The gangsters did not yet have England’s footballing genius in their sights. He was, after all, only nine years old. Before long, word of Little Wayne’s gift reached the football scouts. First to glimpse the Rooney talent was retired train driver Bob Pendleton, who came across the future England player in a fashion wholly consistent with Liverpool 11. Pendleton was asked by the treasurer of the Walton and Kirkdale junior football league to collect unpaid refereeing fees owed by Copplehouse Under-10s. Patrick Barclay, then with The Guardian, tracked down the debt collector’s tale: ‘The treasurer asked if I could go and get them,’ said Pendleton. ‘I walked down to where they were playing and was talking to the manager when I saw a little fellow. He was so comfortable on the ball. I said to the manager, “Who is the little fellow?” and he said, “You’re joking, aren’t you? That’s young Wayne Rooney.”’
Pendleton recalls: ‘From the word go, the things he could do with the ball, the goals he could score. Even then, he was one of them players.’ The Everton talent spotter immediately realised that young Wayne was a seriously gifted young man. But the moment the youth wing of a big club signed up a lad his first priority had to be with them, not the pub team, so Pendleton, according to McKeown, agreed to wait until the Copplehouse Colts had finished their season and won their cup, and then sign him up.
It was only a matter of days. But, unknown to Pendleton, Liverpool had also sniffed the air. An Anfield scout had been at the same Copplehouse game and got their offer in first, asking Roo’s dad immediately after the game if young Wayne would come along to their training ground, Melwood, for a trial. As McKeown told it: ‘He ripped apart the other kids, just played at a level far better than them. He scored a few goals, too. The other kids had Boss, AstroTurf-friendly shoes on, but Wayne only had a pair of normal trainers. He still managed to compose himself and play well. But Liverpool didn’t welcome him. He had his Everton shirt on. They ignored him.’
Roo didn’t get on well with the Liverpool coaches, and that was because of something screamingly obvious: he was wearing an Everton shirt. The problem for Roo is that, being a lifelong Blue, sporting the Toffees’ colours was as natural as brushing your teeth, but you can easily see why their sworn enemies on Merseyside might not think too highly of such unwitting defiance. Roo was asked to attend a second trial for the next week, but, in the meantime, Pendleton heard about the trip to the enemy and acted. He invited the Rooneys to come to an Everton trial. Pendleton said:
I just introduced myself to the parents and said I’d like to take the young man into Bellefield [Everton’s training ground]. The look on their faces – because they were Evertonians – said it all. I was on to a winner. Later, I went over and had a little chat with Ray Hall, the training manager, and said, ‘I’m bringing the little fellow in.’
The second trial for Liverpool and the first for Everton fell on the same evening. The Rooneys stood up Liverpool and went to the Everton trial. The young soccer star had come home – it was the team he adored, and he loved every single thing about the club: the stadium, the Z Cars entrance, the fans, the players. The Toffees signed him up that very evening, after one training session. Ray Hall said: ‘I didn’t even need that as proof. You get an experienced scout sitting there with his cup of tea quivering while you’re talking to the lad, and you know he’s a special talent.’
He was on Everton’s books. Missing out on Wayne Rooney was a decision the Kop would live to regret.
Roo says in his autobiography that he was desperately excited about his news and needed to tell the most important person in the world. Going like an express train, he zoomed from the Everton training ground home to tell his mum. She wasn’t there but at church, taking part in the rehearsal for his brother Graeme’s first communion. In church she was sitting next to the mother of Francis Jeffers, another Everton academy star, ‘and when I told her the news she burst into tears’.
Roo told his mates, who were so delighted they celebrated by having a kickaround in the street. Though if he hadn’t got in, his mates would probably have commiserated with Roo by having a kickaround in the street.
Hall vividly recalls seeing Rooney’s star quality shine when the Everton Under-10s played Manchester United, away. It was only a little while after the Man United training programme had processed talent like David Beckham and all the attention was on who next was going to emerge at Old Trafford. And then people began to realise that they were looking at the wrong end of the pitch. Everton Under-10s beat Manchester United Under-10s 12–2, with young Wayne scoring six of the twelve goals. Hall told Jonathan Norcroft of the Sunday Times: ‘It was an eight-a-side game with small goals, yet Wayne executed this overhead kick that flew straight into the net. There was a big crowd, but the place went silent. Someone, Wayne’s dad, I think, started clapping. Suddenly everyone, the United parents included, was applauding.’
Tim O’Keefe, coach of the Liverpool Schools Under-11 side, is yet another coach who was gobsmacked by the precocity of Little Wayne, who broke the team’s scoring record of seventy-two goals.
We could never really coach Wayne because he had such ability and was just ahead and did his thing. He was once running through the middle with only the centre-half to beat and teammates wide on either side. Me and one of the other coaches were telling him to give it wide and his dad was telling him to take the defender on. Instead, he ignored us all and just looked up and hit it in from thirty-five yards. Then he looked over at us and shrugged his shoulders before giving that big smile of his.
This description tallies with dozens of other Rooney genius goals. They all sound like the same goal, over and over again. They are not – but all carry the hallmark signature of Wayne’s space-traveller’s goal-scoring trick. He is many intergalactic light years from the goalmouth, sees his opportunity and uses his enormous firepower to knock one in before defence and goalie realise that he could be a threat. Arsenal were to find out what it was like to be on the wrong end of the Rooney kick-from-outer-space trick a few years on.
When Little Wayne was ten, he was chosen as Everton’s mascot for the derby game with Liverpool – there could be no higher honour for a schoolboy Toffee. The huge bonus of being picked as the mascot was that you were allowed to have a couple of shots at your own goalie in the warm-up. You can guess what happened next. Normally the tiny player would be massively awed by the great occasion and just tap the ball gently into the goalie’s gloves. But the little so-and-so had been honing his skills all week and Everton goalkeeper Neville Southall was taken totally by surprise. The first ball young Roo lobbed over his head into the back of the net; the second clipped the crossbar. Southall, the portly Wales goalkeeper, didn’t see the funny side. Wayne thought Southall called him a ‘flash bastard’.
If he hadn’t been a footballer, Wayne sometimes suggests he could have made it in showbiz. Or that’s the laughably absurd boast that follows from his first performance in the public eye, when he and his mates for a youth-club competition put on the musical Grease. Little Wayne played Danny, the part played in the movie by John Travolta.
The way Rooney tells the story in his autobiography gives you a feeling of what it must be like to be brought up in Crocky, when there was never quite enough money to go around. All the boys in the Grease spoof had been given black leather jackets for Christmas, so that they looked like mini-Travoltas. After they had done the song, they twirled their jackets above their heads and launched them into the audience, at which point their mums raced to get hold of the right jacket. Otherwise they would’ve lost their Christmas presents. You can’t imagine that happening just like that in Tunbridge Wells.
Grease has been a theme in Rooney’s life. He first realised that he had a chance with Coleen when she offered to lend him her video of the musical – it was as good as her saying, ‘I’m hopelessly devoted to you …’
Little Wayne’s other sport was boxing which, as we know, ran in the Rooney blood. So it’s possible he could have ended up king of the ring. But it never quite worked out like that. He did go to a boxing club at Croxteth Sports Centre, run by Uncle Ritchie, his dad’s brother. Wayne messed around, skipping and sparring, but he never actually stepped in the ring. He says in his book that he had a strong punch – and no one is going to contradict him.
But football was his great love. He was so bent on winning that some of the coaches found him ‘goal greedy’. It took a while before they were able to make the boy play for the team, and not just for himself – but that’s a common problem for every football coach that’s ever breathed.
Neil Dewsnip was a coach at Everton’s academy and nurtured young Wayne for much of his teenage years. He was ‘not tall, but he was always powerful’ as a child. At every level, he played with school kids much older than him. At Under-12 level, he played for the Under-13s; at Under-15 he played for the Under-17s and even the Under-19s. By sixteen, of course, he was playing with the big boys.
But at one stage, they had to bring the precociously skilful player back into his own age group – fourteen – ‘to stop him getting beaten up and allow him to regain his confidence’.
It was at fourteen that Little Wayne suffered from two separate problems that, for the very first time, stood in the way of success. The first was physical: he began to get terrible pains in his knees, and then his back too. He tried to hide the pain from the Everton coaches and physio, lest they drop him for good. The downside to all ‘football academies’ for kids who are young and gifted is that your star quality can vanish with puberty, and Little Wayne was streetwise enough to observe that at least some of his fellows at the Everton Academy were not being invited back for another year. The thought of that happening to him was terrifying, and yet sometimes his knees were so full of fluid they had to be drained, and the pain would last an hour and a half. He told the Everton physio about the problem and Osgood-Schlatter disease was diagnosed directly. It’s a fancy term for growing pains, when youngsters who shoot up in adolescence suffer short-lived aches in their joints, particularly their knees. Little Wayne recovered from the growing pains, and got his natural athleticism back.
His second problem was psychological: he felt uneasy with one of his coaches at Everton, that he wasn’t getting along with him. He admits that he gave him some stick, which, of course, made everything worse. Big Wayne came to the rescue and played honest broker. Roo’s father knew how he felt, but he also realised what the coach was trying to achieve. He gave Roo a telling-off, said the coach knew what he was doing and told him to get on with it and cut out the cheek. Rooney says in his autobiography that he buckled down and got on with it.
That conclusion comes a little too breezily. The fact is that Wayne Rooney had a troubling and prickly relationship with authority figures: sometimes they can be a club team manager, like David Moyes, sometimes a captain of England, like David Beckham, sometimes referees, of English or any other nationality you care to think of. His disciplinary record, since he hit the big time, is not wonderful. The one thing that Roo did not learn at Everton was how to control his temper, how to accept an adverse decision gracefully and how to conduct himself maturely on the football pitch. That’s not for want of Everton FC trying. Maybe, by the time the club got their hands on him, it was too late. You can take the boy out of Crocky, but you can’t take Crocky out of the boy.
Pendleton, the Everton scout who first spotted Rooney’s talent, was asked by Barclay if he ever hoped to pull off his talent-spotting success a second time. ‘No, Jesus,’ he said. ‘A good friend said to me, “You only find one of them in your lifetime, so sit back and enjoy the ride Wayne is going to give you” – and I am enjoying it.’
There was no doubting the boy’s precocious talent. The sharks were beginning to circle. If Wayne kept on developing, without a career-killing injury, the coaches in the north-west were starting to sense a footballing great might be on their hands. And you could make a lot of money out of that – millions of pounds’ worth. The key to the money was control of ‘the asset’. The stakes were not small. So long as Rooney can stay playing he has the potential to earn £100 million or even more from football and sponsorships over the next ten years or so. A smart agent could earn a good percentage of that – a prize worth perhaps as much as £10 million, maybe more, and one you don’t give up without cursing your luck.
But for the time being, Wayne was safe and secure under the Everton umbrella, knocking in as many goals as he could, still enjoying street footie with his mates. It’s this image of Wazza and his pals knocking a football around the back streets of a council estate that the advertisers and the brand-makers were to drool over when Rooney’s career hit the stratosphere. Many people in the game have mourned the passing of street football, killed off by modern life and the fear that there’s a paedo on every street corner. Some of the game’s greatest talents, including Pelé and Maradona, grew up playing urban footie. But that was a generation ago. Rooney says he played endlessly in the streets with his friends without a problem. That is true, but it may be because Crocky’s deprivation means that it is socio-economically a throwback to the 1960s.
Even today, not that many people in Liverpool 11 have their own cars. The streets, certainly around Roo’s first home, on Armill Road, are curiously empty of vehicles. Also, Rooney’s tight-knit extended family, with loads of cousins all living nearby, were the perfect form of ‘child security’ – but that, too, is increasingly uncommon for many people in Britain, who have moved away from their old extended families. His childhood was out of sync with much of modern Britain – and maybe modern Britain is the loser.
Little Wayne’s schoolwork at De La Salle wasn’t much to write home about. His Year 8 report, for July 1999, when he was thirteen, shows that he got nought in geography – he hadn’t turned up for the exams – and nought in Spanish. His other marks show an absence of academic genius: 40 per cent in maths, 49 per cent in science and, curiously, 60 per cent in religious education. He boasts in his autobiography that his report shows that he could do it, when he could be bothered.
One line in that school report prefigures some tabloid headlines later on: ‘General targets: Get to class without any distractions, i.e. gambling.’ Roo explains in the autobiography that gambling meant ‘Jingle’, a playground game where he and his mates would chuck 10p or 50p bits at a wall: the one who lobbed his coin nearest to the wall scooped the lot. The teachers hated it, Rooney says, but it doesn’t exactly sound like high-rolling in Monaco.
Once he got into trouble for taking his favourite football into the science lab, where it was promptly confiscated. In a red mist, Rooney kicked a hole in the wall, denied doing it, but then had to confess when a teacher playing Sherlock Holmes discovered the remains of half the wall embedded in the front of his shoe. He got two days’ suspension for that. If, say, Prince Harry had been brought up in Crocky – an unlikely thought, worth savouring – one wonders just how much better he would have done at school than the young Rooney.
But perhaps the most impressive ‘school report’ is the one his schoolmates haven’t made. The absence of evidence on Friends Reunited or in the tabloids that Little Wayne was a thug, a bully, a love-cheat, a serial killer, a sociopathic psycho is worth noting – because had there been anyone claiming that he was a bit that way, then it would have come out. What you see is what you get: a bit of a lad, brilliant at soccer, not obviously the next Lucasian Professor of Physics at Cambridge University, but not someone his much less successful, much poorer schoolmates want to slag off in any serious way. They must have liked him.
To be a winner at football, to make it at Everton, Little Wayne knew that he had to keep his nose clean. The distractions were ever present in Crocky: drink, drugs, crime. In the autobiography he comments on realising that some of his mates were sniffing glue and smoking weed. He confesses that he tried to smoke an ordinary cigarette once, but never liked it. Later, he saw that some of the people he knew on his Crocky council estate were getting into drugs, big time. They have since become addicts and, he says, look terrible.
It does happen. A football coach who first spotted young Rooney’s genius mentioned that one of his – the coach’s – relatives was Craig Charles. The Liverpudlian TV star was born in Bootle, which is a milder, posher, slightly less homicidally scary version of Crocky. Charles started out as a player for Tranmere Rovers, then became ‘Susan Williams’, a trans-gender punk poet with attitude, then got the part of Lister, the Scouse smeghead but signed-up member of the human race in the cult mock-sci-fi classic Red Dwarf, before moving on to Coronation Street. Later, Charles popped up on the front page of the Daily Mirror, snatched in video stills whiling away a four-hour taxi journey between London and Manchester, snorting crack cocaine from an old drinks can. He copped a caution and is back broadcasting.
Thankfully, Rooney never snorted his talent up his nose.
However, one suspects that Little Wayne wasn’t quite the angel depicted in the First Communion photograph all the time he was growing up in Crocky. He admits that he had a mini-motorbike, a Yamaha PW80, which had three gears, no clutch and no licence. He rode it around his council estate in Crocky when no policemen were at hand. The sight of Little Wayne coming at you on a mini-Yamaha at 30mph wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste. And the model of alcoholic sobriety doesn’t quite ring true: ambitious sportsmen have to keep off the bottle, true, but the odd binge never stopped Sir Beefy Botham from knocking a cricket ball out of the ground.
Rooney does pass on one story about him being surprised in a pub, but the angle is that he was an innocent – a man falsely accused. One day a busybody member of the public noticed that young Wayne was sitting in his dad’s other local, the Dog and Gun (before it shut up shop), and telephoned Ray Hall, the head of the Everton academy, to complain about the errant young star wasting his time in a pub. Hall sent a scout round to check out the allegation of Little Wayne’s under-age drinking, only to find that he was just watching the football on telly.
What kind of a drinking story is that?
Just like what happened on his cousin James’s eighteenth birthday: everybody else may have been knocking back the booze, but Wayne goody-two-shoes Rooney nobly declined the demon drink. The way Rooney tells it, the dominant colour in his life is a very light pastel beige.
As a schoolboy player on Everton’s books, Little Wayne fell naturally into the lap of the first smart agent who saw him play, and one with good connections to the Blues and even the Rooney family. His name was Peter McIntosh. He saw Rooney do his stuff, was astounded and signed him up on 12 December 2000. McIntosh and his Proform outfit ran a modest stable of home-grown Everton talent, with a bit of grit from Tranmere Rovers – Birkenhead’s bonny boys on the other side of the Mersey, locked, it seems forever, for pernicious and unnecessary reasons, down in the basement of the Football League. McIntosh ran not very well-known names like Leon Osman and Tony Hibbert, and Jason Koumas, who moved from Tranmere to West Brom for £2.25 million. McIntosh already had a Rooney on the books, Little Wayne’s older cousin, Thomas Rooney, who was then playing for Tranmere, the son of Uncle Ritchie, who ran the boxing club in Crocky.
McIntosh comes across as an affable man, a natural gentleman, with no side to him. He has, though, a chronic addiction to blazers. Roo’s mother Jeanette is, by common consent, someone you would not want to cross swords with. McIntosh gave an interview to Sue Evison in which he sidestepped the issue as well as he could. He said that Jeanette is what you might call a strong character. He added that she knew her stuff, wasn’t one of these women who don’t know anything about football. She knew about the offside rule, she knew when a player was playing well or badly. And her belief in Wayne was total.
Big Wayne and Peter McIntosh pale in comparison with the dinner lady from Crocky as the big influence in his life. But McIntosh did his best: making sure that Little Wayne didn’t make any obvious mistakes, or sign his life away to the football equivalent of the Foreign Legion.
Meanwhile, the buzz around young Wayne grew louder. As time sped by, McIntosh’s problem was that Rooney’s genius was no longer a secret. Down the East Lancs Road, the great beast of Manchester United was beginning to stir. Other teams were also intrigued when they heard reports of the new Boy Wonder. The honours and accolades continued to pour in. In an outing for the England youth team against Scotland, Rooney scored the opening goal, and two months later he got another against Canada. He was a fixture in Everton’s FA Youth Cup side, his favourite season 2001–2, when it seemed he couldn’t help but score goals. He got two against West Bromwich Albion, then two more against Manchester City, a goal against Nottingham Forest and two more against Spurs in the semi-final. Tottenham manager Glenn Hoddle waxed lyrical about him, as did Liverpool, but the message from Everton was very clear: Rooney was theirs, and strictly not for sale or any other entreaty.
The semi-fiction employed by the Football Association is that players under seventeen shouldn’t earn any serious money and are free to go anywhere, lest they be unfairly swayed by the first big team that comes their way. It’s a noble attempt at giving young players a bit of leverage against the Big Money that rules English soccer, and it doesn’t always work. Clubs, desperate to hang on to talent, use all the obvious tricks to keep potential stars on their books until they sign properly on their seventeenth birthday. But Everton had no problems with Little Wayne: he and his family were Blue, through and through. The side has a real family atmosphere, full of malarkey and messing about, and the Rooneys loved it.
When he was sixteen Roo signed a kind of football version of a prenuptial agreement, committing him to the Blues. It kept the other clubs at bay, at least for the time being. That season, coming to a close in the spring of 2002, Everton had more than their fair share of injuries. In April Little Wayne travelled to Southampton with the team proper as a substitute. Roo records in the autobiography that the fans were shouting for him to come on, but it never happened. Had he been called from the subs’ bench, he would have beaten Joe Royle’s record as the youngest-ever Everton first-team player.
Wayne aches with pain whenever he is forced to sit on the substitutes’ bench. If there is one thing that winds him up, it’s watching others playing football when he isn’t. Little Wayne was due to come on for Everton in the next game, but the fixture clashed with an England Under-17 game for which he had been picked, and national call-ups take precedence over league games, so Joe’s old record stood.
England did well in the Under-17 World Cup, before they were defeated by Switzerland. But there was one final game in that season, the FA Youth Cup Final, in May, against Aston Villa, over two legs. Word had reached the Toffees that their new hero was on great form, and an astonishing 15,000 Everton fans turned up for what was only ever going to be a youth game. Roo scored the first goal and pulled up his shirt to reveal a T-shirt underneath with the slogan ‘Once a Blue, Always a Blue’.
The T-shirt had been the idea of Roo’s cousin Toni, also, obviously, an Everton fanatic. The Toffees lost the game 4–1, and a couple of years later they lost Rooney, so soon the slogan on the T-shirt would no longer be a proud boast but a curse that would haunt the star.
Meanwhile, Rooney’s mind turned to romance. If you are thinking that Coleen was his first childhood sweetheart, then you would be wrong.
To be fair to Coleen, nowhere has she ever claimed that she was Roo’s first childhood sweetheart. That label may have been stuck on her by hacks, oozing saccharine from every pore, putting Coleen in the grotesquely difficult position of having to deny what was first an implication, which then morphed into an assumption, and then became a fact without her ever uttering it.
Hunteroo’s take on his pre-Coleen love life is so dull it’s more fun reading the instructions on a bag of cement. He writes that he had his first so-called girlfriend when he was about thirteen, whom he went out with for about two months. That ended and when he was fifteen he had another girlfriend for about seven months. But there’s one thing everyone agrees on: young Wayne fancied Coleen something rotten from the word go. In Grease terms, she was the one that he wanted.
Wayne has had a rough press, because he looks like a Scouse wide boy with far too much money. Coleen has had a rough ride too, for no particular good reason. She was, by common consent, one of the brightest, prettiest girls at St John Bosco, and was always going to make something of her life. She has also got herself out of Crocky, which means that when she sees a chance, she takes it.
Her family are Liverpool supporters, her father a devout Catholic. Transparently good people, they adopted a young girl, Rosie, who turned out to be suffering from a disease called Rett’s syndrome, which eats away at the sufferer’s nerve system, causing a terrible progressive paralysis. None of that has prevented Coleen from getting the bucket-of-shit treatment. Private Eye has an excellent satirical column called ‘Glenda Slagg’, in which the wilder excesses of Fleet Street’s women-for-women’s journalism is ridiculed. But even Glenda at her bitchiest would be hard put to match Australian acid queen Amanda Platell, who wrote in the Daily Mail:
No number of designer makeovers can disguise the fact that underneath she is Vicky Pollard with money, just as no amount of crash diets can really change that sweet, tubby little figure. She is flogging her chavdom for all it is worth while she can, as even Col knows she has the shelf life of a pork pie.
This is vitriolic even by La Platell’s standards and has been belied by later events. Stand-up comic Jenny Eclair gave it to Coleen with both barrels when she was crowned the face of Asda, a supermarket chain so prolier-than-thou that its technique of imprinting its advertising brand is for its adverts’ customers to spank themselves on their arched buttocks. The comedienne wrote: ‘You cannot be a style icon and the face of Asda, as Coleen is. That – literally – would be having your frozen chocolate gateau and eating it. Coleen is as exotic as a catering-size bag of chips, but possibly slightly duller. She is the Chav Princess’ – spankety-spank.
Ah, but Coleen is now worth an estimated £8 million. How galling must that be? The backwash of bitching and sniping Coleen has attracted is oceanic. Coleen’s life – thus far – shouldn’t provoke this concentration of sulphur. And yet it does. There is something about Coleen that brings the claws of Fleet Street’s minxes out and there seems to be nothing that she can do about it. By falling in love with the brightest footballing talent of his generation when she was still a schoolgirl, Coleen has somehow hit a double jackpot: she has her youth and she has loads of money. There is also a whiff of revolting old-fashioned snobbery: that a young woman from somewhere vulgar with bus stops should never make it on to the front cover of Vogue. It shouldn’t be allowed … her kind are not suited … blether, blether, blether.
However, there are times when Coleen functions as her own worst enemy. Coleen told her very own life story in 2007 – at that stage, all twenty-one years of it – in her very own autobiography, called, imaginatively, Welcome to My World. The book is a tribute to the colour pink. Pink jacket, pink glitter title, pink inside cover page, pink handwritten bits, pink prose. Some of that, at least, was tap-tapped out by a chap called Harvey Marcus, who appears in the book credits as ‘Edited by …’. Harvey pops up once in Neon, an electronic newspaper archive, as ‘celebrity editor’ of Marie Claire magazine, drooling at the chops about Angelina Jolie, so he is clearly a journalist of some stature. These celebrity chaps like lists. On page 210, Coleen–Harvey treat us to a list of Coleen’s top ten favourite bags:
Welcome to my World reads like a savage dystopian satire on the mindlessness of Western consumerism, though that does not seem to have been the original objective. Nevertheless, there are some funny bits in it and Coleen has an honest turn of phrase that occasionally punches through the self-regarding photographs, the listing of bling and the fancy parties and places ‘me and Wayne’ have been to.
They’ve been yachting on the south of France, they’ve swum in the Caribbean and they’ve been partying at Beckingham Palace but they first hooked up in front of the chippy thanks to a dodgy bike chain in Crocky. Coleen tells the story in her book. She was riding on the back of her friend Claire’s bike when the chain broke just in front of the fish and chip shop where Wayne and his mates were hanging about. The damsels in their distress called for help and Wayne Rooney played the gallant Sir Galahad. She says, slightly acidly, that she has since learnt that Roo is not a handyman, but that night he managed to fix the bike and a date was booked to thank him for his courtesy.
Having bagged that prize, they got chatting and Wayne established that Coleen had been to amateur drama classes. He chipped in with his Grease story, she mentioned that she had the video, he asked Coleen whether he could borrow it that very night, he tailed her home, got the video and they went round the back of the Queen of Martyrs church and true love was sealed with a snog.
It’s not exactly Elizabeth and Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice but this is Croxteth, Liverpool 11, after all. He’s got loads of money, she’s beautiful, ping and pong; he can appear thick, she’s bright, yin and yang. They were hooked on each other.
The first photograph of Coleen appeared in the Sunday Mirror in February 2003, and it says something about her cosmic self-confidence today that she allowed it into her autobiography. She is wearing a black puffa jacket with the hood up, blue skirt and blue socks as she walks to school. It looks as though it is raining in Crocky. The image is not wholly flattering. In her book she says that the moment she appeared in the newspaper loads of her relatives rang to congratulate Crocky’s latest celebrity. She’s often said that she finds the media intrusion into her life pretty ghastly, but she has the honesty to confess that she loved her first brush with fame: ‘You laugh at yourself being in this national newspaper, and it’s strange, and funny. That day I must have looked at that same picture at least fifty times.’ As photographs go, it wasn’t that bad – she could have been opening the door to receive flowers, like the wife of one of our former Prime Ministers.
There is an honesty about Coleen’s reflection on her first moment of fame which is quietly impressive.
The first big press interview she gave wasn’t with Saccharine Sue of The Sun, but with the Sunday Mirror’s Zoe Nauman in 2003. The Mirror photographed Col in a silver spangly number. She looked like she was done up in foil, oven-ready, at gas mark 5. In the clearly staged photographs she seems unhappy, not herself, with a tense stuck-on smile as though she was having second thoughts about appearing as Miss BacoFoil 2003. But Coleen comes across as she is – no Bette Davis or Dorothy Parker, at least not yet – but a lively, thoughtful, decent teenager, and one who is already a little wary of the press. Nauman reports Coleen’s views on Roo: ‘He tells me he loves me all the time. We are like best friends. When I am with him I feel really relaxed. He is really caring. You wouldn’t think so on the pitch but there is a soft side to him.’
Coleen told Nauman how the couple slowly fell in love:
At first we were just mates, but then we began to spend more time together. Then we became best friends and soon realised we liked each other more than that. When I first started seeing Wayne I was a bit nervous, but as I got to know more about what he was like, I realised how understanding he is.
But the first great test of their love raised the question not of just how understanding Wayne Rooney was of Coleen, but of how understanding she would be of him.
And his dark side.