None of the pressures ratcheting up inside Wayne’s World – the baby-oil sessions in the gangster-protected brothel on the Aigburth Road; the most feared criminal family in Britain taking an unhealthy interest in his affairs; the growing tabloid monster interest – appeared to trouble his game. That went from strength to strength.
But, first, a word in passing in defence of estate agents. As a breed, estate agents are overmuch maligned. Too often, they are portrayed in the media as cliché-riddled scumbags out for a fast buck who don’t give a monkey’s what they sell to whomsoever, so long as they get their percentage. Their detractors claim, wholly unfairly, that your average estate agent might inspect a fungoidally damp shack of two rooms and a void in the earth for a toilet with a garden contaminated with 2,3,7,8-tetrachloro, paradoxide with diethyl phthalate and polyhexo built on the slopes of an active volcano, and write it up as a ‘bijou medieval-effect residence with enhanced garden nutrients, convenient for thermal springs’.
Spare a thought, then, for the hard-working professionals of posh estate agents Kinleigh, Folkard and Hayward of the King’s Road, Chelsea. The good people of KFH were naturally alarmed when two scallies out ‘on the rob’ marched in one midwinter weekday and began to case the joint. An informant told the tale: ‘One of the agents simply refused to give the pair any details of their properties. The two scallies were asked to leave the premises or police would be called. The agent thought they were burglars who had come to London to “case” some big houses before robbing them.’
The duo weren’t robbers at all, but, reportedly, Mr Wayne Rooney and defender Alan Stubbs, who were having a quick look at house prices in Chelsea before the match in December 2002. The Everton football source who told the story to the papers alleged that ‘all the lads were crying with laughter when they found out. The estate agent had mistaken them for a couple of scallies on the rob.’
A spokesman for Kinleigh, Folkard and Hayward, whose Chelsea offices are near the Stamford Bridge ground, told one paper: ‘I have heard about this incident. I am not allowed to comment on it, but we wouldn’t normally judge people in this way.’
In his autobiography, Rooney describes the story as ‘total rubbish’. Of the two groups of people – professional footballers from Merseyside and London estate agents – I’m with the former.
Dog must eat dog. That is rule number one of the pirate code of Fleet Street, and it would be quite unsporting to give any other journalist the benefit of the doubt when it came to their word against that of the Croxteth Cyclone. However, there are times when the papers pick up on something and get it half or, more often, a quarter right. Take Nick Henegan, football writer of the Daily Mirror, who wrote in his paper about a tattoo on Rooney where his lower back meets his upper buttock: ‘The italic mark at the base of his back, just above his shorts, looks like the letters IREN. Or it could spell “gran” as a tribute to his grandmother Patricia Morrey, 78.’
Nearly there: the tattoo on the Rooney (upper) arse spells ‘THEN’. It’s a gag carried out with one of his old Crocky mates. The pair of them went round Liverpool, always saying to each other, ‘OK, then?’ His mate got ‘OK’ tattooed on his bottom and Rooney ‘THEN’.
His first tattoo bears the legend ‘Coleen’ and is placed on the top of his right arm, where it joins his shoulder. He got that tattoo from a shop in the Quiggins centre in the heart of Liverpool.
‘Coleen’ and ‘THEN’ are a far cry from David Beckham’s more spiritual body etching. One of Beckham’s nine tattoos spells out the name of his beloved Victoria but it is penned in Hindi rather than English because Beckham thought it would be ‘tacky’ to have it tattooed in Shakespeare’s tongue. Tragically, the tattooist got his Hindi wrong, so the tattoo actually reads ‘Vhictoria’ rather than ‘Victoria’. A second Beckham tattoo is in Hebrew, from the saucy Song of Songs, and reads: ‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine, that shepherds among the lilies.’ This is a hymn to fidelity which, given the former England captain’s alleged record between the sheets, makes one wonder whether Roo’s ‘THEN’ was the smarter choice.
Some people look down their noses at body art, but Beckham, despite all his tattoos, remains a style icon. Rooney himself admits that his make him look ‘like a cartoon version of a burglar’. Perhaps he should have got ‘Choleen’ and ‘THHEN’ in Babylonian-Cuneiform. That would’ve impressed the lads down the Wezzy.
Right from the start of his career on the national stage, the image of a street yob stuck to him like chewing gum to a shoe. His game has always had the raw aggression of street football, and playing in the Premier League changed nothing. Rooney and, perhaps more importantly, his family and advisers did nothing to sidestep the stereotyping when England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson handed him the award for BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year in December 2002. He picked up the award with his tie knotted a couple of inches above his waist and furiously chewing gum. Who gives a damn?
Well, at least some of the punters. One J. Wooster, of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, wrote to the Express to complain: ‘The young football genius, Wayne Rooney, was let down by his gum-chewing, slovenly appearance.’ Callers to Nicky Campbell’s BBC Five Live phone-in the next morning moaned on and on about Rooney’s appearance.
Everton’s chief spin doctor, Ian Ross, hit back:
The whole thing is preposterous and has been blown out of all proportion. In a world riven with problems, I could not believe a major radio station was wasting its airtime on such an inconsequential matter. It is evidently easy to forget Wayne Rooney was still sixteen until a few weeks ago. If people didn’t like the way he dressed, maybe they are short of something to worry about. A lot has happened to this boy in a very short time. He’s a shy lad who happens to be a footballer. Appearing on live television would scare the living daylights out of many a seasoned performer, let alone a teenager from Croxteth. At least Wayne Rooney chose to wear a suit and tie, which is more than could be said for Sir Steven Redgrave or Sam Torrance. I haven’t heard questions being asked of their sartorial elegance.
You can’t rig phone-ins. I’ve been on the Campbell show, as it then was, to talk about the horrors of the Russian occupation in Chechnya: wholesale destruction, terrifying use of torture, savage killing by vacuum bombs – they suck people’s lungs inside out – and hardly a person called in. A young soccer star like Rooney chews gum and the world calls up to complain.
In a sense the hope that the young Wayne could be a model ambassador for his sport and his country was wholly unrealistic. He was brought up in one of the roughest parts of one of the roughest cities in Britain. He behaved exactly like you’d expect a boy from Crocky to behave, and all this episode represents is a failure of comfortable people to imagine what it must be like to be born into a society where money is scarce and half your neighbours are on the social.
Having said that, Roo does make the point in his autobiography that his mother was not best pleased, and the wrath of a Crocky dinner lady is to be avoided at your peril. This was the first big occasion where the papers went gunning for him. Until this point nobody had really come down hard on him before. He found the episode troubling – it didn’t square with all the praise of him being a breath of fresh air, a brilliant player. Now he was just a yobbish young thug. It didn’t occur to him that both views might have an element of truth.
Off the pitch yet another pressure emerged: jealousy. In early November 2002, The Sun screamed: ‘THUGS FORCE WONDERBOY WAYNE OUT OF HIS HOME’. The paper reported that vandals used nails to puncture the tyres of Rooney Senior’s Ford Galaxy in two separate attacks, forcing the Rooneys to move home. Neighbours in Crocky said that Big Wayne had had to shell out £140 on new tyres after the attacks. Doreen Driscoll, seventy-one, a neighbour, told the paper that it was horrible. Doreen said that Roo was a lovely young fellow and everyone around here loved him, especially the kids. It was probably people from outside doing this.
On the pitch, Rooney wasn’t doing an awful lot to build up the impression of a gentleman player. In the first four months playing for Everton at the top level, he had been booked four times. The pressures on the young star were immense – and perhaps the hardest to deal with was the expectation that, as a footballer, he could do no wrong. For example, when Everton played Charlton in November 2002, thousands of T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘Saint Rooney – youth is temporary, class is forever’ were on sale outside Goodison Park. During the warm-up, Rooney’s classic ‘outer space’ shot into the net from thirty yards off brought a huge cheer, a racket only matched by the tannoy news of Liverpool’s defeat at Middlesbrough – announced twice for Everton’s ‘hard of hearing’.
But manager David Moyes, ever cautious, kept Rooney on the touchline for seventy-three minutes. Instead of rocketing in the goals when he finally came on, Roo created a loud and stupid bang with a reckless challenge against Charlton’s Chris Powell – and was promptly booked by the referee.
The Everton fans didn’t seem to mind. One of the club blogs records a fan’s reaction to the foul against Powell: ‘When Rooney nearly snapped the defender’s legs in half. The ref booked him and Rooney started pointing in his book as if to say: “wot did I do?” Sum fella behind stood up and said: “Fuck him off Wayne. Don’t give the bastard your autograph.”’
Another Everton blogger recorded: ‘The ref was booking Rooney when a shout goes up, “hey! Yer bastard! Leave him alone! He’s only 16!”’ (He had just turned seventeen, but you get the drift.)
Moyes had a difficult time reconciling the fans’ adoration of Everton’s outstanding star with the practical problems of running a team – some of whom, at least, could be forgiven for being just a little bit envious of the teenage idol – and keeping Rooney grounded. Burnout was a serious worry. Some say that Michael Owen’s prodigious talent was squandered because he was played too often, too young, causing too many injuries at the peak of his career.
In mid-December 2002 Everton defeated Blackburn Rovers 2–1, the match winner knocked in by Rooney. Moyes gave an interview, reported in the Daily Mail, which contained a subtle blend of admiration for his number-one star and wariness of what too much indulgence might bring. At the start Moyes reflected on Rooney’s innate genius: ‘I’ve never come across anyone like him in my life. Being on a football pitch is completely natural to him. He does things without even thinking.’
Then came the buts. Moyes warned: ‘There are outside influences that could have a detrimental effect on him, and you have to be wary of that.’ Was this a discreet reference to the gangsters who lay in the shadows? Moyes continued:
The years between 17 and 20 are difficult for any lad, especially one in the spotlight. Let’s face it, we’re probably trying to take away his adolescence. We’re effectively stopping him doing the things most teenagers do, and people have to understand the importance of that. We can’t keep an eye on him all the time and it’s vital we get support from everyone to make sure his development continues uninhibited. I’m convinced he has what it takes to handle all that. There’s no big ego with Wayne. He’s a down-to-earth lad who’d ideally like to be left alone to get on with playing football. The good thing is he isn’t the sort to get carried away. I’d be the first to slap him round the ears if he did. Mind you, he’d probably hit me back!
Indeed, Roo might.
Moyes’s conclusion was fair: ‘He puts the fear of death into opponents at times and gets spectators out of seats. But there’s plenty of scope for improvement.’
In self-discipline, for one. On Boxing Day 2002, when Everton played Birmingham City – a team, you may recall, that scored no goals at all during the entire reign of Pope John Paul I – the red mist flared again. Once more Moyes had kept his star off the pitch for the majority of the game. He bounded on, like a tiger late for his lunch of tethered goat, and ran for what he judged to be a fifty-fifty ball. Instead, he slammed both sets of studs into the other side’s Steve Vickers, leaving him with a gaping hole requiring eight stitches. The referee produced a straight red card. Moyes asked the referee to look at a video replay of the incident in the hope that the decision might be rescinded. It was not.
After the game, Moyes defended the boy from Crocky:
I’ll be reviewing the situation carefully. If you look at Everton’s recent record in terms of discipline, it may seem referees are not very keen on us at the moment. I will not be asking Wayne to change in any respect. You people [the media] are saying he is a bit rough and tough, but his enthusiasm is part of his game. I’m not going to stop him challenging for the ball.
The sending-off made Rooney the youngest player in a Premiership game ever to be sent off. Nevertheless, the golden reviews of his football continued. And he was having fun. Rooney loved Everton and Everton loved Rooney. He was adored by the fans but, perhaps most important of all, most of his fellow players grew to like and respect the boy from Crocky – and they signalled that in the classic Liverpool way by giving him an affectionate but dismissive nickname: the Dog. Rooney told Sue Evison that they called him the Dog at the club – he’d been called that since he was thirteen. They used to call him Wayne but then it suddenly changed and he still did not understand why he was the Dog.
Defender Alan Stubbs – the Everton teammate Rooney was allegedly with when the two men were allegedly suspected of being scallies by a posh firm of estate agents – came round to Rooney’s new house in upmarket Formby and was standing at the bottom of the stairs, shouting: ‘Dog, Dog, are you there, Dog?’ Rooney explained to Evison that there were workmen in the house and the door was open so he had just wandered straight in. Coleen and Rooney were still asleep. It took Alan a bit of explaining to the workmen. He wasn’t after their real dog, Fizz, but the best young player in England.
On 28 December 2002, Everton played Bolton at Goodison Park. The game provided a meeting of two stars: former Real Madrid defender Ivan Campo, playing for the Wanderers, and the seventeen-year-old Crocky boy. The first challenge went all the young man’s way. Campo was left dozing in the mud while Rooney was a blur of blue. The Gwladys Street end (where Everton diehards hang out) erupted: ‘Rooney’s gonna get ya.’ The result was 0–0, but Rooney made all the running, was declared Man of the Match and was unlucky not to have scored.
He allegedly made good that deficiency later that same night when he made love to a call girl in a derelict flat and gave her a billet-doux for her to remember the romantic encounter:
‘To Charlotte, I shagged u on 28 Dec. Loads of Love, Wayne Rooney.’
And remember it she did, two years on, with a little help from Fleet Street’s finest, under the headline ‘ROONEY’S SEX WITH VICE GIRL’.
There’s thick. There’s thick as two short planks. And then there’s unimaginably, gob-stoppingly, stupidly thick. And, finally, there is Wayne Rooney leaving an ‘I shagged u’ note for a prostitute. As the man said, you couldn’t make it up.
The tragi-comic sexual indignities of Rooney and Charlotte were not paraded in front of the nation’s bacon and eggs until July 2004, but, again, one has to remember that 2002 was Rooney’s annus mirabilis, his first great brush with fame – and he had yet to seriously encounter the dark side of the celebrity coin. The daft boy had only just been given a Blue Peter badge, after all.
The king of sleaze-sleuthing on Merseyside, Graham Johnson, got the story again for the Sunday Mirror. This, then, is the snapshot of Rooney’s life as a seventeen-year-old as observed by the call girl.
Rooney and his pals had had to go to an escort agency because, by late December 2002, the star had got the red card from Diva’s. Making money from prostitution is still a crime in Britain, but the police tolerate brothels to prevent a greater social evil – young women selling their bodies on the streets with no ‘protection’ at all – from flourishing. But if you push it too far and take the piss, the vice squad has the power to close down a brothel with a snap of its fingers. Rooney was too young, at seventeen, and, far, far worse, he was too famous. The word in Liverpool was that when he turned up at Diva’s, Everton fans would get to hear about it, and small but noisy crowds of lads would start chanting ‘Rooney, Rooney, Rooney’ at two o’clock in the morning.
OK – maybe not the world’s greatest entertainment – but it was cheap and funny. However, you could imagine that might annoy some of the more respectable neighbours trying to get a decent night’s sleep, and it was hardly discreet or low profile. Diva’s closed its doors to the Everton star. So Rooney and his pals turned their attention to escort agencies, and one they found in the phone book was called La Femme. (The agency has since dropped Charlotte and her sister for talking out of turn.)
Charlotte told Johnson that that night the agency had got a call for three girls to go to a flat in Crocky. Charlotte, her twin sister Katie and a third escort girl who was never named found a dilapidated flat, set amid Crocky’s usual charms of graffiti-strewn, abandoned dens that look like they’ve seen better days. The door was opened by a man who called himself Mark. She said she recognized him from the Jolly Miller pub where she worked some of the time pulling pints. Inside the flat were three men, one bald, one fair haired and Wayne Rooney.
Cunningly, he was wearing a brilliant disguise – a Father Christmas hat was sitting on top of his head. As disguises go, it might be seen as less successful than a fake plastic moustache and a pair of thick glasses. It’s not going to fool three streetwise girls from Merseyside and it didn’t. It seems perhaps a little odd that Rooney didn’t try harder to disguise himself, if indeed that was what he really wanted. Or perhaps the lads had only decided on an escort late on, when access to convincing disguises was limited. And/or drink had been taken in the course of the evening. The trio from the escort agency hadn’t arrived until nearly 2 a.m., which suggests Rooney and pals might have been partying a little beforehand.
Not to beat about the bush, Charlotte popped the ‘Are you Wayne Rooney?’ question. He was in a bit of a tricky situation.
Quick as a flash, Rooney said: ‘No, I’m a boxer.’
Brilliant.
Charlotte knew who he was. She had clocked his mug in the local paper the previous day. Worse, Charlotte considered the man pretending to be a boxer to be ‘dead ugly’. Her inner feelings chimed with many of her gender: in 2007 a research firm, Onepoll, sampled 4,000 female sports fans, who plumped for Roo as the ugliest sports star of all time.
Perhaps it also isn’t a coincidence that one of Rooney’s buddies is Ricky Hatton (Rooney carried out Ricky Hatton’s prestigious Ring magazine belt in his knockout victory over José Castillo in June 2007), another sports star whose looks are, ahem, less than flattering.
Charlotte, Katie and the other girl were billing £140 a pop. Charlotte told Johnson that they wanted the cash ‘up front’, which was pretty fair, seeing as how they’d arrived at a grim flat in the middle of Crocky. In the event – and again suggesting that calling out the escorts was more a spur-of-the-moment decision than pre-planned – the lads didn’t have enough bread on them and Rooney handed over his bank card to another lad to draw out some readies. Yes, they do have cash machines in Croxteth, Liverpool 11, and they apparently work, because friend of Roo returned with the money and Charlotte said that ‘I saw his name on his bank card,’ confirming Rooney’s identity, as if his face hadn’t already given the game away.
The girls paired off with different guys – Katie with Mark, the third girl with the aforementioned baldy, Charlotte with Rooney. Given that Charlotte reported that four men greeted them at the flat, the fourth man appears to have opted out of paying cash for sex. Or maybe he was broke. Charlotte and Rooney ended up in the scruffy bathroom and she provides the readers of the Sunday Mirror with perhaps the most detailed homedécor appraisal of a bad-sex venue ever.
The bathroom, she notes, was not properly decorated and the peach paint was peeling off the walls. It needed a good clean, and the bin was tipped over and rubbish had spilt out. The tiles on the bathroom had paint splashed on them. Charlotte proceeded to strip, and Rooney likewise. According to Charlotte, she was laughing all the time because she couldn’t believe she was having sex with Wayne Rooney.
They went back to the bedroom, rejoined Katie and Mark, and lay down on the bed. It was at this point, in this atmosphere of post-coital merriment, that Charlotte asked Rooney to sign something to prove it to all her mates, like an autograph. Roo promptly ripped the corner off a small piece of paper and wrote his billet-doux. Charlotte explained to Johnson: ‘He was pissed.’
Silly boy.
Charlotte added, bitingly: ‘He couldn’t write properly and didn’t seem all that bright.’
If you were looking for a ten-word summary of Wayne Rooney off the pitch back in the day, Charlotte’s assessment is the one to beat.
But that wasn’t the end of her encounters with Wayne Rooney. On New Year’s Day 2003, Everton played Manchester City, two mid-level teams playing out a draw that was considerably duller than the 2–2 scoreline suggests. Rooney was booked for the fifth time that season. He’d played well-ish and, yet again, manager Moyes took his young star’s side in the disciplinary matter – but Roo’s red mist was beginning to become a major problem, a weakness that other teams would identify and try to capitalise on. Our hero had an Achilles heel. The media stylised him off pitch as a yob and that fuelled the association in the minds of football officials between Roo and violent play.
The elephant trap was blindingly obvious: cunning rival players would start diving the moment robust street footballer Rooney went for a ball within yards of them, but Roo, being a bit of a pachyderm, sometimes couldn’t think of a way out of the trap. Every now and then he still can’t, and the haunting fear is the brilliance of his natural game is only a whisker away from a red card. That’s what makes watching him so fascinating – he can win or lose a match in a tenth of a second.
That New Year’s Day night, Charlotte was in the Jolly Miller, the pub where she pulled part-time shifts and had first encountered Mark. On this particular night, Mark happened to be there and invited her to a party at his place later that evening. Charlotte told Johnson that after a while Rooney arrived with his mates, having taken drink, sporting denim trainers, a grey T-shirt and blue trackies – the pure Crocky look – but clutching a bottle of Cristal champagne.
Cristal is the filthy rich chav’s bubbly of choice. The brand, produced by Louis Roederer, flogs at £200 a pop and enjoyed, until recently, gangsta rap chic. Cristal is so called because of its clear crystal bottle, created, so the story goes, for the paranoid Russian tsar Alexander II, who feared ‘being bumped off’. They made the glass see-through because the tsar was afraid of assassins concealing weapons inside an ordinary dark green champagne bottle. (Just because the tsar was paranoid didn’t mean he was wrong. Russian revolutionaries got him in 1881.)
In the nineties Cristal was adopted as the ultimate status symbol by black American rappers, who refer to it as ‘Cris’ or ‘Crissy’. Hiphop mogul and music industry King Midas Jay-Z in his number one hit ‘Hard Knock Life’ toasted the bubbly thus: ‘Let’s sip the Cris and get pissy-pissy.’ But times change. In 2006, The Economist asked new managing director Frédéric Rouzaud whether the gangsta rap association might harm the marque. He replied: ‘That’s a good question, but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business.’
Some of the rappers thought this reply a bit snooty and a simple ‘thank you’ would have been more gracious. Cris is now boycotted by the gangsta rappers. Both P. Diddy and Jay-Z have said, on their more recent albums: ‘Fuck Cris’.
I’ve never drunk Cristal, and even though Wayne Rooney drinks it, I’d stick to park bench cider. It has the same effect.
This time Charlotte and Rooney did not hit it off and soon Charlotte and Katie left the party.
January was two-faced for the young star. In the middle of the month he was formally presented to the football experts in the press to mark the occasion of a fresh sweetheart deal with Everton. His pay had gone from £80 a week as a sixteen-year-old, then £90 a week when he hit seventeen in October, to around £14,000 a week. It was the first big deal brokered by his new agent, Paul Stretford, and made Rooney one of the highest paid teenagers on the planet.
Manager Moyes had forbidden Rooney to speak in public thus far, so the press conference was the first occasion for the world to judge the star as an orator. In reply to a question about the deal, he replied in a whisper that you needed a hearing trumpet to pick up: ‘I’m very delighted.’ It quickly became clear that, genius though he may be on the pitch, the boy from Crocky, as a public speaker lacked that killer kick. It wasn’t the words he spoke so much – they made sense – but the timidity and hushed voice with which he spoke them. Away from the television cameras and the mass of the writing press, he gave a pooled interview to the Liverpool Echo that was distributed to the rest of the media. He told his local paper that his ambitions were to play for Everton and keep doing what he was already doing. He said there had never been any doubt in his mind that he would sign for Everton. This was something he’d always dreamed of.
But he reflected, a little, on the flipside of fame, too, admitting that sometimes it was really hard having to deal with all the attention, especially when people were outside your house. That was the downside and he just wished it would go away.
That kind of attention came at the end of the month, when The Sun reported on a Rooney failure that must have been supremely irritating for the young star: ‘IF ONLY HE COULD PASS A DRIVING TEST LIKE HE CAN PASS A FOOTBALL’. The story hit every footballing cliché in the first sentence: ‘Footie wonderkid Wayne Rooney was as sick as a parrot last night – after failing his driving test.’ The paper reported that he had flunked the easy written theory exam, and now had to apply to take it again. One of the star’s friends spoke anonymously to the tabloid, in a way that might make you wonder whether he was indeed a friend. When he got the results, said the friend, he was gutted, adding that Wayne was an amazing footballer, but he was not that bright academically. The paper went on to give readers a flavour of the intellectual rigours of the theory exam: ‘Objects hanging from your interior mirror may a) restrict your view; b) help you concentrate; c) provide entertainment; d) improve your driving.’
The Sun gave a handy hint: ‘Here’s a clue, Wayne – the answer is not b, c, or d.’
In February 2003 David Moyes called Rooney over at the start of a training session and told him: ‘You’ve been called up for England.’
Roo leapt to the assumption that meant the Under-21s, and asked, according to his autobiography: ‘Is Hibbo in?’ meaning his Everton teammate Tony Hibbert.
Moyes replied: ‘No, Tony’s in the Under-21s. You’re in the full England squad.’
Roo was going to play his first game for the England big boys. The game was a friendly against Australia, at West Ham, but part of the run-up to the vital qualifiers for Euro 2004. In My Story So Far Rooney (or his ghost Hunter Davies) sets out perhaps the most thrilling moment in any footballer’s career, the time when they first enter the squad as part of the national team. Roo’s Uncle Eugene gave him a lift down to the Sopwell House Hotel in St Albans, close to Arsenal’s training ground, where the England team were going to hone their skills. Rooney had lunch with the other players, then retired to his room for a quick kip before a strategy meeting at three o’clock led by Sven-Göran Eriksson. Roo fell fast asleep, dead to the world. The hotel had to find a spare key and shake Rooney awake before he caught up with the briefing, which was, as you might expect, not worth missing a snooze for.
This was the very first occasion for Rooney to meet David Beckham and the other England stars. Clearly it wasn’t that inspiring or he would have managed to stay awake.
Amongst the names you would kind of expect – Frank Lampard, Stevie Gerrard, Sol Campbell – there was his old mate from Crocky, Frannie Jeffers. It’s an indication of the snakes-and-ladders nature of modern football where those two boys from Crocky have ended up – one is at the top of the ladder right now, a multimillionaire and a fixture in the England squad, and Jeffers is struggling to find a top-flight football team to take him on.
Goalkeeper David James was the joker in the pack, hyperactive, cracking jokes, always the comedian. Rooney himself isn’t a natural wit – at least, not in public – but there’s something about him that makes people laugh and he’s not mean spirited or miserable about being the butt of a joke. That he doesn’t mind being laughed at is one of his best qualities. Pretty soon the England team were enjoying some of the Rooney family pantomime. The story goes that the England players were forewarned about Roo’s mum, Jeanette. Word of her strength of character had reached the England dressing room. When someone asked what time kick-off was, England and Liverpool striker Steven Gerrard said: ‘When Wayne’s mum gets here.’
The match against Australia was the usual England disaster, with England losing 3–1 to the Socceroos. But Rooney came on in the second half, aged just seventeen years and 111 days, and so, at that time, England’s youngest full international player.
Rooney’s second England game was on 9 March, against Europe’s minnows, Liechtenstein. The score was 2–0 before Rooney came on, but he was fast becoming an England fixture.
Later that same month Paul Stretford held yet another vexed meeting about who should run Rooney’s career. The venue was the Novotel in Euston, just opposite the station and among those present were Stretford, the rival wannabe agent John Hyland, and convicted drug smuggler and feared gangster Tommy Adams.
It was that month, too, when Charlotte the call girl was on her own in the city of Liverpool queuing for a sandwich at lunchtime and saw Rooney and his mates in front of her. She told the Sunday Mirror that Rooney kept turning around at her, pointing and laughing at her. As she tells the story, she is stuck in a slow-moving queue waiting for a salmon sandwich, damned if she is going to run away from them. Up ahead of her – and, she felt, laughing at her – was the city’s most promising footballer and his mates. She said that she thought he was bragging that she was the girl he’d shagged over the bath, and telling everyone that she was a prostitute. That’s how shame and embarrassment can suddenly strike you: when you’re doing something else entirely and a mistake comes and hits you in a completely unexpected way. She didn’t speak to him, she said, concluding: ‘I hate him.’
The idea of revenge – a dish best served ice cold – didn’t come into it.
Not then.