Wayne Rooney may one day show Everton he really is a Blue | Football | The Guardian
Wayne Rooney may one day show Everton he really is a Blue
Daniel Taylor
The striker’s move from Everton to Manchester United was a bitter affair but a return to Goodison could make sense for both parties in the next year or two
Wayne Rooney once more wore the Everton shirt in August, for his boyhood hero Duncan Ferguson’s testimonial at Goodison Park. Photograph: BPI/Rex Shutterstock
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Saturday 10 October 2015 17.00 EDT
Last modified on Monday 4 April 2016 08.03 EDT
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Over time, as the rancour fades and the rawness makes way for something more appealing, it can be easy to forget just how caustic and acrimonious it was for Wayne Rooney when he cut himself free from Everton, the club that are imprinted on his soul, and discovered the hard way how there is little in football that appals supporters more than rejection from the players they cherish.
One of Rooney’s worst professional memories was the time shortly before his transfer to Manchester United when Everton had a home game and, once the theme to Z Cars had died down, hearing the Gwladys Street End, where he had once been thought of as one of their own, singing about him again, but this time “there’s only one greedy bastard”. The interview his agent, Paul Stretford, set up with the Sun added to the malevolence given the poisoned relationship that newspaper has with Merseyside. Graffiti was daubed over Rooney’s walls and, even after he had left Merseyside, the unpleasantness rumbled on because of a dispute over the house Everton had bought for him and his family, close to their training ground, as part of the agreement when he signed his first professional contract.
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His parents had moved in and Rooney had to buy the house and repay Everton everything they had spent on the mortgage. There were two years to find that money, according to the account in Rooney’s book, but he claims Everton tried to force him to pay early and threatened to turf out his parents.
Rooney, the Everton-daft kid who was taken to his first match in nappies, wrote primary school letters to the imprisoned Duncan Ferguson and grew up with posters of Anders Limpar on his bedroom walls, was a pariah and still remembers the night he was watching television as viewers texted in messages saying he was never a “true Blue”, calling him a “Judas” and worse. Rooney watched the messages flashing up on the screen then took his phone and texted one of his own: “I left because the club was doing my head in – Wayne Rooney.” A few minutes later, the Sky presenter made an announcement: “Would the people at home pretending to be Wayne Rooney please stop sending text messages?”
They have made their peace, or at least the process is well under way, and every one of us who has grown up supporting a team should appreciate how unsatisfactory it was that everything should end so dismally in 2004.
Everton’s crowd were hurt by him because, in short, they cared about him. It is almost always the same when a prized player wants to upgrade from a proud, emotional club, especially when it is a local boy who has come through the ranks, but now some of the politics and spite have made way, it will be intriguing to see what happens next.
David Moyes always felt that Rooney would go back to Everton at some point in his career. Bill Kenwright, the club’s chairman, has said the same and anyone who watched the BBC’s documentary on The Man Behind The Goals – an entertaining though plainly PR-managed, no-warts-at-all kind of event – could see how natural and comfortable the England captain was on his old turf. Rooney might have spent a lot of time away but he still thinks enough of Merseyside to make absolutely certain his children were born as Scousers in Liverpool hospitals, rather than allowing their passports to be stamped with Manchester, and even the most diehard Evertonian might have to accept the player had valid reasons for wanting to join a club of United’s stature and ambitions.
Would he ever return? It would not be a surprise here for various reasons even if, first things first, a player with Rooney’s competitive spirit presumably wants to believe he is capable of better times at Old Trafford, where his form has become a legitimate point of scrutiny. Rooney has done most things for United but he has never won a trophy as captain. He is still talking about playing in the World Cup in 2018 and, having received a personalised golden boot from Sir Bobby Charlton at Wembley on Friday after overtaking him as England’s record scorer , the next chase is to establish himself in that position with his club as well.
Rooney is third in United’s all-time list of scorers with 235, two behind Denis Law, and gradually reeling in Charlton’s total of 249, even if it is taking a little longer than he might have anticipated, with only one in his last dozen Premier League appearances. The hat-trick against Club Brugge in the Champions League playoffs should not be overlooked but, without wishing to be too negative, they were moderate opponents, currently sixth in the Belgian league, whereas in the Premier League, away from home, Rooney has the rather undistinguished record of scoring only once in the past 18 months. His form has waned to the point the Manchester Evening News ran a comment piece on Saturday encouraging Van Gaal to leave him out when United visit Everton next weekend.
He is certainly not the player he was, which we should probably expect given that he turns 30 within the next fortnight and has already crammed an extraordinary amount of football into his life. Rooney has had the kind of career that will earn him the respect of every professional in the sport and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, not a player who hands out compliments too easily, was absolutely right to note how unusual it was for a footballer to spend so long at the top of the sport.
Equally, we should trust what our eyes tell us. Rooney’s deterioration has been pronounced enough to leave the distinct feeling that he is suffering the effects of playing so much so young (the equivalent, at the same age, as two full seasons more than Ryan Giggs, with a much more crash-bang-wallop style). There is no point dressing it up: in the worst moments, he resembles a champion boxer who has had one too many fights.
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At the highest level, there is little evidence that he can trouble defences in the way he once could, and when that is clearly the standard that Louis van Gaal wants to attain it is perfectly reasonable to wonder how long the United manager can tolerate these diminished performances. Until now, Van Gaal has always given Rooney unwavering support, but his treatment of Robin van Persie should be a reminder about what can happen when an old favourite fades.
The next level down is another matter and, though Everton are plainly more than a club of seconds and castoffs, they have a habit of going after players from Old Trafford who are either perceived as being on the way over the hill (Louis Saha, Phil Neville), or having never made it up the slope (Darron Gibson, Tom Cleverley). Rooney’s colleagues have certainly been given the impression he is entertaining the idea about finishing his career at Goodison and clearly it helps that the rawness has subsided a little, and he can go back to his old ground next weekend without the same levels of opprobrium he has encountered on his other appearances.
For now, Rooney’s first priority ought to be justifying Van Gaal’s perseverance with him. We are talking about next summer, at the very earliest, or more likely the following year before Everton explore the idea properly and, even then, it will not be straightforward when the player earns £235,000 a week, roughly three times Everton’s top earner.
“Once a Blue, always a Blue,” his T-shirt said. If it does come down to money, it might be that Rooney has to prove that again and, in the process, perhaps change the opinions of those on the Gwladys Street End.
Transfer committees are neither claptrap nor a trap for Klopp
Jürgen Klopp lived up to his billing with that sunrise of a smile and his mix of good sense and off-the-cuff soundbites during his introductory press conference at Liverpool, and it was good to see him immediately making it clear he was not troubled in the slightest by the club’s system of identifying, and buying, new players.
Yes, Liverpool have made a series of bad signings, but the complaint that a manager should have the only say about transfers is outmoded in modern football and there is nothing particularly unusual about a club operating with a network of people behind the scenes.
Managers at the highest level are simply too busy to take in all the scouting that is necessary and conduct all the relevant background checks, and of course it should be up to other people at the club, namely the owners, to decide on the money involved, rather than giving the manager carte blanche to spend what he likes.
Elsewhere in these pages today we have the story of Nottingham Forest’s double European Cup winners . Yet the current club is in a transfer embargo, in the lower half of the Championship, and that is partly because when Billy Davies was in his first spell as manager they had an “acquisitions committee”.
Davies made such a fuss it was eventually disbanded. In his second spell at the club he brought in his cousin/agent as general manager and they signed players of low quality on high wages. Forest, flouting the financial fair play regulations, have been in trouble ever since.
The problem at Liverpool is that someone at the club had the daft idea of calling it a committee, too. It sounds more like a branch of the Round Table, than a football club, but there is nothing wrong or unusual about the way it is operating.
The danger arrives if a player is signed against the manager’s wishes, or when the decision-makers make the wrong choices, but there has been far too much attention paid to what is a perfectly sensible system.