Fergie's pragmatic approach ends Wayne Rooney saga
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Wayne Rooney reported sick at Manchester United's training ground. Photograph: Tim Hales/AP
He has not scored in 18 hours of football and Wayne Rooney will have to wait at least another 90 minutes if he is unable to overcome a stomach bug to play at Fulham today.
The Manchester United striker, who last scored in March and endured a woeful World Cup with England, reported sick at United's training ground yesterday and did not travel with the team to London. The club's medical staff ordered Rooney home, fearing he could pass on the infection to the staff and players.
It is unlikely that Rooney will have recovered sufficiently to join his team-mates today, which will mean a first start for new signing Javier Hernández, who was outstanding in pre-season and replaced Rooney after 63 minutes of United's opening 3-0 win against Newcastle United at Old Trafford.
Rooney's absence will also be a blow for England, with Fabio Capello desperate to see if Sir Alex Ferguson's appraisal that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the player is correct.
England start their European Championship qualifying campaign against Bulgaria at Wembley a week on Friday.
Rooney found the net 34 times for United last season before his touch deserted him – his last goal came five months ago in the Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich.
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Whatever the reasoning, Sir Alex Ferguson was right to allow Wayne Rooney a short break from the game. Photograph: Paul McFegan/Sportsphoto
The hardest-working person in the country at the moment must be Robbie Savage's agent. Closely followed by Savage himself, one might conclude, what with the necessity of showering quickly after Derby County games to take part in 606 phone-ins, a book just out, a newspaper column to pen and an attempt to set a new world record by popping up in every single punditry chair the television industry has to offer. Good luck with the Queen's award for industry, but it is still possible to suppose the agent is doing all the donkey work.
Savage doesn't actually say much into any of his microphones, after all, including the ones that capture his thoughts for the printed page, and given his present ratio of ubiquity to insight it would not be difficult to imagine commissioning editors beginning to think that less might be more. So fair play to whoever is backing the Savage campaign for total media domination, banging on all the doors and making all the bookings. Only a cynic would suggest the need to grasp every available opportunity all at once betrays a suspicion that popularity may turn out to be short-lived.
All these thoughts and some even less charitable ones occurred when ESPN brought together Savage and Kevin Keegan to discuss the Bolton Wanderers-Manchester United game with Ray Stubbs, and I must admit my first reaction was to reach for the remote. Yet perhaps ESPN knows something about chemistry that I don't, because the company appeared to bring the best out of Keegan.
Normally a fairly neutral panel performer who usually manages to give the impression he would rather be doing something else, Keegan came up with an opinion on Wayne Rooney's tribulations that was not only forceful enough to make the following day's back pages but could end up marking a watershed in the United striker's career. (For the benefit of the half dozen or so people who don't know this already, Keegan said Rooney's confidence is shot, which is obvious, and that he could not turn off the celebrity tap when it suited him. Sell your wedding pictures to magazines, Keegan warned, and you put your family life into the public domain.)
Perhaps it did not require Sherlock Holmes to make that connection, yet with a vivid awareness from his own playing days of the pressures a high-profile persona can bring, Keegan put his finger on an issue that will undoubtedly have been troubling Sir Alex Ferguson. Rooney is both a footballer and a celebrity, as most leading internationals are. But so was George Best, once, before the celebrity aspect of his life began to complicate his hitherto straightforward relationship with his core activity.
David Beckham is arguably a bigger celebrity than he is a footballer at present, though it was not always so, and the transitional period began at Old Trafford, even if he was long gone by 2007, when Ferguson observed: "He is such a big celebrity now that football is only a small part of his life." And of course there was Cristiano Ronaldo, perhaps the best example of a mutually successful relationship between football and celebrity, unless you happened to be the club that wanted to hang on to him. Ronaldo outgrew United, and not many modern players can say that.
Rooney is nothing like Ronaldo or Beckham, not even that much like Best, yet what the events of the last few weeks have shown is that he is not necessarily going to turn out like Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs or Gary Neville either. While it appeared in the first couple of years after his transfer from Everton that only injuries could possibly stop him from becoming the greatest footballer of his generation, now a few more complications have raised their head, and he is still only 24. That is not automatically a comfort to the club that first experienced problems with Best at the age of 25 and lost him completely when he was 27, though for purposes of comparison, Beckham was 23 when he returned in personal turmoil from the 1998 World Cup and received an arm round the shoulder from his manager. "Come back to Manchester and the people who love you," Ferguson said, while elsewhere in the country Beckham was experiencing hostility and abuse.
The big difference between Beckham at 23 and Rooney at 24 is that the former had only put himself on the map a couple of years earlier, with his remarkable goal against Wimbledon embellishing his first full season. Beckham had been loaned to Preston North End as a relative unknown in 1994-95, the World Cup in France was his first, and in 1998 United's treble was still in the future. Rooney at just over a year older has played in two World Cups, lit up the European Championships in Portugal six years ago and won a Champions League medal at the age of 22. Like Best, who also won the European Cup at that age, he already seems to have a full career behind him, when in reality he could be looking at another 10 years at the top.
There is no need to make gloomy forecasts about history repeating itself or Rooney being unable to recover from a dud World Cup and being upstaged by Dimitar Berbatov and then Michael Owen. All that has actually happened is that he has allowed other aspects of his life to interfere with his talent for playing football, discovering in the process that natural ability is not something that can be taken for granted. That doesn't happen to every footballer, even if United have seen off-field issues sideline careers before.
Ferguson possibly never imagined it would happen to someone as uncomplicated and enthusiastic as Rooney but, as Keegan rightly pointed out, it just has. Nothing from here on can be as certain as it once was, and Rooney's entire career to date has been based on the certainty that he would make an exceptional footballer. What follows is terra incognita. Having worked out that Rooney was not going to play through his problems, much less be inspired by adversity, United were wise to give him some time to rest up and prepare.
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Originally posted by Rooney9:
Wayne Rooney reported sick at Manchester United's training ground. Photograph: Tim Hales/AP
He has not scored in 18 hours of football and Wayne Rooney will have to wait at least another 90 minutes if he is unable to overcome a stomach bug to play at Fulham today.
The Manchester United striker, who last scored in March and endured a woeful World Cup with England, reported sick at United's training ground yesterday and did not travel with the team to London. The club's medical staff ordered Rooney home, fearing he could pass on the infection to the staff and players.
It is unlikely that Rooney will have recovered sufficiently to join his team-mates today, which will mean a first start for new signing Javier Hernández, who was outstanding in pre-season and replaced Rooney after 63 minutes of United's opening 3-0 win against Newcastle United at Old Trafford.
Rooney's absence will also be a blow for England, with Fabio Capello desperate to see if Sir Alex Ferguson's appraisal that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the player is correct.
England start their European Championship qualifying campaign against Bulgaria at Wembley a week on Friday.
Rooney found the net 34 times for United last season before his touch deserted him – his last goal came five months ago in the Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich.
I love Man United
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Sir Alex Ferguson, right, has persuaded Wayne Rooney to stay at Manchester United, ending a week of uncertainty about the striker's future. Photograph: John Peters/Man Utd via Getty Images
It has been a week of breathtaking cynicism and opportunism seldom exceeded when it comes to exposing so much that is wrong and morally bankrupt about modern-day footballers and a grubby industry where the rich are so obsessed with getting richer it can feel like money is how we must now keep the score.
Never again will anyone speak of Rooney, that old street footballer, being a throwback to those days when we would like to believe there was a bit more nobility about the men we wanted as our heroes and the most important words in the lexicon of the sport were not "pound", "thanks" and "cheerio".
Football has become a business where young men with fluffy chins can barely spell their own name but sure as hell do a good job when it comes to adding up – and there is a depressing inevitability that we will soon be subjected to the sight of Rooney putting the badge on his shirt to his lips, as if all the posturing and strategic manoeuvring and the cha-ching of men who like to chew gum as they swig their champagne has been a trick of our collective imaginations.
A part of you admires his nerve. It takes a special form of self-interest, after all, not only to wangle an extra God-knows-how-many millions out of England's biggest club over the space of his new five-year contract but to have done so at a juncture in Rooney's life when public opinion of him had dropped to a point where it was not just low but subterranean in some places.
And yet it has also been a week in which there has been at least one glowing reminder of the pleasures and the pride that should accompany being employed by Manchester United and the impression left is this: whatever you think of Sir Alex Ferguson, his hypocrisies, the frequent mistruths and the even more frequent rages, how can anyone not have at least begrudging admiration for that shrewd, political mind, still as sharp as a tack as we approach the beginning of his 70th year?
A preconception has built that Ferguson will send any player who challenges his authority to the guillotine. It is one he likes to cultivate himself. "If footballers think they are above the manager's control," he once said, "there is only one word to say: 'Goodbye.'" And there is a decent XI – Jim Leighton, Jaap Stam, Paul McGrath, Gabriel Heinze, Norman Whiteside, David Beckham, Paul Ince, Neil Webb, Roy Keane, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Dwight Yorke – who could testify to this ruthlessness.
But Ferguson is a pragmatist. He did not move on Peter Schmeichel after losing a 3-0 lead at Liverpool in January 1994, when a screaming match came close to turning into a punch-up. Paul Scholes was not transfer-listed in 2001 when he turned up his nose at playing with the kids in a Carling Cup tie against Arsenal and refused to board the bus. Whiteside and McGrath were ushered out for their apparent belief that beer and football were virtually synonymous but Ferguson kept Bryan Robson even though the great warrior had many of his own lost nights.
This was what compelled Ferguson to seek out Rooney at the club's training ground at 10am yesterday: the knowledge that losing him would cause too much damage to the team.
It was the morning after the night in which manager and player had never seemed further apart. Paul Simon once sang there are 50 ways to leave your lover and Rooney's idea was the worst kind of infidelity, namely to go off with their worst enemy, Manchester City. To twist Ferguson's analogy, he had seen a cow in a different field and, well, he wanted to milk its udders. But Ferguson, however much he felt personally let down, never lost sight of the fact that Rooney is the talisman of this team and, still only 24,, at 24, the great hope.
The manager set to work, reminding him of the club's history, the trophies he has already won, the size of the place, the traditions, the romance and what it means to put on that red shirt. He told Rooney he was making the most calamitous mistake of his professional life contemplating a move to Eastlands. He asked him whether it was worth becoming a pariah, to be remembered for all the wrong reasons. He asked him to put a price on the prestige of running out at Old Trafford – before answering the question himself and saying there was none.
As we have seen over the past five days, there is nobody better when it comes to long, impassioned homilies. Rooney listened, took it in and rang his agent, Paul Stretford, on the drive home to suggest they arranged another meeting, one final set of make-or-break talks.
A conference call was set up with the club's chief executive, David Gill, and two of Malcolm Glazer's sons, Joel and Bryan. Ferguson had done his bit. He had seen in Rooney's eyes that his words had got through but he knew there was still the issue of money to be resolved. Then, finally, at some point last night he took a call from Gill. The first two words were: "Good news."
Whether it is a cause for celebration is another matter but Ferguson was entitled to blow out his cheeks and chuckle as he sat down for an interview with MUTV today. Rooney, he said, had apologised to him and the other players, and would do likewise to the supporters. Rooney was then interviewed, but there was no apology. Somehow it symbolised a grubby week.