Wayne Rooney
Wayne Rooney |
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THE
SORCERER’S APPRENTICE: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS “Two
loves I have of comfort and despair “When
I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a “Never
such innocence, Whither Wayne Rooney to date? His first full season in the first team is over. Time surely to assess his progress. After all is said and done he is still a boy until his eighteenth birthday later this year. Not that that was anything other than a large advantage for him as he engaged life fully through his football, in great gulps, and experienced it all in ten short months. Honest observers of life acknowledge you have to be young or innocent enough to know the truth. In this case, the playing truth. But if your life has damaged you irreparably all of this would escape you. Already I have the feeling that little will escape the attention of The Duke, his protecting family and David Moyes. I hope too he manages to keep his obvious instinctive love of just playing footy. There are few better sights than innocence in open full cry and in talented pursuit of a common public dream. Similarly, few human experiences are more wistful than that of innocence lost. We can all share these most civilized of feelings. Furthermore, Wayne Rooney is an Evertonian through and through, a local boy. Which means we Evertonians share it at a visceral level too. We are all part of the human conspiracy. For Wayne Rooney it was youth’s tumultuous time, hormones agog. The first year of apprenticeship flew by. Jeu d’esprit was everything. Whatever happens none of us will ever forget it. Nor will those on the receiving end of his talents. Let’s get the dry seasonal data out of the way first, subjective fan-biased judgments added: Home V Tottenham Hotspur.
Subbed after 67mins. Steady and unspectacular game. Altogether he played a total of twelve full league and cup matches. He scored nine goals. He missed four matches through suspension, was unused substitute in one, was substituted in three and substitute in twenty-one. Usually he came on as substitute during the last half hour. He played a full game in the closing run-in of eight matches due to us losing Tomasz Radzsinki to injury. It was obvious David Moyes had a clear policy which he adjusted only because of late circumstances. During the season some imagination-starved inarticulate deadbrains described him as “a phenomenon.” No he wasn’t. He was much more than that. He was – is – an outstandingly gifted young footballer with all the weaknesses and strengths of any human being. Calling him “a phenomenon” turns him into “an item” or “a brand” a la the despised G14 Group. But he is none of these things. He is Wayne Rooney, possibly, nay likely, on his way to football immortality. To hell with the phenomenonists. We are after all The People’s Club. Which means we automatically loathe the second rate media, their second rate hype and their second rate prose. Closely followed of course by a tiny number of our own home–grown stick-up-their-arses self-styled aficionados. Gawd save us and young Rooney too from the badged-up Sunday youth team organizers out in suburbia out to persuade us not only of their unsung work for charity but also their “technical ability,” whatever that is. To them Rooney is just more coaching fodder. The real fans will celebrate him while the arseheads will argue about how often he “tracks back” or “runs off the ball” or, so help me, “develops his peripheral vision.” There’s no question he started the season slowly by his own measure. But once he scored two goals against Wrexham in the League Cup – their manager blamed his defence(!)- he truly was off and running. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time. And so it proved. In short order he had Manchester United, Arsenal and Newcastle running in circles. After those displays against that opposition only the wilfully ignorant could deny his abilities. Very quickly, opponents started clustering around him in bunches of three or four to try and stop him. It made not very much difference. He went through them all anyway. He refused to dive for a penalty or free kick. He kept going. And the crowd adored him. He wasn’t so much a breath of fresh air as a gale scouring the landscape clean. The four games he missed in January/February proved crucial for us because it coincided with other suspensions and injuries. It was a real test. As it turned out, we did rather better than expected because we lost one and won three. But it was a measure of his extraordinary impact that we couldn’t wait for his return. He only got on for six minutes in our defeat at Charlton. Even then he almost grabbed an equalizer. And no sooner was he back than he was selected right after the Charlton match for the England squad to play Australia. Sven said, “If he’s good enough, he’s old enough.” Which of course is a clichè – but only because it is true. So at the grand age of seventeen years and a hundred and eleven days he appeared on the international stage, albeit in a farce of a game. He didn’t score but he still managed to look as though he would every time he had the ball. His passing and general hunger for the game stood head and shoulders above everybody else on the pitch. And the East End crowd responded to him spontaneously. He really does have that kind of playing personality, that kind of aura. Even when he gets hooted by opposition fans (no mean feat for a seventeen years old rookie, that) he still has the same expression. Which is yet another of his assets. His playing concentration is absolute, frightening even. He never loses it, not for a second. I remember a TV close up of him during his sending off at Birmingham. He got up after the clash with the Brum player, determined as ever, and turned toward Elleray the referee. The lower middle class public school housemaster wasn’t going to miss this opportunity, not with a bull-necked working class Scouse adolescent he wasn’t. All Elleray lacked was a cane. You could read Rooney’s lips as he said, “I was going for the ball,” and then didn’t wait for Elleray to have the satisfaction of waving the card in his face. He walked. Quite rightly, Rooney’s gesture dismissed Elleray’s contemptible judgment more than any fruitless argument. Even at seventeen the boy is good in adversity. Which bodes very badly for defenders’ peace of mind during future years. By this time though virtually everybody in the game with common sense and good will said not only that he was good enough but that he had all the makings of a truly great player. The real question was how he would deal with it while developing his natural talents, or whether he would fall victim to the temptations and hangers-on which dog every celebrity. The worst elements of the media had already shown their intentions when his unjustified sending-off produced disgusting cheap headlines like “Loony Rooney!” In reality it was another seminal point in his learning curve because it demonstrated that his life and abilities are mostly in his own hands, and that the media and its infoclerks would betray its own mother for a headline, any headline. Looking back, there’s no question of his salutary moment of the season. It was the winning goal against Arsenal. Which just goes to show how important is context. Had he scored it against, say, West Brom or Blackburn likely it wouldn’t have drawn half so much attention. It wouldn’t have diminished how good it was because the truth of it was self-evident. But the fact that he scored it against the double holders, unbeaten in months and with their magnificent players in top form, made it all the more potent. Even the overpaid and undertalented metro media couldn’t deny the obvious. He had arrived. The goal itself had an almost surreal quality you had to witness in person. Words and pictures really don’t do full justice to the occasion. The whole execution carried Rooney’s trademark astonishing self-confidence and determination from the moment he killed the ball stone dead, through the turn to his right, to the deliberately created swerve-and-dip shot from outside the penalty area. For perhaps a split second after the ball hit the net the crowd failed to react, unsure of what they had just seen. Then the place went off its collective head. It was almost as though everybody in the ground had a quantum leap of communal understanding. Even the few Arsenal fans will have known. It was like the kind of direct-hit flash-over explosion which destroyed many old battleships in crossing-the-tee battle. Perhaps the metaphor isn’t too pat. When he scored, it seemed to change everything at Everton Football Club. This is illusion of course but it dovetailed beautifully in context. It was unforgettable. So was his award as BBC Young Sports Personality. There he was, a glorious sartorial mess, chewing gum, as bemused and empty headed as any other seventeen years old adolescent sprouting gawkily through last month’s suit, talking monosyllables. You wanted to cheer even though you knew what some of the broadsheets and even less talented tabloid hacks were going to do the next day. Fact is virtually every fan loved it, pinkies apart, the way one minute he looked lethal on a footy pitch and then the next minute like a fish out of water amongst back slappers. The ones who didn’t love it don’t matter. Doubtless they would have put Gaugin’s philandering or Frank Lloyd Wright’s nose-picking before their painting and architecture. Great or even mild talents have always attracted the hatred and resentment of mediocrities. I described in a pre-season essay how instinctive and deadly is his first touch. It was world class even then. Incredible as it sounds, it actually improved the more he played. At times it was almost sensual. When you have that kind of ability it appears to give you much more time than less gifted players. It leads to opposition fans screaming, “Gerron ‘im! Fuckn GERRON ‘im!!” in frustration. Before you jeer at that, just think how many times you have shouted that yourself when great players like Beckham, Merson, Vieira, Zola, Henry, Shearer and Giggs have the ball. At the top of their form such players look like they can do what they want at any time. Rooney’s first touch is so instinctive, so animalian perfect like a cat’s movements, I can recall the first time I saw it look ordinary. It was the awful home match against West Ham. An easy ball was played into him and it bounced off his instep instead of stopping stone dead at his feet the way it usually does. Maybe he was just as bored as the rest of us. Whatever his human failings, if he conducts himself properly, avoids serious injury and has luck on his side Wayne Rooney has everything it takes to become one of the greatest players of all time. Anyone with common sense knows it. Still, there’s a long way to go. Anything can happen. Some aficionados have attempted to compare him to other great players. They are wasting their time. Like all great players, Wayne is just himself, a unique combination of talents and one obvious playing weakness. The only thing this fan sees as lacking is his heading. Even then, just at head height, nobody I have seen can cushion the ball better; it is only when he leaps to head (which he hardly ever does because he doesn’t need to) that he is a mere playing mortal. The worst comparison I have heard is with Paul Gascoigne. It is a ludicrous idea. For one thing, Wayne Rooney isn’t interested in showboating. He’s far too busy using his abilities to maximum affect in any given situation. For another, he pays next to no attention to the crowd. As I pointed out in my preseason essay, usually he won’t waste his time with anything he sees as ineffective. The only time he did, his brief hands-on-hips routine against West Brom, he was instantly looking for the playing affect, not to humiliate anyone. Occasionally he does indeed stop play stone still, but even then you can see his eyes turning through a quick one hundred and eighty degrees as he assesses the situation around him. Like all ambitious kids he wants to know it all and do it all at the same time. Only experience will teach him how to be even more economic and useful with his playing time. But the fact is he wastes no time at all delivering the most deadly football. Inevitably the question arises as to who he can play best with up front. It’s a tricky one because all sports pairings appear to be a matter of human chemistry even when they are worked at. Thankfully nobody has yet devised a formula for human chemistry, not even the badged-up coaches with more paper talk than talent. At this point in his development it truly doesn’t seem to matter too much. For the moment his ebullience and early naiveté carries him through everything. If pressed, I’d say he plays better with Kevin Campbell because Kevin plays the so-called “holding” role better than anyone else at the club. But it’s marginal. If he could form a partnership with The Rad then it could be the most deadly duo in Europe bar none at all. In the meantime we already have some classic memories of his play. For me, the two best memories, Arsenal goal aside, were the home games versus Birmingham and Bolton. In the closing fifteen minutes of the former game he had defenders spinning in all directions. Throughout the latter game he almost reduced Campo to a gibbering wreck. Yes, I know the ex-Real Madrid player is not the greatest defender in the world but he IS a veteran pro still capable of solid displays. The same goes for the Brum defenders. Rooney destroyed them all in much the same way he did Blackburn at home. Seasoned players, some of them quite magnificent, got their worst chasing of the season. They seemed to fall like dominoes all around him as he went on his determined merry way assassinating established reputations, oblivious to the anguish of opposing managers and coaches yelling from the touchline. There’s no point saying he was amazing because it was nothing so mundane. In some ways it is Rooney’s greatest stroke of luck, ours too, that this period of his football life coincides with the introduction of David Moyes as our manager. On the face of it it is a perfect pairing. As the raw data shows, Moyes has brought him along sensibly. One wonders if Walter Smith and Archie Knox would have been as sensitive. Certainly if Moyes had the remotest intention of listening to aficionados, which he hasn’t, Rooney would have been on at the start or well before half time in every game. In which case he might well have burned out by now, or have laid the foundation for future injury problems. As it was, his run of starts toward the end of the season plainly got to him by the time of the Villa home match. He was shattered when he came off after scoring the winner. When he exited the TV camera lingered on the scene in the dugout. Senior pros, none of them with any illusions left for professional footy, grinned broadly and hugged him without restraint. He beamed like a twelve years old kid with an unexpected ice cream. And it was all spontaneous, not a trace of cynicism anywhere. You want it to go on forever. But that closing run of eight full time starts was vital in his development. He scored three times. He also missed a lot of chances. Likely he wouldn’t have got the starts if Tomasz Radzsinki had not suffered injury. True to form he let nobody down, least of all himself. See, one of the great things about him is he WANTS it so much, just like a kid in the street, and quite unlike too many so-called senior professionals throughout the game. Which is why fans everywhere have warmed to him. They know it when they see it. Sensible fans – the vast majority – will always acknowledge genuine talent. So where does he go from here? Well, his contract ties him to us for the next three years and he and his family say categorically he doesn’t want to play for anyone else. At his age, stars in his eyes, that is what you would expect from a local boy anywhere. I guess he is with us for at least two years unless there is an earthquake. But who knows what will happen if and when giant bankrupts Real Madrid or one of the other members of the corrupt G14 Group make a move? Wayne Rooney and his family are only human and we are not a wealthy club. The combination might prove decisive. David Moyes will gradually increase the amount of time he plays in each game and give him extended runs of full games, and this will be carefully measured against his physical development. Uneven physical growth can dramatically affect a sense of balance and is one of the things which prevents promising youngsters from fulfilling early promise. And as we know, his existing sense of balance is nothing short of gyroscopic. Let’s hope it doesn’t alter. Like Pelé he has seemingly perfect proportion. Nothing looks out of place, not yet anyway. If he has an equal metabolism then defenders might as well throw their hands in now. He’ll be unstoppable. It isn’t too difficult to imagine Moyesy having him measured every day, anxiously scanning read-outs for signs of inconsistency. Which is why they appear to work so well together. They both want the same thing: a great player. So, of course, do we. An England call up was more or less certain, catastrophic loss of form notwithstanding. Eventually maybe he could solve our national team’s much publicized left side problem. But frankly it appears he could play almost anywhere. Long term he might even be a better midfield player than a striker. For example, one of our greatest right backs, Tommy Wright, started at inside forward before settling into a defensive role as though that was his most natural place. Where this issue is concerned I am minded of Arthur Clarke’s closing words of the Star-Child in the novel “2001 A Space Odyssey” – “For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” Quite so. So when he had ten minutes against Australia he was warmly greeted by the West Ham crowd. He has that kind of – much abused word – charisma. You know he won’t let you down unless he suddenly acquires a mercurial temperament. He didn’t score but he was instrumental in England’s goal with one of his specialities, a left-to-right long pass. Then came his full début against Turkey and finally the small part of the footy world which hadn’t heard of him was unable to avoid his impact. He was brilliant. At seventeen he looked as though he had been there all his life. He was afraid of nobody but the Turks were mortal afraid of him every time he got the ball. We had seen it all before at club level. None of us expected him to do it so soon at international level. Maybe we should have known. He came off to a standing ovation from the Mackems, not the most easily pleased audience in the country. How the board of directors will deal with his future is even more difficult to divine. True romantics amongst them, if any, will want to keep him at almost any price. Self styled “pragmatic businessmen” will want to cash in if we run into financial difficulties. In the latter case the dread words “revenue stream” will feature prominently. Somehow the club has to steer itself through a monetarist quagmire and keep romanticism of the sport alive. With some luck – and determined resistance – institutionalised corruption of the last thirteen years will be hounded out of the game. If this happens we stand a better chance of holding onto him for much longer. If things stay the way they are there is likely to be only one logical conclusion. Work it out for yourself. Which directors are “romantics” and which are “pragmatics” and what is the balance? For the most part the media will be its usual disgraceful self. There’s no point thinking otherwise. I believe they have only (relatively) behaved themselves so far because it suits them. Tabloids or broadsheets, they will build him up as an “item” and then fall over themselves to knock him down when he has an inevitable downturn in form. This will apply even to good and usually honest writers like the petty home-counties snob Brian Glanville. Honest commentators and journos will be as hard to find as a needle in a haystack. There’s no point getting impotently angry about this. Just don’t buy their product. Easy. And what of the fans’ reaction? I hope we can avoid too much of the kind of muck someone uttered in his final game before suspension. “Wouldn’t you think,” groaned a middle aged man who should have known better, “that he’d at least TRY before his suspension?” You hear things like that and you are almost at a loss to answer without exploding into paroxysm. You get the same kind of tosh from pinkies beside themselves with envy. At the other end of the scale are the fans, mostly young, who are desperate for a genuine footy hero of their own. So desperate in fact that they’d have him a wreck before he reached his eighteenth birthday and then discard him as just another failed kid. Where the fans are concerned my burgeoning concern is they will lose sight of what we have here, and if and when he does establish himself they’ll take his abilities too much for granted. Sections of fans everywhere are notoriously fickle. Those who qualify for the latter category would do worse than heed the words of the song: “Don’t it always seem to go, You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” And then you have to take account of the most important element of all: how he thinks of himself as he attains manhood. Sooner or later the penny will drop that football is indeed a short life and he has to make a living to sustain him for the rest of his days. He will be lucky if he gets fifteen or twenty years out of it. And it will flash by. His thinking will fluctuate between boyhood dreams and a necessarily acquired sense of professionalism. He will find the greatest feat of all is not to fall prey to sourness and its practitioners, to retain a capacity to laugh, to keep good and honest and reasonably intelligent company, to treasure his family even more, to realize that loyalty – though often difficult – sometimes carries a price he might want to pay. Whatever he decides will be HIS honest decision and everyone should respect it. It is his life, not ours. We don’t own him any more than does Everton Football Club. He is his own self. We should respect that more than anything else. As the season drew to a close David Moyes said the youngster needed a rest from the game, that next season he would be fitter, fresher and faster than anything which went before. If that turns out to be true then it is an invigorating thought for us Evertonians and a sobering thought for everyone else. If his potential continues to expand at the same rate there can surely be little question that come May 2004 he will have established himself as one of the world’s great players. It is a heady thought. Moyesy played him from the beginning in the last eight league games. He responded by scoring three times. He also received some appalling physical treatment from older players desperate to at least slow him down. The affects became apparent when he missed some easy chances in some of the games. This is likely to be the mixture for next season. A repeat of the mathematic ratio of the closing games would give him fourteen or fifteen league goals. If that is what transpires then it is reasonable to say his playing development will be bang on target. Anything higher would imply he’s ahead of schedule. All of this assumes he escapes serious injury but of course that likelihood increases with continued exposure to the kind of incessant brutality he has already received. Flesh and blood can only take so much even when you have the kind of physical make up and single mindedness of Wayne Rooney. My instinct, as it was at the start of the season, is that he will indeed become a great player and stay with us. Still I have no idea why I say this, nor of course can I back it up with empirical data. The fact is your guess is every bit as good as mine. That’s the way football has been since its inception. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Only the whingeing Melledrew Tendency would expect certainty. And The Duke has the potential to be one of the greatest players the world has ever seen. Simple huh? What They Say About Our Wayne Casting The Roons Blue Kipper Headline 2 Years Ago Wayne Rooney - Remember his Name
Wayne Rooney is a 15 year old forward. He is going to be a star. Remember you heard it on Blue Kipper first. He scored 8 goals for Everton's Under 17's side last season, even though he is a year younger than the rest of the squad. Along with Scott Brown, & Sean Doherty, Rooney has been selected for the England U17's for a tournement next month. He and is the youngest member of the squad. If you get a chance go & watch the games. (20/06/01) |
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