Sideline Cut/Keith Duggan Like everybody else, I found myself fairly taken with the Wayne Rooney story.
Ostensibly, this is only the beginning for Everton football club's very own Mozart, but I think regardless of future symphonies the youngster has already composed his classic.
At 16, he has scored a goal that will probably not be bettered all season against the most polished club in England. That David Seaman, a man who will now almost certainly appear on the converse list of Greatest Ever Britons, was the victim of Rooney's audacious and distant strike seemed prophetic. It was as if the very gods presented young Rooney as a vision of the future, as if to say to poor Seaman: Be gone. Taketh thou thy Status Quo ponytail and liveth well on good memories.
As lasciviously as London's headline writers heaped misery on Seaman's swift and irrevocable decline and fall, so did they seek to immortalise the Rooney boy's arrival. The goal must have been re-screened over 100 times on various channels over the week and already has a classic, ageless look about it. Like Ronnie Radford's but with less mud.
There are plenty of things to like about the boy. First up, his name. Lest Rooneys everywhere take offence, let the record declare that Rooney is a very fine and uncomplicated name. Studies have proven that about 90 per cent of the world's most intelligent and handsome and generous people happen to have Rooney as their surname. But in purely football terms, it doesn't sound as zesty and Motsonesque as, say, Maradona or Beckenbauer or Johann Cryuff. Or Georgie Best. Attempts to make it the first cousin of Ronaldo are ill-advised and doomed.
Rooney as a soccer surname doesn't have that pan-national glamour, which makes it all the more valuable. It reminds you of that Only Fools and Horses sketch where Del Boy offers Rodney the gift of an inscribed bracelet.
Rodney accepts it eagerly, searches for his name and then looks at Del with indignation. "Roo-ney?" he moans. "Who the bloody 'ell is Roo-ney?"
Well, now we know. He is the future of English football. Possibly. The other thing to like about Rooney is his sheer ordinariness. As Andy Townsend noted the evening after his lightning bolt against Arsenal, the young fella's got a big old behind on him.
A classic centre-forward's butt that affords him a sturdy and immovable centre of gravity. He is no gazelle, Wayne, and looks like he would make short work of a quarter-pounder with cheese meal at any time of the day. If he happened to be born in Roscommon or Kildare or somewhere, he'd probably be full back on the county minor team, a happy and confident big lump of a lad who would gladly denude fey young forwards of their illusions of greatness before heading home for the tea.
But it was his fate to be reared in Liverpool, and the great thing about him is that he looks identical to so many young Scousers, with the five quid haircut and a friendly, up-for-mischief glint in his eye.
The best part of the story is that he still lives with his parents in the estate where he was raised, still sleeps in the bedroom where he has stuck blue Everton banners on the window. To think he left his house last Saturday morning like so many other 16-year-olds to support his boyhood club, except that when he arrived at Goodison he was ushered through to the dressing-rooms, togged out, scored the winner and drank in the adoration of the fans. Back home again in time for Match of the Day.
"You're late for your tea, Wayne."
Of course, the reality of Wayne Rooney's life is much more complicated, and now he has listen to a thousand different voices as he debates upon when and what sort of contract to sign. But the point is that at least he has already done something to make him worth the money.
Unlike so many depressing Premiership nonentities, Rooney has delivered before his time. He has, even if it is for just one afternoon, entertained in a memorable and unique way. He lived the ancient schoolyard dream and it was glorious.
Sure, the goal means that his advisers and agents can beckon the carriers of the silly money, but who would begrudge Rooney whatever he gets when for 10 years the Premiership has rewarded the mediocre, the Warren Bartons, with vulgar pay cheque after vulgar pay cheque?
Rooney has his problems. Already, Brian Clough has come out and announced that he wants to bestow upon the prodigy one of his infamous lip-smackers. That can't be good for the street cred of a 17-year-old. And in less than a year's time, he is going to have to decide how to spend the money that is thrown at him. Somehow you can't see young Wayne morphing into a Beckham clone. You just can't see him being arsed.
Instinctively, you sense that Rooney has inherited the Liverpudlian sharpness and a withering disdain for pretentiousness, that he knows his roots the way Robbie Fowler, for all his bad luck and propensity for finding trouble, did.
I hope he takes heed of the way Fowler's football life has turned, from teenage Kop idol, from The Natural, to a seasoned striker facing into the autumn of his sporting life fighting injury at a club that is foreign to him in both lifestyle and history.
It is funny that Fowler was a Toffee as a kid and probably fantasised on the streets of Toxteth of living the minute that Rooney did against Arsenal. They have already begun comparing young Rooney to Dixie Dean, whose statue sits grandly outside Goodison. (See, even Dixie Dean is a winsome football name, jaunty and suggestive of skill but with a definite whiff of cocktailish glamour.)
Such wistful comparisons are wildly premature, of course. Rooney turned 17 on Thursday. Tomorrow he leads the converted Toffee sceptics down to the capital to play the Hammers. It is good to think of those thousands of replica Rooney jerseys wandering through north London. Wayne's every move will be studied with bated breath by both visiting fans and those from home.
The kid has done a dangerous thing, marking himself out at such a tender age. Maybe he will spend the next 12 months learning the truth, although not in a Janis Ian kind of way. Or maybe he will just keep on scoring goals because that is what he knows how to do.
Either way, he has already distinguished himself in a way that is more permanent than many of those he will face over the season. Bet Del Boy could sell a heap of those gold bracelets around Goodison now.
