On Monday, BBC’s news channel delayed a segment about Brexit, that rather important issue facing the country right now, and went straight to Wayne Rooney’s press conference. It wasn’t Gareth Southgate’s press conference, the routine press conference a manager gives before an international match, it was presented as Wayne Rooney’s.
More than that, the press conference was hyped so much by the channel that if Rooney had announced his immediate retirement from all forms of football it would have just about matched the billing.
Of course, there are many who would like 30 year old Rooney to announce his retirement from football, a lot of them Manchester United supporters. For some it would represent a step forward for the club, whilst for others it would be seen as a ‘win’.
Like fans of all clubs, Manchester United supporters aren’t averse to criticism of their own. Marouane Fellaini, Michael Carrick, Ashley Young, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Memphis Depay are just a handful of the current squad to have faced harsh criticism for on-pitch and/or off-pitch issues.
It’s natural, fans have their favourites and also have their opposites, players who aren’t living up to what they want, or players they simply dislike.
With Rooney it’s different. Very different. They hate him.
Not all Manchester United supporters despise Wayne Rooney, but a very vocal section do. He’s hated so much that criticism is welcome, encouraged, and asked for. Why aren’t you having a go at Wayne Rooney? Why do pundits let Wayne Rooney off easily?
Truth is, Rooney has never been let off easily. There may be a selection of pundits who don’t go full throttle, and an even smaller number who back him, but to suggest Rooney is somehow immune to media criticism is plain wrong and the result of a confirmation bias which wouldn’t look out of place coming from the Donald Trump camp.
Last week when French pundit Christophe Dugarry criticised Rooney in the French media, and we covered it, much of the reaction was basically: No shit sherlock.
Pundits can’t win. Maybe they need to start a petition calling for that immediate retirement, perhaps size him up for the dog meat factory.
It’s been hard to access the football media recently without seeing some sort of Rooney criticism, and that’s been the case for a while. Before Euro 2016 there were calls for Troy Deeney to be picked in the squad ahead of the captain, and many claims that he simply couldn’t get in a full strength team.
Bashing Rooney is fashionable, it’s become the perceived mark of a Manchester United fan from Broughton to Bangalore. If you want to impress other Manchester United fans on social media then bashing Rooney is seen by many as a sure way to go.
Being fashionable doesn’t necessarily equate to being wrong in this instance. It’s been so obvious with Rooney that there’s little defence. To be fair, by the standards of much of his own career, and the standards of, well, top level football, he’s been shit.
A first touch which has rarely looked accomplished has become comical at times, and some performances could have been soundtracked by the Benny Hill theme music.
Footballers have periods of bad form, prolonged periods of bad form, and even career ending periods of bad form, but few get the venom Rooney has received for it.
It has to be assumed that Rooney doesn’t want to play poorly, that it’s not some elaborate plan to annoy people. The England captain probably doesn’t wish to skip the autumn of his career and instead head straight for the cold, bleak, winter.
Rooney won’t be thrilled he failed to live up to some of the lofty expectations put upon him, he may half accept that playing so much football early in his career has probably shortened the length of his effectiveness, but he won’t be happy about it.
He deserves to be dropped, and he has been dropped, but for some that doesn’t quite seem enough. Rooney hasn’t started a game for Manchester United since September 21st, playing against Northampton Town in the EFL Cup, but that doesn’t appear to have calmed things much.
For England against Malta he certainly wasn’t standout terrible and he certainly wasn’t great, changing things for Slovenia makes sense. The hype surrounding it doesn’t.
Rooney is England’s captain, but that’s not the only hyping factor here. The striker speaking to the media made headlines but didn’t generate them. If he hadn’t fronted up, and let’s be honest he said all the right things, then the headlines would have been about him anyway.
Rooney sells.
Unless Jose Mourinho goes on a one man mission to prove the football world wrong, and that can’t be totally ruled out, Rooney will swap England’s bench for Manchester United’s after the international break.
Mourinho has been a big fan of Rooney, and very publicly stirred the Manchester United pot by trying to sign him for Chelsea. The manager wanted Rooney in his first spell at Chelsea, then at Real Madrid, and in his second spell at Chelsea.
The Portuguese has been very clear about how he sees Rooney, as a striker, but even he has been dragged into the temptation to play him elsewhere. In July, Mourinho explained: “Maybe he is not a No 9 anymore but he will never, with me, be a No 6. He will never be 50 metres from the goal.
“For me, he will be a No 9 or a No 10, or a number nine-and-a-half, but with me he will never be a No 6, not even a No 8.”
It’s fair to say that hasn’t been kept to religiously. Rooney can pick a long pass very well indeed, even on current form, but there’s so much more that he can’t do when playing deep that seeing him become some kind of deep-lying playmaker is difficult. The game has perhaps changed too much for that.
There’s not too much harm in trying, and it’d be no surprise if it was tried again on occasion, because Rooney’s talents are such that it’s worth trying to get that song out of him again, somewhere.
That’s the situation, but it doesn’t come close to explaining the over the top dislike from some, and the plain hatred from some others. Even Marouane Fellaini at the height of his lowness didn’t come close to matching it, partly because the Rooney issue is one which has festered and been nurtured for years.
He’s a Scouser, and, again from Broughton to Bangalore, that’s became a reason. People who had no care about the local dynamic, now have a reason to do so, and people who do feel the local dynamic, wherever they’re from, can deploy it.
The worse Rooney gets, the more Scouse he becomes. At times it was almost used in an endearing way, via chants and such, but it was always there.
That’s not it though, it’s almost certainly not even the major motivation. Rooney has been the subject of a momentum that has built up, and some of it is his own doing.
When chasing a huge new contract, many players use other clubs, but not many use direct rivals. The Manchester City flirtation created justifiable dislike: ‘We could cope with you being a scouser, but being a scouser and wanting to sign for Manchester City? Nope, that’s it.’
And from around about then, every Rooney rumour was automatically believed by many, like a watering can of mainly nonsense, pouring out on a little seed which grew into what we see today.
Story leaking, fighting, disrespecting, drunk, chain smoker, clause in contract saying he must start games. There’s many more.
The story leaking claims are perhaps the most bizarre. This is not to say that Rooney and those associated with him haven’t leaked stories at certain points of his career, that suggestion would leave people ‘angry and confused’, but for a while almost any negative leak coming from Old Trafford has been pinned on Rooney.
Even if the story wouldn’t benefit Rooney, even if the outline idea of the person leaking it clearly isn’t Rooney… for a while it’s been clearly Rooney.
The ‘two transfer requests’ story is taken as gospel after Sir Alex Ferguson used his goodbye speech to plunge the knife into Rooney, twist it a bit, and then ride off into the sunset. Even as Ferguson was speaking it sounded more like Rooney had a strop, wanted to know why he wasn’t an important part of the team, and then said something about leaving if he wasn’t wanted.
Answering back was always going to be difficult at a time when Ferguson was untouchable. Rooney was placed in an impossible situation, but if Ferguson was extracting revenge for the first time around, then perhaps it was understandable.
There are literally, and really literally, not just the Jamie Redknapp version of it, Manchester United fans who would be gutted to see Rooney come good again. People who would feel personally aggrieved by a man who has given them joy daring to do so again. It would prove them wrong. And sometimes that’s a bigger issue than form or anything else really.
That’s no criticism, people can despise who they choose to, but it’s fair to point out that’s the very real situation for some.
Wayne Rooney isn’t just dealing with a collapse in form which has been gradual for a while, the slippery slope to the end of his Manchester United career has seen its gradient increased by other factors.
If he can somehow turn this one around then maybe Wayne Rooney can win back those who have so fully turned against him. The first part may be possible, the latter, unfortunately, probably isn’t.
