Who flung the pizza? Well, there’s no doubt that Wayne Rooney was there in the field at the Battle of the Buffet between Manchester United and Arsenal, the greatest conflict involving a slice of pizza hitting the blazer of the manager of Manchester United in recorded human history. But Rooney was on the defending side – and this time, at least, history’s finger of blame would be quite wrong to point in his direction.
The battle took place in October 2004 after the Reds smashed Arsenal’s historic 49-game unbeaten run, winning 2–0 with a goal by the Crocky Cyclone. United boss Sir Alex Ferguson was reportedly splattered with pizza, soup, water and sandwiches during the confrontation – forcing him to change into a tracksuit for his post-match TV interview. Witnesses told the papers how it kicked off, with United striker Ruud van Nistelrooy tapping Arsenal boss Arsène Wenger on the shoulder and teasing him about the result.
Wenger turned on Fergie, remonstrating with him, jabbing away at the Scotsman and, reportedly, making critical remarks about Wayne Rooney. The players got stuck in but security men broke the whole thing up and Roo writes it down in his book as not much, saying the battle itself was nothing really, just handbags at five paces with a bit of pizza thrown in.
Submission and Wayne Rooney do not go together like, say, gin and tonic. And yet Rooney in My Story So Far is deeply, almost morbidly submissive towards Sir Alex Ferguson. It’s so Uriah Heepish it’s slightly creepy.
The contrast with how Rooney refers to David Moyes is quite remarkable. Moyes is always ‘Moyesy’, which is the kind of thing that players call each other, not their managers. You can’t imagine Rooney calling his United manager ‘Fergie’ – and he doesn’t. It’s always ‘The Boss’.
In the ‘Rooney report’ at the back of the book he is asked the question, who is his most admired manager? You’re ahead of me: yes, it’s Sir Alex Ferguson. Rooney says that’s not because he’s the boss of Manchester United, but because he’s the best. Cereal-packet psychologists might speculate that Rooney has always been looking for a strong authority figure and in the Boss he has found it. But there’s something interesting about Ferguson, too. For a man with the reputation of ferocity, he appears to have a weakness, a kind of ‘Dat’s My Boy’ complex (after the dog in the Tom and Jerry cartoons who adores his daft puppy). The Scottish hard man seems to like to have at least one wayward player on his books at any one time. Over the years Ferguson has protected Bryan Robson, Roy Keane and now Rooney with a fatherly indulgence – ‘Dat’s my boy.’
Rooney has found in Ferguson something he needs; and Ferguson has found something in Rooney that he needs to protect. The odd thing is that, almost from the word go at Old Trafford, Rooney did not change. He still scored goals, but he still got into too many stupid rows on, and sometimes off, the ball. He was still getting headlines for all the wrong reasons. He was doing what he did worst: losing it extremely badly when losing – and it happened both when he was playing for his new club team and when he was representing his country.
England flopped against Spain in November 2004, in Madrid. It was supposed to be a friendly but the Spanish supporters behaved abominably to England’s black players, booing every time they got the ball. The best response would have been for England to have knocked Spain into a cocked hat – but they were pretty useless, conceded an early goal and then wandered around like a bunch of old ladies in search of a teashop with doilies. Frustrated and angry at the lacklustre performance of his own teammates, Roo let his own emotions rule him. His aggression was out of control. Most observers were surprised at the leniency of the Greek referee Georgios Kasnaferis. Rooney should have had a yellow card for a violent and stupid tackle on the Spanish winger Joaquín Sánchez Rodríguez and a red card for the idiotic shoving of Spanish goalkeeper Iker Casillas in the back. Sven-Göran Eriksson took stock and pulled off Rooney a few minutes before half-time.
In anger at this very public humiliation, Roo ripped off his black armband, in memoriam for Emlyn Hughes, the Liverpool and England legend, who had died a few days before the friendly, and appeared to treat the Swedish manager to a chorus of ‘fuck off’s. No one doubted that Roo meant no disrespect to Hughes, but it reinforced the public image of him as a hot-headed thug. The Daily Mail spoke for Middle England: ‘LOONEY ROONEY LETS THE COUNTRY DOWN’. In his book Roo concedes that his behaviour was ‘not nice’.
Meanwhile, up the East Lancs Road, Everton were defying all predictions. They had lost their Boy Wonder to the team with more dosh, and all the smart money had been on the Toffees taking the drop at the end of the 2004–5 season. It didn’t quite turn out like that. On the contrary, Everton made a blistering start to the season, winning match after match against far more moneyed opponents. It was almost as if Rooney’s genius had been some kind of curse that had inhibited the lesser but real enough talents of the rest of the team. Moyes, too, seemed liberated, no longer having to spend oceans of his time worrying about how to keep his best player while the sharks with bigger chequebooks circled. There must also have been a ‘let’s show Roo’ factor: that Everton was a football team, not a one-man band. At Christmas 2004, Everton were second in the Premier League. The Sunday Mirror commented that without the Boy Wonder, the Toffees were going from strength to strength and were real contenders for a Champions League spot. Moyes, said the paper, had developed a tightly knit, well-organised, feisty outfit who played great football and were hard to beat. Yet, with the possible exception of free-scoring Aussie midfielder Tim Cahill, there were no standout players on the Blue half of Merseyside.
The Independent on Sunday quoted Everton’s chairman, Bill Kenwright, on Moyes the miracle-maker: you knew the manager was a one-off within three minutes of talking to him. That feeling about a person had only happened to Kenwright once before in his life and that was when he was very young and started ‘big’ school and he sat on the bus on the way to school next to someone special. He went home and told his mum about it. That lad was Paul McCartney.
Moyes, without Rooney, was doing very well.
Boxing Day, yet again, was taken at face value by Rooney when United met Bolton Wanderers.
‘ROONEY SLAP CASTS UGLY SHADOW ON UNITED WIN’ – Independent.
‘WAYNE FURY’ – Daily Mail.
‘ROONEY’S VIDEO NASTY’ – Daily Express.
The Reds won 2–0, but the England star had pushed his hand into Bolton defender Tal Ben Haim’s face during the win at Old Trafford. For an ex-boxer, it wasn’t much of a slap, but in the modern game it wasn’t on. The Israeli went down as if he had been pole-axed by a rampaging brontosaurus wielding a pickaxe handle, which was a little bit theatrical. Neither the referee nor the linesmen saw it, but Roo got a suspension afterwards when the video evidence was reviewed. In his book, Roo wasn’t particularly meek about the incident. He says that he was fouled by Tal Ben Haim who also gave him a mouthful, so he gave him a push. Rooney said Ben Haim went down like a bag of shite, as if he knocked him for six with an uppercut. Point is: a football pitch is not a boxing ring.
In February 2005, Roo’s reputation sank lower when Manchester United played Arsenal. The Daily Star headlined the story ‘THERE’S NO F***ING PROBLEM WITH MY F***ING TEMPER!’ The paper reported that Rooney was filmed swearing twenty times in a minute, helping out its readers with the maths: that’s spitting out the F-word every three seconds. Challenged that he had a short fuse, he replied: ‘Nothing really. I don’t think there is a problem with my temperament. My record shows that.’
His record showed the opposite. After he was given a yellow card for bad behaviour, he was shown swearing at referee Graham Poll like a machine gun, firing ‘Fuck off’ – or something very much like that phrase – at him every 2.7 seconds. The referee took aside his captain, Roy Keane, and his fellow England teammate, Gary Neville, to ask Rooney to calm down. Poll told Keane: ‘I can’t keep warning him.’
Kev Mitchell, for my money one of the best sportswriters in Britain, and by no means a stuffed shirt, was deeply unimpressed by Rooney’s attitude to reasonable authority. He asked himself what effect bad behaviour in Premier League matches might possibly have on the ordinary, amateur game and wrote up his shocking findings in The Observer.
Ben Youard is a 34-year-old maths teacher from Islington in north London who, like thousands of players up and down the country, enjoys recreational football. Except on one rather remarkable day…
‘I was playing in a match in the Invicta Sports League in south London,’ he recalls. ‘The opposition were all in their early twenties and they had a centre-back who was particularly aggressive – kicking people, making late tackles, all that. Somebody made a bad tackle on him, and he completely lost it with the other player. The referee had to pull them apart and, when the game restarted, the guy went off to the sideline to his bag, pulled a gun out and started waving it at the referee saying, “Next time anyone does that to me, I’m going blow their head off.” His teammates calmed him down and made him put the gun away. The game was abandoned immediately and all of the opposing team, apart from the gunman, pleaded with the referee not to report them to the FA. They said the nutter was just a ringer who didn’t normally play for them. That’s the excuse that all teams use when there’s a bad incident like that.’
‘The most enlightening part of Ben’s story,’ reflected Mitchell, ‘is contained in the final phrase: “…when there’s a bad incident like that”.’
Like pulling a gun after losing a tackle.
Away from football, Rooney’s good name continued to be under attack. In April 2005 a few pals and their girlfriends, Coleen included, went round to Rio Ferdinand’s house. The blokes slipped off down the pub and the girls caught up with the errant men in a club in Alderley Edge. Roo freely admits that he and Coleen had a bit of a row and then, because Coleen had a photo shoot in Cyprus to fly off to early next morning, they left before the others. In his autobiography, Roo tells how The Sun and its Sunday sister paper the News of the World falsely alleged that this minor tiff was much worse. He said they used headlines like ‘CRAZED ROONEY THUMPS COLEEN’ and ‘YOU BRUTE’. The News of the World, Rooney said, piled in, accusing him of a ‘violent and nasty assault’ on her. It was said he had slapped her across the face, punched her in the ribs and then told her to ‘f*** off home’. Rooney said it was all rubbish – he had not touched her in any way.
Roo sued and, in April 2006, The Sun and the News of the World crumbled and the case was settled on the steps of the High Court. Roo got an apology and collected damages of around £100,000, plus all costs, and gave it all away to three charities, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, SOS Children and Claire House, a rest home for sick kids, where Coleen’s sister Rosie goes every now and then. The apologies were terse, but grovelling.
The Sun ate humble pie. The paper wrote that it had on 12 April 2005 published a front-page article under the headline ‘CRAZED ROONEY THUMPS COLEEN’. The article, The Sun said, alleged that Wayne Rooney had slapped his fiancée across the face and that he had to be calmed down and restrained by teammates. They now accepted that these allegations were false. They sincerely apologised for the embarrassment caused by the article. They agreed to pay substantial damages as a mark of regret and Mr Rooney’s costs. The paper ran a leader, entitled ‘WIN IT LADS’, which said that they were pleased to have reached a settlement with Wayne Rooney and looked forward to welcoming the England team back with the World Cup. The News of the World also issued an abject apology.
At the end of the season in May 2005, Manchester United hadn’t done all that brilliantly. They came third in the Premier League, lost to Arsenal in the FA Cup Final and didn’t progress into the juicy bits of the European Champions League. Wayne’s old mates in Crocky looked down on United’s misfortune with charity: ‘Ha ha ha.’
But Roo did manage to sign off the season with a beauty of a goal, yet another of his out-of-space shots caught on a volley and powered in from somewhere on the far side of Jupiter. It was against Newcastle at Old Trafford on 24 April. Roo had just been arguing with the referee – the usual – and he himself admits in his book that he wasn’t really looking for the ball when it seemed to fall out of the sky. He whacked it out of frustration and anger at the ref – and it flew in. It was voted Goal of the Season on TV.
This is as concise an exposition of how Rooney’s demons and genius are intertwined as we will ever get.
Meanwhile, Everton – one of the poorest sides in the Premiership, widely expected to come a cropper and go down to the Championship – came fourth, exactly one place behind Man United, and above their great rivals Liverpool. The Sunday Times gave David Moyes a mock Blue Peter Award for making a Champions League football team out of the footballing equivalent of sticky-back plastic, washing-up-liquid bottles and Lee Carsley – the Irish international who had played a blinder for the Toffees.
By their own wholly ridiculous standards, the summer of 2005 passed relatively quietly for Roo and Coleen. One could almost say that the press had got a bit bored with them. The Hairdryer, being a sharp-witted old owl, took Manchester United to Japan for some pre-season friendly games, which proved too far away or too expensive for the tabloids to bother the squad.
Still, Roo remained an easy target on a soft news day. Professor Oliver Hoener of the University of Mainz in Germany had spent years studying videos of matches and interviewing top players. He concluded: ‘Mindlessness is a good quality for a striker and good decisions have nothing to do with intelligence, which is why players such as Wayne Rooney show so much genius on the pitch.’
The Sun took aim at the open goal and scored: ‘PROFESSOR: SECRET OF GREAT SOCCER IS DON’T THINK (MUST BE WHY ROONEY IS SUCH A SUPERSTAR).’
They illustrated the professor’s musings with a graphic of Roo looking particularly thick with a large white blank where his brain might be, apart from a single small question mark. The paper filled out the story with two quotes from soccer greats, illustrating the professor’s observation, one from Brazilian star Ronaldo, ‘We lost because we didn’t win,’ and one from the Wales legend Ian Rush, who said after his time at Juventus: ‘I couldn’t settle in Italy. It was like living in a foreign country.’
Roo isn’t the only footballer in the world who says daft things.
Coleen, meanwhile, reinvented herself yet again. She had been written off as a money-grubbing chav by the handbag-wielding howitzers of Fleet Street. Responding to that, she turned on her heels and walloped the lot of them by suddenly appearing in Vogue magazine, looking extraordinarily beautiful.
The overpaid bitch queens of Fleet Street scrabbled around, aghast. They opened and closed their mouths, but they had nothing to say. Coleen had stuffed them. The Vogue interview was by Justine Picardie, a sympathetic and intelligent writer. She didn’t pass off Coleen as the female pope, but she took her as she found her: soft spoken, disarmingly young, ‘very vulnerable’. Justine never used the word, but the one that was implied throughout the piece was that Coleen was nice. Justine noted that Coleen didn’t bring along any security to the Vogue shoot but her ‘immensely likeable mum’, Colette, and her aunt, Tracey, who saw Wayne and Coleen through the nightmare of the prostitutes. In her piece, she quoted Angela Carter, who, in 1967, set out the nature of public taste: ‘a capricious goddess, goddess of mirrors, weather-cocks and barometers, whom the Elizabethans called mutability’. Justine concludes her piece offering Coleen one piece of advice that it would be a shame if she changed too much.
‘Oh, I know,’ says Coleen. ‘If I lose weight from around my face, I don’t look like me. And I do want to be me…’ Her big hazel eyes flick away from her notebook for a moment, and she glances at her reflection, almost furtively, in the mirror opposite. And then, quickly, she smooths back a stray lock of hair, and you can see that she is steadying herself, steeling herself – not just for the Vogue photographer, but for the unseen future, too, whatever it may bring.
The contrast with the usual snotty crap in the tabloids about Coleen was a breath of fresh air.
For the start of the 2005–6 season, Manchester United had brand new owners, the Glazer family, headed by geriatric boss Malcolm Glazer, who his critics say has a striking resemblance to Noddy’s friend Big Ears – he who sits on the red-and-white spotted toadstool in the Enid Blyton books. Forbes magazine puts his wealth at roughly $2.2 billion, and worries about the family’s ‘massive debt load’ which, the rich man’s magazine says, ‘continues to hamper profitability despite rising revenues’. Some followers of the beautiful game have a downer on the Glazers. In the view of the critics, the Florida-based family borrowed heavily to buy their very nice Mancunian cow and are now milking it for every cent they can get. The business is now run by the sons, Malcolm, in his eighties, having suffered from a series of strokes. They’re shrewd and savvy, the Glazers, taking a very, very low profile, leaving all the public talking to Sir Alex Ferguson. Five years on in 2010, the Glazers offered a £500 million bond to help ease their debt repayments. It was doubly oversubscribed.
The Glazers appear to have bought a very nice milking cow indeed. None of the Glazers appear to have taken a salary from Man United, true, but the bond prospectus did report that from July 2006, in five chunks, £10 million was paid in ‘management and administration fees’ to companies affiliated to the Glazers. Under the terms of the 2010 bond, the family is entitled to be paid up to £6 million by Man United in management fees. The prospectus also revealed that each of Malcolm Glazer’s five sons and one daughter personally borrowed about £1.66 million from the club, a total of £10 million.
At least, some say, Rooney scores goals.
His aim at the start of the 2005–6 season was to win the World Cup for England in the summer of 2006 and bag some pots for Manchester United. But he could not shake his demons off. The start of the new season saw a series of goals – he found the back of the net in his first three games, celebrating another great goal against Newcastle by swearing, ‘You fucking beauty’, which caused offence when it was picked up by the superb hearing technology of the TV soundmen – and then a series of shaming performances: yellow cards, a red card and an industrial amount of swearing at rival players, referees, his captain…
The international fixture list featured a game against minnows Northern Ireland. The Irishmen ate the big fish and spat it out, closing the game 1–0 up against the Three Lions.
Rooney disgraced himself in the first half. He was booked for a foul on Keith Gillespie and reacted by kicking the ball in the general direction of another Irishman, David Healy. For this total want of sportsmanship, Rooney picked up a yellow card.
Rooney reacted to this censure by sarcastically applauding the Swiss referee, Massimo Busacca. The England captain, David Beckham, had to step in to prevent the colour of the card going down the light spectrum. Rooney then appeared to start swearing, ‘Fuck off’ at his captain. The People ran their version of the exchange between Roo and Becks.
BECKS: F****** calm it down NOW… get yourself sorted and do the job we need.
ROO: That’s total b*******. I’m doing my f****** best, what more do you want?
Not happy bunnies.
The row carried on at half-time when Roo said of Beckham that he was a ‘flash bastard’. The two men squared up, dangerously, as Becks allegedly told Rooney that he was ‘out of order’.
No apology was forthcoming. Instead, according to Joe Lovejoy, football correspondent of the Sunday Times, Roo told Becks to ‘get stuffed’. The News of the World alleged that the actual language used by Roo by way of reply was somewhat more robust: ‘Fuck off, you cunt.’ Rio Ferdinand, Roo’s friend and Man United teammate, stepped in to calm things down. He too was told to ‘fuck off’.
England assistant coach Steve McClaren entered the fray and he got a ‘fuck off’ too. It was only when Sven arrived to read the Riot Act that the striker recovered his composure. At the start of the second half, Roo and his captain publicly shook hands.
For the rest of the game a meek and docile creature calling itself Wayne Rooney wafted around the pitch, behaved himself and performed like one of the ladies on the perfume counter at Harrods while the England team fell apart and let the Northern Irish walk all over them. ‘You’re not very good,’ the Northern Irish fans sang at the end – and they were being polite.
The more thoughtful sports writers had a pretty compelling explanation for Roo’s almighty sulk in the second half. He hates playing right up front, alone, and likes coming through the defence from the centre – but that role was reserved exclusively for David Beckham. The fundamental problem for England was that it seemed as though the rather wonderful and stable friendship built between Beckham and Eriksson had ossified. The team strategy had been built around Becks from the early Eriksson years. In 2001, it worked beautifully, never better, when England defeated Germany 5–1 at Munich. But as time had rolled by and the 2006 World Cup neared, the captain was no longer the world-beater he had once been. Worse, the strategy showed a lack of mental suppleness on the part of the manager.
Rooney was in some ways a victim of Eriksson’s lack of flexibility. Paul Wilson in The Observer set out the argument in a piece headlined: ‘ENGLAND’S COACH IS UNDER FIRE, BUT RESENTMENT BUILDING AGAINST THEIR OVERINDULGED CAPTAIN IS THE REAL PROBLEM’.
An Arsenal blogger was less polite: ‘England are just a bunch of braindead Sky-famous journeymen, mismanaged by a Swedish con man who can make even Wayne Rooney look bad. Sven is not a motivator or a tactician, he’s a groupie. One day he and Becks will get married and go to live in Tuscany.’
So, atrociously behaved as he was, some people who knew about football agreed that Roo did have something genuine to moan about. And, to be fair to the teenager, Roo appeared to be genuinely contrite about his behaviour. Until he did it again, the following week when Manchester United drew with Villarreal of Spain, 0–0. After a miserable sequence of three quick fouls, he got into bother with the referee, no-nonsense Dane Milton Nielsen. Ian Ladyman in the Daily Mail felt sympathy for Rooney, that he was a little unfortunate to have been booked for a trivial trip on Villarreal captain Quique Álvarez in the sixty-fourth minute. But Rooney compounded the fault by sarcastically applauding Nielsen, almost clipping the official on the nose. Ladyman noted that no referee in Europe would stand for such insolence and, inevitably, Nielsen turned, produced a second yellow card and then flourished the red. Quique Álvarez had appeared to dive under Rooney’s challenge. But Rooney’s reaction to being booked – clapping his hands right in Nielsen’s face – was worse than stupid. Ferguson didn’t even look at Rooney as the striker left the field, which spoke volumes for his feelings.
At this stage, Roo’s career record could be summarised by the fact that he had been booked and/or sent off on almost as many occasions as he had scored goals – thirty-two yellow and two red cards making a total of thirty-four versus thirty-seven goals.
The Sun’s headline writers put the boot in, wholly predictably, trembling before ‘THE DARK SIDE OF THE ROON’, ‘WAYNIAC’ and ‘WAYNE LOONEY’. The paper followed that up with ‘OVER-REACTION MAN: 30CM ROONEY DOLL CAN KICK, PUNCH AND SULK. You’ve heard of Action Man – now here’s Over-Reaction Man, a toy figure of hot-headed Wayne Rooney.’
The strange thing is that despite all the slapping Roo suffered from papers like the News of the World, he still seemed to be happy to talk to them. In December 2005, the paper reports that Rooney told the News of the World there was a feeling they should win the World Cup for Sven. All the players liked him and respected him, he respected them, and, more importantly, he trusted them. Rooney went on to bury the hatchet with his captain, Beckham. He told the paper that David had been a great friend to him, a great captain and a terrific player. He explained that he was very frustrated when so much was made of their argument during the Northern Ireland game. Arguments happen on and off the pitch, he said, but they happen because you try to help one another and because you care: it was blown up out of all proportion. Rooney said that the next day they were on the phone talking, speaking in the dressing room afterwards and everything was sorted out.
What’s striking about this stuff is that he is amiably being quoted in a newspaper that only the other day had alleged that he had told the England captain to ‘fuck off, you cunt’ and a newspaper that he was suing for alleging, falsely as the paper conceded on the steps of the High Court in April 2006, that he had thumped Coleen at a nightclub. The explanation is simple. Plastered over Roo’s chest in the News of the World interview is a T-shirt depicting ‘The Real Thing’ – advertising the world’s number-one carbonated sugary drink which makes fat people fatter and rots teeth. On the inside page, the real deal is spelt out: ‘SPORT OF THE WORLD – WE GET THE INTERVIEW THEY ALL WANTED’ and in much smaller type: ‘In association with Coca-Cola’.
Roo gave the interview to a big paper as part of his sponsorship deal with Coca-Cola. Once you get into bed with a corporate major, they call the shots. If you don’t play along, you don’t get the dosh. It is not impossible that Roo might have preferred not to talk to the News of the World while he was suing it for libel, but that is part of the reality of being a celebrity.
It’s not as nice as it looks.