in the end, but . . . he was sent off in the quarter-final against Portugal after he stamped on Ricardo Carvalho. Cristiano Ronaldo encouraged the referee to dismiss his club-mate.
David Moyes sued him for comments in his 2006 autobiography, in which Rooney claimed his former Everton manager repeated private conversations they'd had to the Liverpool Echo. The case was settled, Moyes receiving a reported €558,000 in damages. The pair have since made up.
He's had his share of grief with the English tabloids, unflattering revelations six years ago about his private life – dating back to when he was just 16 – an early warning to him of the price of fame. In 2006, though, he successfully sued two tabloids for false allegations, donating his €112,000 damages to charity.
He missed out on playing for the Republic of Ireland – he qualified through his Dublin-born grandmother – by declaring for England.
Well, more a low for us, perhaps.
