“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Only in football does turning 30 constitute the setting in of old age.
For clarity, Dylan Thomas did not have Wayne Rooney in mind when he sat down to write his most famous work, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” Yet if Rooney has designs on the Jose Mourinho years being anything more than a gentle swansong to his Manchester United career, he would need to rediscover the rage that took him from the tough streets of Croxteth to the pinnacle of his profession.
Former managers David Moyes and Louis van Gaal may have settled for Rooney playing below par; Mourinho will want an on-field lieutenant to mirror his own persona. In short, Rooney needs to be the horrible bastard he was at the start of his career.
Whether he still has it in him or is running on empty after over 700 senior matches is not clear.
Few called Jamie Carragher a fool when last season on Sky Sports (via The Independent) he proffered:
I just think that battering from centre-backs and the pressure that is on him, mentally as well, to play from that age of 16, I think we are looking at a player who is getting to the stage of his career where I don’t think he will be playing at the top level at 34-35.
I just think he’s been playing so long now that maybe it’s 30 on his birth certificate but in terms of games played he’s a 35-year-old player.
In terms of age, there seem to be fewer doubts about Zlatan Ibrahimovic at 34 than there are about Rooney at 30. The Swede’s physique remains immaculate, with a black belt in taekwondo perhaps helping him in terms of both flexibility and agility. Rooney is no kung-fu king, but he likely has one of those t-shirts you get for finishing the biggest burger on the menu.
The arrivals of Ibrahimovic and Henrikh Mkhitaryan, emergence of Marcus Rashford and continued excellence of Anthony Martial threaten to reduce him to the periphery. Jesse Lingard and Juan Mata, whose groan could probably be heard as far away as Chelsea when Mourinho got the United job in May, are also vying for starting spots.
A senior statesman to his younger team-mates these days, perhaps more careful with his words than his passes, Rooney is no longer the firebrand figure of days of yore.
He may need to be that guy again if he’s to avoid being quietly ushered out of the building like the bloke in accounts who didn’t think it weird when his boss told him his new office was in the staff car park.
For the minute, Mourinho is beating the drum for his captain, with the pair having spent much of the summer forming a mutual appreciation society, as relayed by Anthony Jepson of the Manchester Evening News:
He is a player I always wanted to have in my side. Finally, I have him and I have him in the club he loves, the club where he has spent the best years of his career.
And, I think, the best is yet to come from him.
I find him full of motivation, full of joy to work every day, and happy to be here as a leader for the young people. He’s my man too. I can say, at this moment, he is my man. I am really happy.
On paper, it’s easy to see why they might be kindred spirits.
Maybe the United manager sees something of himself in Rooney. Even if Rooney’s decline has been easier to plot on a graph (a steady downward trajectory as opposed to Mourinho’s dramatic crash last season), both are champions with their stock as low as it has been for years. Both have a little of the devil in them. Neither is liked by opposition supporters—and in Rooney’s case not even massively by his own.
Even at his Manchester United testimonial on Wednesday evening against Everton, as polite as it was, there has always been a sense the relationship between club, player and supporters has been as much a marriage of convenience as it has a full-blooded love affair. He has never held the reverence of the Manchester public like the Class of ’92, the Busby Babes, Eric Cantona, Cristiano Ronaldo, Bryan Robson or any of George Best, Sir Bobby Charlton and Denis Law.
Agitating to leave Old Trafford, as Rooney did twice, per Ben Smith of BBC Sport, has never sat well with supporters.
To claim Rooney’s best is yet to come seems fanciful—ludicrous even. But perhaps bringing it out is a challenge Mourinho has set himself. He scored 34 goals in 2009/10 and repeated the feat two seasons later. Between 2006 and 2009, he won three Premier League titles and the Champions League. Roll the clock back even further, and Rooney won the PFA Young Player of the Year in each of his first two seasons at United, 2004/05 and 2005/06.
At Euro 2004, his performance was perhaps the best by a young player at a major international tournament since Pele in the 1958 World Cup. That’s how good Rooney was.
As BBC Sport reported at the time, when Mourinho was looking for a centre-forward for Chelsea in 2013, he wanted Rooney. Football years are like dog years, though. The eight Premier League goals he managed last season made up his lowest return for 13 years. Mourinho may have wanted Rooney forever and a day, but now he’s got him, does he know what to do with him?
Having reinvented himself as a midfielder to mixed results in recent years, Mourinho’s first press conference soon put paid to that experiment. Rooney’s feted long-passing game was dismissed with a snarky retort, with athleticism in his midfielders taking priority over an ability to hit long diagonals that are pretty but not particularly penetrative.
“You can tell me his pass is amazing, yes his pass is amazing, but my pass is also amazing without pressure,” Mourinho said, per Alan Smith of the Guardian. “There are many players with a great pass but to be there and put the ball in the net is the most difficult thing to find, so for me he will be a 9, a 10, a nine and a half but not a 6, not even an 8.”
Square pegs in round holes don’t wash with Mourinho. He won’t be indulged as a quarterback from deep, taking the ball off the toes of his centre-halves.
Mourinho is a players’ manager but as ruthless as he is loyal. As he said, Rooney is his man “at this moment.” It’s like introducing your wife at a dinner party with the caveat, “for now.”
Rooney will take consolation from the fact many had written off John Terry and Frank Lampard at Chelsea before Mourinho had even contemplated it—at least publicly.
If he has a slow start to the season, though, and Mourinho suggests a stroll along Manchester’s famous Ship Canal to talk things through, he’d be well advised to offer instead to meet him in a bright, busy public space with plenty of witnesses bystanders. Just ask Eden Hazard and Bastian Schweinsteiger (or Coronation Street’s Samir Rachid), with the German being forced to train alongside his team-mates’ kids in the club’s creche.
To his critics, and there are many, the light has long since gone out for Rooney. The era-straddling player, who has played 520 competitive matches for Manchester United over 12 years since joining from boyhood club Everton, is to some less a shadow of his former self than no longer capable of casting one at all.
Manchester may be football’s capital city again, but to cling onto Rooney as a totemic figure is to try to get into the Hacienda nightclub every Friday night despite the fact it got turned into flats years ago.
Ibrahimovic was always going to be Mourinho’s focal point. Throughout his career, he has perennially favoured a proper centre-forward whose presence allows other players to play off him—nearly always in his preferred 4-2-3-1 formation.
From Benni McCarthy at FC Porto to Ibrahimovic and Diego Milito at Inter Milan to Didier Drogba and Diego Costa at Chelsea to Karim Benzema at Real Madrid, Mourinho has always stayed true to his belief in specialist players, eschewing the vogue for playing without a natural No. 9. He’s probably wanted to for years, mind, but he doesn’t want to lose face by following Pep Guardiola’s lead.
Mkhitaryan had the best season of his career last term, playing across the attacking-midfield line for Borussia Dortmund, scoring 11 goals and contributing 15 assists in 31 league appearances. He should quickly curry favour with the club’s supporters by injecting pace into a side so slow under Van Gaal that Super Sunday games used to finish on the Monday.
Few would dispute Martial was United’s most productive outfield player last season, with much of his best work coming when he cut inside from the left flank. The Frenchman is more than good enough to cement the role under Mourinho, with his willingness to track back likely to earn him further favour with his new manager.
Rooney could start the season to the right of Ibrahimovic or tucked in just behind centrally, with Mkhitaryan pushed wide. It’s early days, but Rooney and the Swede have dovetailed nicely in pre-season, with the latter telling MUTV the Englishman as his “perfect partner,” per Andrew Dickson of Sky Sports.
The United captain’s main headache could be keeping Rashford kicking his heels on the substitutes’ bench.
When Rooney departed the field in the 52nd minute of his testimonial match to a rousing Old Trafford reception, Rashford replaced him. It was the same substitution former England manager Roy Hodgson made in Nice, France, as the Three Lions were humiliated by Iceland at the European Championship. It will be a change Mourinho will almost certainly utilise again in the first few months of his tenure as Manchester United manager. Could Rooney become a specialist 60-minute player this season?
It would only become an issue when the substitution is Rooney for Rashford. If Rooney passes the baton, he’d never catch his 18-year-old team-mate on the home straight.
For the moment, the grin that envelops Rashford’s face every time he bounds onto the pitch like a puppy chasing a stick betrays the fact the Mancunian boy, and he is a boy at the minute, is happy just to be at the party.
Precociously talented kids have a propensity to grow up quickly, though, as demonstrated by Martial’s reaction to the news Ibrahimovic had been bequeathed his No. 9 shirt. It was as though he had been informed he would be expected to don a chauffeur’s uniform each morning before escorting his new team-mate to training in a gold-gilded carriage.
Mourinho is no fool and will be acutely aware he faces heavy scrutiny over how he handles Rashford’s development. The cases of Kevin De Bruyne and Romelu Lukaku continue to haunt him. The printout handed out at his first press conference defending his record in terms of developing young talent was so one-eyed it was no coincidence many journalists noticed they had unwittingly doodled a picture of Cyclops in the margins of their notepads when they’d stopped laughing.
Many have sneered at the labelling of Rooney as the greatest English player of his generation; few would dispute he has been the most polarizing. Statistically, he is a revelation. Five more goals for Manchester United would ensure he finishes his career as the club’s all-time record goalscorer. He already has the record for England.
Forever being judged as the player he didn’t become rather than the one he did is quite the millstone around his neck. He never did become the white Pele or keep pace with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, with whom he shared equal billing as one of the most exciting players in world football in the mid-2000s.
A nation has time and time again hung its hopes on his broad shoulders. More often than not, when it mattered, he hung his head. A miraculous performance as an 18-year-old at Euro 2004, when he scored four goals in the group stage, proved the exception rather than the rule in terms of international tournaments.
Luck transpired against him, with Rooney picking up cruel injuries when at his pomp before the 2006 and 2010 World Cups. He made the plane for both Germany and South Africa, but he was at his best neither physically nor mentality at both. He missed the first two games of Euro 2012 after picking up a needless red card in qualifying against Montenegro.
As a nation, England has always held an obsession with what Rooney was like as a kid. It’s as though he was the greatest footballer you never saw as opposed to becoming England’s highest scorer—before likely doing the same for Manchester United. You’d think he’d had the career of Sonny Pike.
Having seen him play as a boy is a badge of honour. It is the sporting equivalent of the famous Sex Pistols gig in Manchester in June 1976; if everyone who said they were in attendance that night really did go, the Lesser Free Trade Hall would have had to have had a capacity of around 250,000.
It’s what he was like, not what he is like, that fascinates.
It’s hard not to detect a distinct whiff of wistfulness to Rooney’s comments on Rashford, per Stuart Mathieson of the Manchester Evening News: “I think at the minute Rashford is a young lad and he doesn’t need that much advice from me. Just let him play and enjoy his football.”
He would do well to practice what he preaches. Rooney has always been at his best when he plays the game instinctively. When he thinks too much on the field, you can see the cogs turning. He becomes a jazz musician given sheet music, hamstrung to a debilitating degree when he should always stay true to the great Thelonious Monk’s mantra: “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”
There is no player in world football as good as Rooney who can play so badly.
For a player labelled an idiot savant in his early days, when he was just as likely to kick an opponent into the stand as he was the ball into the goal, it’s perhaps underappreciated how much a student of the game he is. David Winner’s superb interview with him for ESPN FC in 2012 subtly pulled from the player an insight into the mental processes he puts himself through both before and during matches:
What people don’t realize is that it’s obviously a physical game, but after the game, mentally, you’re tired as well.
Your mind has been through so much. There’s so many decisions you have to make through your head.
And then you’re trying to calculate other people’s decisions as well. It’s probably more mentally tiring than physically, to be honest.
Watching Rooney’s three children accompany him onto the field for his testimonialwith variances on “dad” on the back of their United shirts recalled their father’s own mascot moment that marked him out as a one-off.
Charged with gently warming up Everton goalkeeper Neville Southall ahead of a Merseyside derby, a then 11-year-old Rooney repeatedly chipped the Toffees legend at Anfield, to the amusement of the Welshman’s team-mates.
Southall is a man who not only calls a spade a spade but also wouldn’t be averse to using one if the occasion called for it.
“The mascot would usually just go out and warm up Big Nev,” Southall‘s teammate and captain Dave Watson told the Sun. “But Wayne kept chipping him and Nev was getting really pissed off about it. The thing with Nev is that he doesn’t really have a polite way of saying things. So it wasn’t a case of ‘Excuse me son, pack that in’—he just told him to ‘f–king stop that, you little so and so!'”
Moyes once described Rooney as the “last of the classic street footballers,” per Sky Sports, and here he was at 11, taking the mick out of one of the world’s greatest goalkeepers.
Rooney told Winner: “I was quite cheeky, I think, but you need to be as well, because to be a top footballer you need to have a bit of arrogance, a bit of swagger about you.”
You said it, Wayne. It’s time for the swagger to make a comeback. He’s still capable of moments of brilliance, and to his credit, he never hides—even when he’s playing poorly. He always takes responsibility, and that’s a pretty rare quality.
Just six years after chipping Southall, it was David Seaman who was left embarrassed by a now-16-year-old Rooney, scoring his first Premier League goal. Reigning champions Arsenal arrived at Goodison Park in 2002 top of the Premier League and unbeaten in 30 matches.
On as an 80th-minute substitute with the game locked at 1-1, the bull-like Rooney needed just four touches to introduce himself to the world.
First, he plucked the ball out of the sky with a touch so graceful it’s hard to believe it was the same player who can look as though he has mini trampolines strapped to his boots these days. He turned toward Arsenal’s goal with his second.
Ignoring an obvious pass, with his third touch, he edged further forward still. With his fourth, after looking up, he wrapped his foot around the ball with such exquisite technique the head curator of the nearby Tate Liverpool requested to have it put behind glass alongside a Damien Hirst original.
As though time were somehow suspended, Rooney almost became part of the crowd, as much transfixed by the ball’s trajectory as those in the stands. Seaman had no chance as it violently thwacked against the underside of the bar, as all truly great goals do, before nestling in the net.
Cue commentator Clive Tyldesley: “Remember the name: Wayne Rooney!”
Now we all know it, Rooney’s primary job for the forthcoming season is to ensure we don’t forget it.
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