Wayne keeps falling

ILLUSTRATION: DAVID HUMPHRIES

Rooney the manager cannot escape the celebrity machine or his vivid teenage past

He was the last great English footballer from a more ragged time

4 Jan 2025 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport

Barney Ronay

Re-centre your de-centred centre. Thirty-seven new year wellbeing tips on how to simplify your wellbeing tips. I lost seven inches of neck fat without visiting a gym, changing my diet or having any neck fat to begin with. The problem with this kind of new year newspaper stuff, the endless weekend articles about how to make yourself feel better, is that it is usually quite complicated. There is a need to understand things, balance your energies, interact with a baffling digital world.

The fact is most people, and definitely most men, would be happiest if they could just spend every day smashing up garden statues with a hammer. Lie in a pile of leaves for a bit. Eat cheese with a penknife. Spend the afternoon burning a big pile of cardboard boxes. At the end of which someone would say, we really needed those statues smashing. You are a hero. Here is a special badge that says “I am a Good Boy”.

This is basically the recipe for human happiness. Unfortunately there just isn’t the opportunity to do all of this. Instead you have to understand things, make small changes involving nutrient intakes, listen to podcasts about weaving, as opposed to just being really excellent at banging things with a hammer.

This is not completely unrelated to another January staple, the departure of Wayne Rooney from his latest managerial post, which is showing signs of becoming a new year ritual, like wassailing or first-footing. Rooney was sacked by Birmingham City on 2 January last year after 15 games in charge. This time his departure from Plymouth Argyle by “mutual consent” came on New Year’s Eve after 25 games.

Is Wayne Rooney a good manager? His record suggests not. But no one really knows for sure. Rooney loves football. He’s smart and likable. He is also still caught in the Wayne-22 paradox, which states that Wayne Rooney has only ever been employed by the kind of board that thinks it’s a good idea to employ Wayne Rooney.

Plymouth have one of the smallest budgets in the Championship. Hiring an inexperienced celebrity who wants to do stuff with inverted full-backs was never going to work. And it is still the case. Only when a club that will never appoint Wayne Rooney appoints Wayne Rooney – the kind of functional, sensible club that won’t actually employ him – will we know whether Wayne Rooney is a good manager.

I am biased in this, as I just really want him succeed. But I’m not alone. At Birmingham and Plymouth the most striking aspect has been the sense of sympathy, of a warm exit. This is the most interesting thing about Rooney now. He’s popular. There is a genuine well of affection for this slightly bruised one-off, this survivor. It isn’t new. Manchester United fans in the stadium always loved Rooney. Young people on the internet get the Rooney aura. England fans on a train will still routinely chant his name. There is a sense of something revivalist, a nostalgic affection in seeing him out there walking across a Championship pitch, beard jutting like a Celtic warrior lord, all authentic soulful male sensibility.

Even the pre-departure stuff at Plymouth was wreathed in concern. We heard talk of his “bachelor lifestyle”, the karaoke sessions, the late-night kebab shop fan pics. There is always a sense with Rooney of someone trying to find a home, a second life inside the machine, pursued still by his own impossibly luminous teenage promise. As Harry Angstrom, the lost and paunchy former school sports star in John Updike’s Rabbit Run, says: “I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball, I really did. And after you’re firstrate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.”

With Rooney this includes the shared knowledge that the world has been rough with him, that he has spent his life hurtling through time like a runaway asteroid. In football terms the most startling Rooney was the first Rooney, that perfect galloping teenager, the boy who did the Zidane spin past Zidane at Euro 2004, and who was, aged 18, the most exciting footballer in the world.

Rooney and David Beckham were the first English footballers to be processed, without protection, through the modern celebrity machine. Rooney was portrayed as a kind of dustbin child, a street foundling. His teenage sexual misadventures were gleefully fanfared by the adults of the press (a bit weird, really, all that). Beckham at least wanted to be famous. Rooney was just thrown into the meat grinder.

There is a nostalgia here too. Rooney was in many ways the last of something, a pre-academy talent, a last great English footballer from a more ragged time. There are plenty of more mannered technical players now. Young Wayne was visceral and self-made, all jangling limbs and off-the-cuff invention, with a brilliance that took you to strange and exhilarating places.

The journey from this, young Wayne out there punting the ball about like a crunched-up can of Monster, to the production line 8.5 who takes the ball in the half-spaces with perfectly metered efficiency, seems to speak to something that has also been lost. The corporatisation of play. The ability of the game to simply make you feel things. Rooney ran himself into the ground chasing this, banging away with his hammer. It feels like a kind of victory that he’s still here wanting more.

The dark heart of England’s golden generation arrived at Germany 2006. By the end Sven-Göran Eriksson was already off, outed on a yacht dreaming his mad dream with a fake sheikh. As Sepp Blatter would observe a few years later: football drives people mad. Eriksson knew things though. His last words as England manager were: “Let Wayne Rooney live, you need him.” He’s still right about that.