The Wayne Rooney story is the shape of things to come

 
8 March 2013

The re-cast horizon of Wayne Rooney represents one of the great personal challenges of modern English football. It is a calling to arms for an individual player that we haven’t seen since George Best first began to submit to the weakness that probably came, along with the sublime gifts, as early as the cradle.

The bad turns delivered by nature to Best and Rooney are no less poignant because of their profound difference.

Best’s tragedy was alcoholism. When the final accounting is made, Rooney’s is likely to lie in the fact that of all the advantages he shared with his brilliant Old Trafford predecessor, including an utterly exceptional set of skills and frequently uncanny vision, one vital asset was missing. It was, of course, the physiology that makes not just superior athletes but great ones.

For quite a while drinking through the night and then producing a training performance outshining far more dedicated team-mates was the least of Best’s achievements.

Once, after such a feat, Sir Bobby Charlton predicted that one day, hopefully in the far distance, vital bits of Best’s body would be displayed in some high-powered medical research laboratory. Charlton shook his head and said: “The boy is unbelievable.”

Rooney’s experience last season, when he reported for work after what might have been considered a routine Best session, was in the sharpest contrast. He was sent home, dropped from the next match and fined a week’s wages.

He also put himself, officially, into the cycle which concluded so disastrously this week when his manager Sir Alex Ferguson decided he had 11 players more suitable to the challenge of facing Real Madrid.

One question is now inevitable. Can Rooney, at almost the precise age that Best was plainly locked into decline, fight back? Can he re-establish the aura that took with him as recently as the 2010 World Cup.

We all know the disaster that ensued but, against the background of this week’s events, it is haunting to recall how many still believed Rooney could announce himself as a major player in football’s greatest tournament. He was widely billed as a potentially decisive factor, someone to be bracketed with the likes of Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta and Cristiano Ronaldo.

When Rooney passed a fitness test on the injury that, in the spring, had interrupted a season of impressively consistent goal-scoring for Manchester United, The Sun announced that Rooney was on the plane for South Africa and so the nation could breathe again. Rooney appeared on the cover of Esquire magazine. He was described, reasonably enough at the time, as one of the last of the natural-born street footballers.

So how is it that he has slipped so far so relatively quickly?

One huge contribution has been the body shape to which Ferguson refers so regularly, along with the hammering emphasis on the need for Rooney to perhaps work harder than most on his levels of fitness.

It is a problem that was recognised early enough but who wanted to dwell on such fears when Rooney was suggesting so strongly that he was indeed the light of the English game, when he came bustling among the ‘Golden Generation’ with a touch and an authority which seemed to belong in another dimension?

It is also seemed for a while that football would remain at the centre of his universe. He had married his boyhood sweetheart, he lived in a mansion and so the rewards for doing something which came naturally could hardly have been more self-evident.

But then, of course, nothing, not even football played in the most encouraging circumstances, is quite so simple. Football, it is said, is indeed a simple game but also one that takes an immense amount of work for it to appear so.

It didn’t look so easy, certainly, in the match against Norwich City which provoked Ferguson’s seismic decision. Rooney scored a fancy goal and contributed to two others but there were moments also when the best of his facility seemed to have deserted him. There was insufficient sharpness, Ferguson concluded, to send him in against the lethal counter-attackers of Madrid.

Now we are consumed by speculation over Rooney’s future. How long will Ferguson be prepared to invest in his expensive and problematic presence? Who will welcome Rooney on anything like his current £250,000-a-week wages now Ferguson has delivered his damning verdict?

Much depends on the player’s ability to not only re-define but also re-shape himself.

In this, an old physical problem is now likely to be compounded by a new one of basic psychology. He has, after all, been told that, at the highest level, he is no longer good enough. It is a devastating verdict on a player who should now be moving into his prime. That at least was a reasonable prediction. Unfortunately, it is one that is now being questioned severely by something as fundamental as natural law.

Nicklaus lets McIlroy off lightly

If Rory McIlroy felt he was in receipt of some stern admonishment from the world’s greatest golfer, he might be a little mollified by the fact that others have felt a much more vigorous lash.

One of them was Jack Nicklaus’s son, Gary, on the last hole of the course his father built in his native Ohio.

Nicklaus was having dinner in the clubhouse with his wife, Barbara, and friends when he peered through the gloaming to see Gary hurl away his putter.

He strode down to the course, thunder on his face, and told his son that he never again wanted to see such behaviour. It had no place in golf, quite apart from shaming the name that had been worked for and achieved only by dint of relentless discipline.

Nicklaus told McIlroy that he had been quite wrong to leave the PGA National course in Florida in mid-round and then offer the feeble excuse of toothache.

The admonishment came more mildly than the one amid the fireflies of an Ohio evening. Let’s hope, for the sake of the already considerable name of McIlroy, it registered just as strongly.

Parisse’s gift

The obligation of England to continue their impressive pursuit of the Grand Slam is not eased by the clearing of Italian captain Sergio Parisse by an appeals panel.

However, there is plenty of reason to believe that, even in the absence of Owen Farrell and Ben Youngs, the momentum created by coach of the year contender Stuart Lancaster will remain unchecked.

The presence of Parisse, which was endangered by an insult to a referee, is simply everybody’s gift. He was said to have failed in his captain’s duties. It was a rare charge against the great man and who would bet against some significant redemption on Sunday?

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