Where I live in Battersea, there used to be a very cheerful street sweeper. I say ‘used to’ because I haven’t seen him for a while. But that’s not the point. The point is that this street sweeper always seemed to be in a good mood.
Every day you’d see him, trundling around with his cart, sweeping up dog eggs and crumpled Coke cans, scratching dirty wads of used chewing gum off the pavement and piling fag ends into plastic bin bags.
He was always good for a chat and, if you got him going, he’d tell you all about his family and his kids, of which he had several, all living in a house somewhere down Streatham way, I think. A happy man. I have been thinking about him every time I read a newspaper story about Wayne Rooney.
According to the Office of National Statistics, the average street sweeper in Britain earned £17,727 last year. Rooney, hoofing a ball around for Manchester United, earns about £35,000 a day. In other words, it would take my litter-picker a month to earn what Rooney earns in an hour. And yet one goes about whistling, while the other sulks. Go figure.
Now, of course, what I am presenting here is a false argument, even if it is a tempting one. You don’t need to be Charles Dickens to work out that they don’t sell happiness in the shops. There are, I am sure, as many miserable millionaires as there are beaming paupers in this world. It’s like Biggie said: mo’ money, mo’ problems.
All the same, it is impossible to read a word about Wayne Rooney v Manchester United without feeling that Rooney is behaving in a grotesque and quite childish fashion.
It’s not about his simple, gross income. It’s more to do with the dazzling solipsism on display. Rooney seems honestly to believe that he is the best player Manchester United possess and that they somehow don’t or won’t see it.
He seems to think that the club ought to build their team around him and him alone: a player with obvious fitness issues, a history of injuries and a terrible attitude.
It is true that he has scored many, many goals in the past and also that he used to be a hungry player, capable of winning matches on his own. But nine years at Manchester United ought to have been enough for him to realise that this counts for nothing.
As everyone from Paul Ince and Andrei Kanchelskis to David Beckham and Roy Keane will tell you, the past is the past and when United players start to trade off it, they are very soon gone. “Manchester United isn’t about Wayne; Manchester United is about the team, the club,” said David Moyes this week. He has been at the club for 18 days and he knows the score. After nearly a decade at United, Rooney still hasn’t worked it out.
So it seems that Rooney will sooner or later follow all those other illustrious names out of the door. But where? I must confess to being mystified at the prospect of Arsenal bidding for him.
A less Arsenal-ish player I can barely think of. He is 27. His form has probably crested. His fitness is a problem. If he is mercurially talented, he is not exactly the most classically technical player in the world. His wage demands touch a million a month. He isn’t even bloody French. Is this the same Arsenal we’re talking about?
Chelsea I can get my head around, just about. The Chelsea team over the last decade have been full of what we might euphemistically call ‘big characters’. All the same, even if United were to sell to a rival, buying star strikers with big reputations from clubs in the north-west has not exactly been Chelsea’s greatest transfer strategy. Roman Abramovich has made a bid but surely somewhere deep down he will worry that he is circling the Croxteth Torres.
Still, it’s his money to squander and, with Paris St-Germain having just bought Edison Cavani and Monaco Radamel Falcao, there aren’t too many other places Rooney could conceivably go.
Maybe he’ll just turn up in a couple of seasons alongside Andy Carroll at West Ham. Or maybe one day we’ll see him trundling the streets of rubbish with his dust-cart and brush, the richest street sweeper on earth, finally with a smile on his face.
