Sometime in 2009 something clicked inside Wayne Rooney’s head and he became a boringly reliable goal-scoring machine. He’d always been exceptional but uneven, brilliant but unruly. In the 2009–10 season he just scored goal after goal after goal. Perhaps the new factor in his life was Fabio Capello, the stone-faced Italian brought in to give England a chance of doing something right in the World Cup. Rooney has said of the Italian that he is ‘like a strict father’. As with Ferguson, Rooney seems to prosper under a strict, no-nonsense boss. Capello’s advice to him was simple – don’t hang about in the centre, go up front and score goals. And that Rooney has proceeded to do. In the best form of his life, he smashed in the only goal of the opening game of the season against Birmingham City thus bumping up his tally at United to ninety-nine. He got his century and one for luck two weeks later when he scored twice in a 5–0 away win at Wigan (not so) Athletic. In November, he scored his first hat-trick for three years in a 4–1 slaughter of Portsmouth. He saw out the Old Year by helping to demolish Hull, winning Man of the Match, and three days later grabbed another goal in United’s repeat 5–0 thrashing of Wigan, this time at home. On fire, in January 2010 Rooney scored all four goals in Manchester United’s 4–0 win over Hull.
Goal after goal after goal: goals against Arsenal, AC Milan and Aston Villa – and that’s just against clubs starting with the letter A. (Did anyone mention Manchester City? It doesn’t begin with A.)
Goals with the boot and goals with the head.
But something else wasn’t happening, too. There were no miserable headlines in the tabloids about Rooney shaming Coleen and texting or bonking X or Y or Z. The temptations are still out there – they always will be for a multimillionaire England player – but New Rooney is not coming out to play. It’s as if his passion for the game, his diehard will to win, is more important to him than messing about with people he shouldn’t be messing about with. In a season when England’s captain, John Terry, was stripped of his post because he had had an affair with lingerie model Vanessa Perroncel, the former partner of his then England teammate Wayne Bridge, and Ashley Cole split up with Cheryl over a battery of embarrassing allegations about him texting naked snaps of himself to Page Three girls, Rooney’s name hasn’t been mentioned on the front pages once. Except for scoring goals.
So what’s caused Old Rooney – the boy who used to frequent Diva’s – to mutate to New Rooney, the squeaky-clean goal machine? Well, his love for Coleen, obviously. A new maturity, both on and off the pitch. Or so he would have us believe.
And everybody go: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Kai Rooney was born in November 2009, a bouncing baby boy. The Mirror won the battle of the headline puns with ‘GA GA GOO ROO’, with The Sun offering ‘IT’S ANOTHER GREAT DRIBBLE FROM…’ and The People ‘ON THE BAWL’. Whatever the headlines, it’s clear from the snaps that Wayne and Coleen love their lad. They have even dressed him up in an Everton strip – a fact that might cause a chin or two to wobble over the gazpacho soup and heart-shaped croutons at Manchester United’s commercial department.
Meanwhile, the long, long battle over who gets to represent Wayne Rooney dragged its way into Court 44 of Manchester’s Mercantile Court. It was mid-February 2010. The rump of Proactive, now part of Formation Group, was suing Wayne and Coleen for not paying its claimed cut – a cool £4.3 million. After the split in October 2008 between Proactive and Paul Stretford, the Rooneys had stuck with the agent. They stopped paying Proactive commissions of up to 20 per cent on multimillion-pound contracts signed by them with outfits like Coca-Cola and Nike. Proactive wanted their share of the dosh – past and future.
The lawyers flabbered out on the court benches like so many pinstriped elephant seals on an Antarctic beach, dreaming of fish or fees or whatever lawyers dream of. Above the judge, the Lion and the Unicorn did their thing. (It always amuses me that the symbols of the Crown and British justice are an animal that doesn’t live here and goes round biting the heads off people and a mythical beast from fairy tales with a boner on its bonce. Spot on.) After a bit a fat man in a big black shirt walked in and sat down next to a solicitor who looked like Ant or Dec with specs. He was Wayne Rooney Senior.
Enter Paul Stretford, heavyish frame but not porky, with an energy about him. He walked past me on the way to the witness box and smiled pleasantly. His voice was soft, his manner a bit nervy, a dogfish out of water. Ian Mill, QC, Proactive’s silk, poked him a bit to little effect, then his silk, Paul Chaisty, QC, asked him about the blackmail trial. Suddenly, Stretford froze, stopped talking and started to – I use this word figuratively – melt. The brief told him to take his time.
Was this bad am-dram? ‘Saucy Worcester – thou too? Forsooth?’ Was the agent hamming it up a bit? Or had his memory been jogged to think back to the worst time in his life? Who knows? He sipped water and recovered his composure.
The lawyers took him through the nuances of the two footballing agreements signed by the Rooneys with Proactive (then run by Stretford) in the summer of 2002, when the star was still contracted to Peter Mac. Then Mill started asking about the late Kevin Dooley, another embarrassing question.
Soon Stretford left the witness stand and his place was taken by Wayne Rooney. In the flesh he’s smaller than you imagine, lithe, muscular, with a boxer’s animality that draws you to him and repels you at the same time. Rooney comes complete with an edge of danger. ‘Mute gimp’ was how one snotty hack described him for his performance in Rio Ferdinand’s World Cup Wind-Ups. The gimp has gone. Instead, Rooney gave the oath in a strong voice and knocked back a series of legal jousts with not swagger but self-confidence. He wasn’t a natural in court – who is? – but he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind and to refine his evidence when needed. He is no Cicero, but he’s better than Beckham.
As he gave his evidence, some of the dealings of Planet Rooney came out. Sir Alex Ferguson restricts his sponsorships to five, lest they get in the way of his day job. He was only doing four out of five – Nike (£1 million a year, according to court papers filed in 2009), Coca-Cola (£600,000 over four years), EA Sports computer games (£200,000 a year) and Tiger beer. ‘To be honest, I’m probably doing the max,’ Rooney said in thickish Scouse. ‘My wife has just had a baby. I need time to spend with them and I need time with my family as well. It could change but not at the minute.’
Rooney clearly sided with Stretford in his dispute with Proactive, but didn’t seem to grip the key point at the heart of Proactive’s case – that if the sponsorship deals were signed with Proactive, then they get the commissions, not the man who happened to be holding the pen at the time of the signing ceremony, Stretford.
At one point, the two briefs and the judge needed to know how much Rooney earned from Man United. Rooney fished out a piece of paper from his pocket and folded it and it was passed around the three legal bods.
In the lift on the way down to lunch I said: ‘I wonder what was written on the paper. More than I get…’
‘More than this whole lift gets…’ said someone else.
‘More than this entire building…’ said a third, which was probably over the top because we are talking about a mass of lawyers’ earnings, after all.
Next up was Jeanette Rooney, who looks hugely better after she has shed stones in weight. She’s the feisty one in the family: feisty, ferocious and fun, blonde hair, eyes of black granite. One of the briefs started yakking on about Peter Mac and she closed that down: ‘He was a schoolboy agent.’
It is fair to say it hasn’t been all plain sailing with Paul Stretford, the agent they ended up with – the Rooneys’ meeting with Dooley, the crooked lawyer about to get struck off for his relationship with ‘Long John’ Silver, the eight-year contract (only six years too long), the brushes with the gangster, the collapse of the blackmail trial because the Crown couldn’t rely on the agent’s word, the fine and the ban from the FA and, in the spring of 2010, a civil case in which details of the Rooneys’ finances were outed in open court for the world and his wife to hear. The Rooneys will not spare their financial blushes if millions of pounds are at stake. Is Paul Stretford worth all the baggage he comes with? That’s a question that only Wayne and Coleen can answer. After the split with Proactive, Stretford co-founded Triple S Sports & Entertainment Group. According to Ian Monk’s PR agency, Triple S’s clients include Wayne and Coleen.
The judge, Brendan Hegarty QC, announced at close of play that he would kick his decision into touch until after the World Cup of 2010.
Fancy the ladies in leopard skin, do ya? If so, top totty in a big-cat-spotted beach gown graced the cover of Hello! magazine in April 2010, bearing the legend: ‘OPENING THE DOORS TO THEIR STUNNING NEW HOME IN BARBADOS COLEEN ROONEY INVITES US INTO HER AND WAYNE’S LIFE – OUR BEAUTIFUL BABY BOY – MY ROMANTIC HUSBAND – WHY I’M PROUD OF MY CURVES.’
Coleen, sporting ear-rings the size of industrial egg-whisks and the aforesaid spotted number, was snapped dangling her pins in the pool at the couple’s new pad in the West Indies. (Readers who have been paying close attention will have spotted that the Rooneys, after the Wedding of the Millennium, dumped Richard Desmond’s OK! magazine for Hello!) And that’s just for starters. There’s acres of snaps of Coleen on her own in her pad by the Caribbean, her eyes smoking at the camera in a bedroom wearing a fireman’s yellow smock with buttons down the middle; slinky Coleen wrestling with a curtain, one high heel angled to show off her ankle at its best, revealing enough leg to cause a riot in, er, north Tehran; Coleen in the kitchen looking foxy juggling oranges in a dress that looks like a fist fight in a hydrangea bush. (That’s someone else’s joke, but I love it.)
The birth of a new baby, the romantic soft spots of a man, the curves of a woman’s body – these are private matters, some say. Then they should read Coleen’s interview with Hello! It’s grimly saccharine stuff, self-intruding and intrusive.
That’s enough of that.
HELLO!: Did you speak to Toni Terry or Cheryl Cole about their marriage problems?
COLEEN: I’ve met Toni many times before when we’ve been away with England and she’s an absolutely lovely girl … Cheryl is just so nice and doing so well.
On her and Wayne: ‘what’s nice is that we have a balanced relationship.’ What’s nice about Stalin and Yezhov is they had a balanced relationship. All right, all right, I am not for a moment comparing Wayne and Coleen with Stalin and fellow mass-murderer and NKVD chum Nikolai Yezhov. But the two Soviet killers were once pictured happy as Larry at the opening of the White Sea Canal – and when Yezhov was butchered on Stalin’s orders in 1940, he was literally airbrushed out of the picture.
There’s no serious harm in Coleen’s interview with Hello! and if you like reading stuff like this, then good luck to you. But the images and the words of ‘COLEEN ROONEY INVITES US INTO HER AND WAYNE’S LIFE’ are so airbrushed they are very far from reflecting real life.
What seems to me objectionable is the way that lawyers for the Rooneys bang on about the couple’s right to privacy and yet the couple are happy to take a heavily airbrushed version of their lives to market. Celebrities are only human and Wayne and Coleen are not bad people, far from it. But having your cake and eating it is not a human right, at least, not yet.
It’s called being greedy. And, in the end, the greedy tend to get their comeuppance.
On the pitch in the spring of 2010 as the season wound to a close, Ferguson’s policy of playing Rooney virtually non-stop secured a great, goal-scoring run for the Crocky cyclone. Wayne was on such terrific form that, as an England fan, one prayed that he would not be felled by some stupid tackle and go clattering down – a knee, an ankle, a leg. England fans were already moaning that Sir Alex Ferguson was playing him every match, to which the obvious retort was that watching Rooney boil in frustration on the sidelines was the best possible way of igniting his anger – and we didn’t want that at all.
In the end it was the ankle, while playing Bayern Munich in the Champions League Quarter Final first leg at the Allianz Arena. In the last breath of the game, Rooney slumped to the ground, his ankle twisted. He missed the crucial Premier League match with Chelsea. United, without their talisman, lost to the nancy boys from the King’s Road – not my description but that of the Stretford End.
Ferguson, ever wily, played Rooney’s injury big. He wouldn’t be fit for the return match with Bayern Munich.
So it was with some surprise that, standing in the Stretford End, surrounded by a sea of green and gold scarves – two of the loan-rich Glazers popped in, but seemed to be very quiet about it – I saw Wayne Rooney step out onto Old Trafford. The big man was back, and for forty-odd minutes, he played beautifully, electrifying the entire game, creating play, making havoc with Bayern’s defence, so that United were 3–0 up. It couldn’t last and it didn’t. A couple of tackles, a twist and turn too fast, and Wayne was limping, desperate to do his bit, but physically, at the end of a long season, not up to it. The Germans clawed back one and it was the end of the first half.
But such was Ferguson’s faith in Rooney that there he was back again for the start of the second half, while fitter, lesser strikers strained at the leash. Not a sensible gamble. Rooney stuttered and limped some more. Rafael da Silva got a red card, and down to ten men it was miserable to watch. Rooney was taken off and then the Germans took the rump of Manchester United apart. Without Rooney, in that game, Manchester United looked like Tranmere on a bad day. Eventually, Arjen Robben banged in a cracking volley and it was auf Wiedersehen Europe, United going down 4–4 on aggregate on away goals.
With Ronaldo gone and Rooney injured, the Red Devils didn’t look very scary.