[SteveJ]

Well done for turning up? Is this what it has come to for the Manchester United and England captain?

http://www.football365.com/news/mediawatch-jamie-vardy-xabi-alonso

 

[RedTiger]

Exactly how I feel. He's currently the butt of everyone's jokes. His confidence must have fallen through the floor.

Exactly how I feel as well.

 

[Vashu]

Southgate making a power play for the job. It's a simple decision in terms of football, but a difficult one in terms of politics. If England win convincingly, Southgate will get the job full time and Rooney will more than likely never play for England again.

But even in political terms isn't it presented for Southgate as a managerial tap-in? The media have turned against Rooney, he's been benched at his club, his small wish has been granted by being played in midfield against Malta ending with disappointing result with sections of crowd personally booing him . And there's his form that screams of the need to drop him. It looks like a very logical decision that also plays to the crowd.

 

[Mciahel Goodman]

But even in political terms isn't it presented for Southgate as a managerial tap-in? The media have turned against Rooney, he's been benched at his club, his small wish has been granted by being played in midfield against Malta ending with disappointing result with sections of crowd personally booing him . And there's his form that screams of the need to drop him. It looks like a very logical decision that also plays to the crowd.

Yeah, I agree, but it's still a symbolic decision -- one that a lot of managers have failed to make. Southgate has it the easiest, of course. He won't be criticized at all for this decision because Rooney's form is at an all time low and the media have no stake in him any more. I still think he's making a point of doing it for other reasons as well, though (I think he wants the job, and this is the biggest statement he can make -- even if it makes sense and isn't controversial in pure footballing terms).

 

[Tonjo]

I think United can solve the right back problem by playing Wayne Rooney there. Can save the money buying Colemen.
Valencia can take on the defender but his crossing is poor. Not many of them find the strikers.
Rooney still has gas in his tank and is robust enough to play on the right back position.
His crossing is as good as Dalvey Blind. With their crosses, United will have more chances created.

 

[Vashu]

Yeah, I agree, but it's still a symbolic decision -- one that a lot of managers have failed to make. Southgate has it the easiest, of course. He won't be criticized at all for this decision because Rooney's form is at an all time low and the media have no stake in him any more. I still think he's making a point of doing it for other reasons as well, though (I think he wants the job, and this is the biggest statement he can make -- even if it makes sense and isn't controversial in pure footballing terms).

Indeed. With such an easy group, as England find themselves in, the decision to drop Rooney might be the biggest event of their World Cup qualifications and the making of the new manager.

 

[Rockets Redglare]

I think United can solve the right back problem by playing Wayne Rooney there. Can save the money buying Colemen.
Valencia can take on the defender but his crossing is poor. Not many of them find the strikers.
Rooney still has gas in his tank and is robust enough to play on the right back position.
His crossing is as good as Dalvey Blind. With their crosses, United will have more chances created.

I hope to Christ this is a joke.

 

[Pexbo]

I think United can solve the right back problem by playing Wayne Rooney there. Can save the money buying Colemen.
Valencia can take on the defender but his crossing is poor. Not many of them find the strikers.
Rooney still has gas in his tank and is robust enough to play on the right back position.
His crossing is as good as Dalvey Blind. With their crosses, United will have more chances created.

Give it up, Wayne.

 

[Borden]

I think United can solve the right back problem by playing Wayne Rooney there. Can save the money buying Colemen.
Valencia can take on the defender but his crossing is poor. Not many of them find the strikers.
Rooney still has gas in his tank and is robust enough to play on the right back position.
His crossing is as good as Dalvey Blind. With their crosses, United will have more chances created.

Great post

 

[balaks]

I think United can solve the right back problem by playing Wayne Rooney there. Can save the money buying Colemen.
Valencia can take on the defender but his crossing is poor. Not many of them find the strikers.
Rooney still has gas in his tank and is robust enough to play on the right back position.
His crossing is as good as Dalvey Blind. With their crosses, United will have more chances created.

That would be a fantastic idea, just the slight problem that modern right backs are expected to provide width to their team and an attacking threat by bombing up and down the pitch and as a result probably require more stamina and pace than any other position nowadays (apart from left back obviously).

 

[SteveJ]

Boo Rooney, boo the system, boo injustice

When England fans booed Wayne Rooney’s name as the teams were announced on Saturday afternoon, it was before he’d even kicked a ball. They booed him again later.

But this isn’t another piece about Wayne’s form, his stats, head merkin, or anything else to do with Mr R playing football. Not really. It’s all gone beyond that now.

Why was he booed? One of the reasons is that Rooney is both literally and emblematically an example of how many people see life is in 2016; a life that is unfair and unjust, a life where a tiny, undeserving rich elite seem utterly insulated against failure and pay no consequences for doing a bad job, a life where those people can underperform for weeks, months and years, still be massively over-rewarded and still have respect demanded for them by the various lackeys who do their bidding. Meanwhile, others have to queue to be searched before leaving work, in case they’ve stolen some of that absolute tat that the company makes, in order to try and make up for the rock-bottom wages they’re paid. That dichotomy lives in our hearts in 2016.

So, boo.

The discontent with Rooney is born out of the mismatch between status, wealth and performance. Wayne seems lovely. But he’s a rich man in a poor man’s shirt. To watch someone doing what he does for that money, while 60% of the country have under £1000 in the bank. The People’s Game? And you want us to play nice? Nah. No thanks.

So, boo.

In a land where nearly a million people on zero hour contracts have to hang around every day hoping for a phone call so that they can go to do a job for a pittance of pay, a million-a-month failing footballer just hoovers it in and is defended for doing so time and time and time again by Proper Football Men, people like Glenn Hoddle, and a whole raft of others who seem blinded by the financial white light emanating from Rooney.

So, boo.

Time and again the Proper Football Men have tried to tell us black was white in order to excuse Rooney’s poor performances. They have tried to mitigate his every disaster and frankly, the paying public is sick of it, in the same way they’re sick of being told we have to suffer economic austerity, by those who will never do so. So the booing is an act of rebellion, not merely against the footballer, but against the status quo and the culture within which he exists. A culture where greed is good and anyone who objects to it is dismissed as merely jealous, as though we can’t see a bigger picture. As though we have no humanity.

So, boo.

But also rolled into Rooney’s ball of sour wax is how statistics have been used and abused to ‘prove’ his worth to club and country. This echoes the commonplace experience of hearing a bullsh*t politician who twists figures to prove how brilliant everything is, despite the evidence of life before our own eyes. The politician who tells us how much better off we are now, even though there’s a food bank on every corner. And the feeling that we’re all being shafted by a mixture of the stupid and the mendacious, and that everything we strove to build that was open, inclusive and positive is being torn down my fools and villains, is evidenced all around.

So, boo.

Rooney, and top-flight football more widely, is presented to us as both the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun. But it’s not true. Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true, or is it something worse? The vaunting of Wayne embodies the lie. A conceit devised to enrich a tiny elite, but blind and impoverish the rest of us. This is the world we live in.

Is it fair on Rooney to use him as an emblem for an immoral economic system and set of cultural values which dehumanise? No. But then being a million-a-month footballer who often cannot control a football with two touches could be said to be a far worse shade of unfair. And let’s face it, he can at least afford the therapy to deal with the emotional trauma, whilst one in four struggle with mental illness, untreated by a failing NHS (not supported because of tax avoidance schemes signed up to by, amongst others, footballers) but brought on by the stress of poverty and the pressures of a society which is increasingly punishes you for being weak.

So, boo.

Scratch the surface, take away the hypnosis of winning games, and there is a fundamental infuriation and increasing bewilderment as to why footballers are so well-remunerated despite poor performances. It feels like an insult to us, who after all, in one way or another, rightly or wrongly, are responsible for this stupid wealth. Those who defend it will tell you that you can’t be brilliant all the time, and of course that’s true, but these stratospheric wages seem based on the fact that you can be. There is even more money available in the form of win bonuses, but no penalty for not being any good.

It’s also true that we’re all consumers now, as opposed to fans. We’re customers of the FA. The triumph of the politics of individualism, which champions the consumer as the holy woman or man of society, is so all-embracing and innate that anyone questioning whether you should be booing or not will say “I’ve paid my money, I’ll do what I want” and in that, they have drank deep from the philosophy which said there was no such thing as society. We are all islands unto ourselves. But then, when the super-rich, like our footballers, are busy protecting their vast income in tax avoidance schemes, tax which would improve the collective welfare, at no real cost to themselves, who can blame any of us from feeling this is where we are now? Too much is never enough for the rich, while too little has to be enough for the rest of us.

So, booooooooooo!

See, that’s the trouble with international breaks, the hypnosis wears off and it gives you time to think. And when you do that, you end up realising that we want to tear the whole bloody thing down and start talkin’ ’bout a revolution. You don’t have to be Walt Whitman or Bruce Springsteen to believe that, in the end, no-one wins, unless everyone wins.

So, boo.

It’s not wrong, it’s all too right.
------------------------------
John Nicholson

...

 

[K2K]

His wife going on twitter is not going to make it any easier for him. There will be some right idiots on there. Even though I think he is done, I almost want him to come into the game tomorrow and get the winner. It is all starting to get nasty and seriously out of hand.

It's not winners he needs. It's perfomances.

He doesn't have many left in him

 

[podurban2]

This guy really wants to fuel the mob mentality. So, booooo, boo, boo, boo!!!

 

[RedTiger]

Apparently I am a joker for suggesting Shearer, amongst others was better than Rooney. Frightening really.

It's just how opinions change over time unfortunately, I agree with you though, if we signed him from Southampton and not Blackburn then he'd be our all time top scorer now and we'd be the ones singing "5 times".

 

[Ash_G]

More like years.

Some of us here saw the decline years ago.It might be the general consensus now but saying Rooney was in decline back then generally made you a pariah.

The funny thing is that Paul Scholes was one of the first to actually admit that Rooney was in terminal decline. He was right. But then he suddenly changed his tune even though the perfomances hardly got any better.

If anything it's the media backing for such a long time that made what was inevitable years ago generally acknowledged only now. His poor first touch,erratic passing and poor positioning whereby he occupies others spaces in the field can be seen as far as 2013.

What's sad is that if this had happened 3 or so seasons ago maybe he could have changed/upped his game and now he could be a much more effective player for it. The free ride from manager and press alike really shielded him to the point where I think his own expectations of what he should be contributing have fallen as well which is the worst part. I don't doubt he's trying in all his matches but there's just such a large expectation gap.

 

[DomesticTadpole]

That wouldn't help though, it would just paper over the cracks and lead to worse in the future. He needs to accept he is now a squad player at best or move on.

Simple stuff really.

You are right. Just starting to feel a bit sorry for him.

 

[sportsczy]

Nobody is going to pay Rooney his Man Utd wages now though. Doesn't his contract run until 2020?

 

[Kag]

Southgate really going for the big job then, it seems.

There's a tendency to make this a bigger issue than it is. The United and England captain is no longer good enough to start games for either side and he's being dropped as a result of that. It shouldn't inspire such sympathy.

 

[Bojan11]

Don't feel sorry for him. Has been shite for three years and been picking up £300k a week along the way thanks to Moyes.

His wife is delusional. He's been the most protected player in the media. Every excuse has been made for him. Bad manager, bad teammates, wrong position and many other excuses.

 

[Marcelinho87]

I noticed that Clive Tyldesley was really having a go at him during the game against Malta. Whatever media support/protection that some on here think he had (definitely amongst some of our own ex-players), seems to have evaporated.

He had full immunity within the press but we have hired somebody who is just as powerful in that dept. and it has bit him on the arse.

 

[DomesticTadpole]

Don't feel sorry for him. Has been shite for three years and been picking up £300k a week along the way thanks to Moyes.

His wife is delusional. He's been the most protected player in the media. Every excuse has been made for him. Bad manager, bad teammates, wrong position and many other excuses.

You have to realise that none of it is Wayne's fault according to his friends and family. Not all of it is his fault either, but some of it is.

 

[prath92]

Nobody is going to pay Rooney his Man Utd wages now though. Doesn't his contract run until 2020?

He will easily get that in USA

 

[liamp]

He will easily get that in USA

Kaka's the highest paid player in MLS and he makes 94k per week.

 

[RedTiger]

Prior to his first career threatening injury Shearer could do all of that (at Blackburn) only player to date to score 30+ league goals 3 consecutive seasons, let alone do it once (one of only about 7/8).

While playing with Batty, Wilcox and Sherwood.

 

[K2K]

Fair play to him doing a presser while knowing he's dropped.

Can't be easy for him - but, if we're honest, it could be the motivation for him to really address his game and focus.

I just get the feeling that Rooney's still got a bit of fight in him.

Maybe it's just hope, or nostalgia, I dunno, but if he really focused on fixing his game I think Rooney could shift back into being a useful squad member.

He might just surprise everyone. It'll be very interesting to see how he comes across in this presser.

He's done.

I think just like Tiger in golf ,the final bell has been tolled.
He now just needs to bow out with grace.

 

[lem8sh]

Nobody is going to pay Rooney his Man Utd wages now though. Doesn't his contract run until 2020?

Rooney has £42million of wages left on his United contract.

 

[prath92]

Kaka's the highest paid player in MLS and he makes 94k per week.

That can't be true. Lampard gets a guaranteed salary of 6m and he gets less than Gerrard does. That alone comes upto roughly 120k for a midfielder.

 

[Vashu]

He had full immunity within the press but we have hired somebody who is just as powerful in that dept. and it has bit him on the arse.

You're telling me Michael Clayton is working for us behind the scenes against Rooney?

 

[Marcelinho87]

I think United can solve the right back problem by playing Wayne Rooney there. Can save the money buying Colemen.
Valencia can take on the defender but his crossing is poor. Not many of them find the strikers.
Rooney still has gas in his tank and is robust enough to play on the right back position.
His crossing is as good as Dalvey Blind. With their crosses, United will have more chances created.

The hell? Joke?

Rooney and crossing the past few games - LOL.

 

[Treble]

I wouldn't be surprised if the club is somehow related to the new media politics towards Rooney. He was shit last season too, maybe even worse in the first half, but was protected by the club. Maybe it's curtains for him in the summer. His presence on the bench is too expensive to make any sense. His form will probalby get worse if he doesn't play regularly. Already Fergie knew that Rooney had to play in order to hit form.

 

[dichinero]

Apparently I am a joker for suggesting Shearer, amongst others was better than Rooney. Frightening really.

Ironic, especially when their comments are the ones that are comical. If it's any consolation pal, I'm a big fan of the Joker. I hate Batman

 

[dichinero]

Abuse my feelings all you want for £300K a week.

Was about to say the same thing!

 

[pixel]

Give it up, Wayne.

On a serious note, I can totally see something like this happening. Rooney sucks in midfield and then starts complaining why he isn't being given a chance to play RB or LB where he could could control the games with his football intelligence.

 

[K2K]

What's sad is that if this had happened 3 or so seasons ago maybe he could have changed/upped his game and now he could be a much more effective player for it. The free ride from manager and press alike really shielded him to the point where I think his own expectations of what he should be contributing have fallen as well which is the worst part. I don't doubt he's trying in all his matches but there's just such a large expectation gap.

This is a player that kept telling us that he has ''nothing to prove''

We had Sir Alex here for 26 years telling that at United you had to prove yourself all over again every year .That was what made us so great. Not this nonsensical protection of an over the hill player for years by his mates in the media.

He simply doesn't match our ambition as a player.How we even let it get this far is a sad indictment in how this club has been run over the last few years

 

[#07]

This is a player that kept telling us that he has ''nothing to prove''

We had Sir Alex here for 26 years telling that at United you had to prove yourself all over again every year .That was what made us so great. Not this nonsensical protection of an over the hill player for years by his mates in the media.

He simply doesn't match our ambition as a player.How we even let it get this far is a sad indictment in how this club has been run over the last few years

This.

The sentimentality surrounding Rooney looks like Liverpoolisation to me. I remember watching the FA Cup final in 1994 and then discovering that Robbo was off to Middlesborough. No fanfare. No tears. No he deserved a proper send off. It was over. Done. That's how Fergie did business. If you couldn't do what he wanted anymore you were out.

If we could shove Robbo out the door like that, I don't understand why people think Rooney deserves some special treatment.

Rooney was a magical player for us up until 2012. There have been some really good games from him since then too e.g. Spurs (H) 2014/15. They have become fewer and further between though, and with the squad we have now we no longer need to indulge him.

He is not the first great player to come to the end of his usefulness at United, he won't be the last either.

 

[Pexbo]

On a serious note, I can totally see something like this happening. Rooney sucks in midfield and then starts complaining why he isn't being given a chance to play RB or LB where he could could control the games with his football intelligence.

I'm a 9!
I'm a 10!
I'm an 8!
I'm a 6!
I'm a 2!
I'm telling on you!

 

[sportsczy]

Kaka makes 138k USD a week. He's the highest paid player at almost 7.2 mil per season.

 

[Sky1981]

On a serious note, I can totally see something like this happening. Rooney sucks in midfield and then starts complaining why he isn't being given a chance to play RB or LB where he could could control the games with his football intelligence.

Except an rb goes roaming means easy goal. Nice one

 

[FC Ronaldo]

I think United can solve the right back problem by playing Wayne Rooney there. Can save the money buying Colemen.
Valencia can take on the defender but his crossing is poor. Not many of them find the strikers.
Rooney still has gas in his tank and is robust enough to play on the right back position.
His crossing is as good as Dalvey Blind. With their crosses, United will have more chances created.

Brilliant. Would read again.

 

[Djemba-Djemba]

I wouldn't be surprised if the club is somehow related to the new media politics towards Rooney. He was shit last season too, maybe even worse in the first half, but was protected by the club. Maybe it's curtains for him in the summer. His presence on the bench is too expensive to make any sense. His form will probalby get worse if he doesn't play regularly. Already Fergie knew that Rooney had to play in order to hit form.

I'm convinced that this is the case.

I think Jose and the club briefed the media following the defeat at Watford that Rooney was no longer untouchable, maybe even that he'll be going next Summer, and then the media changed tone on Rooney and actually started reporting the truth.