Wayne Rooney’s Big Night Out At The Grove has easily been the biggest football story of the week in England, even eclipsing FIFA’s declaration of war on the poppy.
The England captain’s red wine stained lips looked like he’d been drinking gallons of 2-bottles-for-£5 La Caresse (don’t ask, it was many years ago), rather than even the most basic plonk at The Grove.
If you’ve not been, this is one of England’s grandest country hotels and very expensive for good reason. Entering through the security gates, via the long drive, The Grove feels like it’s secluded.
With a country club feel, and several ways to access some very fine alcohol and feel respectable about getting sloshed, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine someone drinking until dawn, waking up in the walled garden’s conservatory, and nothing ever being said of it again.
Of course, most stays at The Grove are very much more low key, but for those who desire, there could be a Downtown Abbey meets What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas mentality.
A wedding at The Grove will not come cheap and the happy couple may reasonably expect that anyone invited wouldn’t use the opportunity to sell photographs to The Sun and turn the memory of the special day into something negative.
The Sun, with a good old British nudge-nudge-wink-wink, have presented this classic in their latest update: ‘After Rooney left, Everton star Jagielka carried on chatting to women including the bride. He was heard asking her at 6am: “What are you up to now?” while her hubby lay drunk in bed. She was eventually taken up to the bridal suite by pals.’
We all know the insinuation there. What a nice public wedding memory, the bride being ushered away from a predatory England international and taken to lie comatose next to the groom.
Thing is, if you’re at a wedding and up until 6am, you’re likely to be well oiled and find it incredibly difficult to remember what happened. Even if the person following Rooney and Jagielka around The Grove was taking notes, it’s highly likely those will have descended into obscene doodles and ‘I love my mum’.
Wayne Rooney himself won’t be able to look back on the night with clarity, even if he was only half as paralytic as we’re meant to believe. The poor guy has probably been waking up in the middle of the night, wondering what new revelations will be published: Is that vision of myself vomiting on the wedding cake simply an anxiety driven nightmare? Who knows?
For anything other than Rooney and co being drunk and up late, we’re taking the word of an almost certainly plastered individual who has almost certainly been incentivised into coming up with claims for The Sun… and who sees no problem with doing that after being at a wedding.
The gratuitous lapping up of another downfall inevitably starts to rankle with the general public who become outrage-fatigued, and then the story has to change to one of concern. Everyone wants their share, but not everyone is so happily willing to splash about in the gutter as The Sun, so the narrative changes.
Even the concern is sniping. Some walk the tightrope of suggesting Wayne Rooney has a drinking problem but balance it in a way that it can still receive criticism, because if he actually did have a drinking problem then the gloves would be on.
It’s perfectly fine to insinuate it, mock it, slam it… but if ‘it’ turns out to be true then it’s time to fall over each other in a rush to appear most understanding. A bizarre balance which shows how morals are so easily interchangeable with desire for backslapping.
But he’s a professional! He’s paid squillions a week. It’s not even as if he’s playing well. He’s fat.
Footballers aren’t robots. If the ingredients to making a footballer were so easy to mash together then everyone could do it. There’s things we can’t fathom.
Why is Rooney so talented, why as a child was he so unbelievably good at football? It wasn’t because he ate all his greens, steered clear of crisps, and drank solely water.
The unquantifiable part of Rooney’s make-up that makes him the footballer he is may also be the very same thing which makes him like to drink too much, make rash decisions, be self destructive.
It could even be a flaw which has turned out very positive for him, in much the same way Jose Mourinho’s paranoia and persecution complex has compelled him to achieve success for years.
We don’t know. But to shout from an ivory tower that the gratuitous coverage is acceptable because Rooney is ruining his career is nonsense, it may well have been the opposite throughout his career.
It’s more honest to admit it’s simply entertaining looking at pictures of drunk famous people and hearing about their stumbling about. Actually, they don’t have to be famous, that’s usually entertaining as long as it’s anyone but yourself.
The problem here is that it’s snowballed into something it most likely isn’t. Rooney has repeatedly done dickheadish things throughout his life, as most of us have. He’s in the public eye, he no doubt takes advantage of image rights allowances, and is pretty much fair game in the reality of how things are covered.
Wayne Rooney drunk. Ha ha, doesn’t he look a mess. Coleen will be fuming.
That’s it, move on.
Dragging it out over days, with additional claims which increasingly sound like bullshittery, is nonsense. Some in the media now trying to frame the whole thing as a genuine concern or anger about the player’s dwindling career, and subsequently taking refuge on the moral high-ground, is disingenuous.
If Rooney does have a drinking problem then it’s serious, but if he doesn’t and he just likes getting drunk every now and again, like half the country, then it is what it is. It’s Wayne Rooney and that’s his thing, not the greatest part of what makes the man, but certainly part of it.
The longer the hand-wringing goes on, the greater chance there is of Wayne Rooney’s career obituary being of a man who wasted his talent because he was more interested in alcohol. And that, almost certainly, would be nonsense.
God I need a drink.
