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The scene was the opulent, marbled concourse at Dubai International Airport, but at that moment we might have been in a dark back alley in a Liverpool ghetto.
One moment, Wayne Rooney was lazing indolently on a seat at the departure gate, his wife Coleen resting her neatly coiffed head on his meaty shoulder; the next they were advancing menacingly towards me.
With his Desperate Dan jaw, impossibly thick neck and veins bulging from his prematurely high forehead, Rooney might have been a boxer striding towards the ring.
Though it was only 6am, Coleen clattered along in glittery high heels, and was wearing thickly painted-on eyebrows. For a moment, they looked quite comical — but I knew better than to laugh.
You see, this was last October, at the height of Rooney’s battle for an exorbitant pay rise from Manchester United, and I had just written a distinctly unflattering article about their self-indulgent, chav-like behaviour while holidaying at a seven-star hotel.
Tellingly, perhaps, it was
Coleen who led the impromptu rant that followed, demanding — in her fish-wife vernacular — to know ‘What gives youse the right to criticise us’, and challenging me to sample the ‘very ordinary’ lives they lead behind the doors of their Cheshire mansion.For good measure, she couldn’t resist mentioning the work they did for charity, and the amount of time she spent caring for her disabled 12-year-old sister, Rosie McLoughlin.
But when I attempted to defend my article, ‘the Big Man’, as Wayne is given to referring to himself in the Manchester United dressing-room, abruptly stepped in.
Maybe he’s bigger than he looks on TV, when he’s being marked by those giant centre-halves; or maybe I’m just shrinking. In any event, I found myself nose to pugilistic nose with the Croxteth bruiser — and what it felt like to be on the other end of one of his raging, foul-mouthed tirades.
‘
Mind what you f***ing say to ’er,’ he began, jerking a thumb in his wife’s direction. Then he paused and reached for the choicest insult he could summon.
‘You’re just a f***ing old paedophile,’ he eventually spat, though as he and Coleen are in their mid-20s, I couldn’t quite work out why.Last Saturday, millions of TV viewers
recoiled in disgust as England’s finest ‘celebrated’ the completion of his match-winning hat-trick with a similar outburst of Neanderthal aggression.
Thrusting his face into the lens of Sky’s pitch-side camera, he let rip with a shocking four-letter rant that left
millions of armchair soccer fans appalled.
They, at least, were able to reach for the off-button. In Dubai, there was no escape for me as the expletives flew and Rooney’s spittle flecked my cheeks.
For a time, I felt sure he was going to hit me, and said as much — warning him that an assault committed in the United Arab Emirates was likely to have more serious consequences than it would at Old Trafford.
But as the red mist subsided, Rooney returned to such senses as he possesses and grudgingly allowed me to explain why I felt justified in criticising a supposedly professional sportsman for lolling around in the world’s most expensive hotel for a week, eating junk food and slurping vodka-and-tonics, while trying to squeeze yet more millions out of his employer at a time when Britain languished in recession.
There followed, as they say, a full and frank exchange of views.
I am as much of a starry-eyed football fan as the next man, and though I had been verbally assailed, I couldn’t resist ending by saying that I had long admired his talent, and hoped, in the second half of his turbulent career, that he would do it full justice.
‘Thanks very much, mate,’ said the man who, just a few moments earlier, had seemed ready to tear my head off.
Then, satisfied that his honour — and that of his wife — had been duly restored, off down the concourse he sauntered.
Down the years, I have seen Rooney lose his temper, irrationally and alarmingly, many times.
He rounded on England fans for booing him and his under- performing colleagues during last summer’s World Cup, failing to understand that — as the people who fund his rock-star lifestyle — this is their inalienable right.
A New York photographer I know claims Rooney once emerged from his Manhattan hotel and challenged him to a street fight.
He routinely treads on and late-tackles opponents, with an expression that suggests he has enjoyed inflicting pain on them.
And not a week goes by without him screaming obscenities at referees and linesmen — in earshot of impressionable young supporters.
Football may be a working-class game in which emotions run high and ‘industrial language’ — to coin the pundits’ favourite euphemism — may well be an unavoidable by-product of these factors.
Certainly, that seems to be the case where Rooney’s manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, is concerned. All too often, his dug-out sounds like a pub in Glasgow’s East End at closing time.
Yet when Rooney is involved, the abuse always seems to be that bit more niggly and personal.
So why, with the world at his gifted feet, does he behave in such a fashion? It is a question I have pondered ever since our close encounter, and I have come to a conclusion.
It is not that Rooney was badly brought up — on the contrary, his family, by all accounts, did an admirable job of raising him in impoverished circumstances on a rough council estate in Liverpool’s Croxteth district. It is not that he is particularly insensitive. According to those who know him, beneath that scowling exterior, he is a bit of a softie.
Rooney is, though, deeply impressionable, immature and selfish. For that he must take the lion’s share of responsibility.
After all, he is, as Coleen told me when I suggested he was being badly advised, a grown man who is capable of making his own decisions. And he keeps making very poor ones, whether it’s sleeping with escort girls or shouting vile abuse at the cameras.
Yet we must also point an accusing finger at every fawning manager and coach, every obsequious, money-grubbing agent who has indulged him since he burst onto the scene as a teenage sensation.
Who cares whether his language offends mothers and small boys, and shapes their behaviour in park kickabouts, if his goals are winning you the league?
Who cares if he behaves as though he is suffering from Tourette’s syndrome when you are raking in a fat percentage of his £250,000-a-week salary?
What those who have watched him over the years point out is the stark contrast between the youthful exuberance and enthusiasm for the game Wayne Rooney showed when he first appeared as a teenager, and the bitter fury of the England superstar today.
It is often said by the Gary Linekers and Alan Hansens who shape public opinion on our national game, that Rooney’s aggression is an essential part of his game, and he would be a lesser player if it were curtailed.
Maybe they are right. But it is a price most decent, respectable fans would gladly pay to be spared the sickening outburst that violated their homes on Saturday evening.
What an article! Have the Mail got it in for Rooney? Nah, of course not, let's drag up something that happened in October
Some of it did make me chuckle though!