The England captain looks certain to leave Old Trafford but, wherever he ends up, it will simply be retirement deferred and not change how he is rememberedWhat seems remarkable now is how uncontroversial the issue of Wayne Rooney’s departure from Manchester United has come to feel. This is, after all, a player who started United’s first five league games of the season, a run of games that suggested he was a first-choice. Perhaps José Mourinho really did see him as such, or maybe he was playing a clever political game, but either way Rooney has faded to the extent that the suggestion he will start Sunday’s EFL Cup final against Southampton on the bench provokes little comment.There is a tendency...
It is a tribute to Rooney’s appetite and adaptability that he has surpassed Sir Bobby Charlton as Manchester United’s leading scorer. His goals and trophies make him the most influential English footballer of the last 25 yearsIt is one of the slightly lost details of Wayne Rooney’s unveiling as a Manchester United player, but at the time Sir Alex Ferguson felt the need to defend blowing United’s entire transfer budget for the following year on a teenager. “The fact is he is 18 and he could spend all his career at this club,” Ferguson pointed out to the gathered media while his player, all gawky jug ears and clear, hard, unblinking teenage talent, held up a red shirt and smiled...
Surpassing Sir Bobby Charlton has become a distraction in addition to making the Manchester United captain too easy to mark out of the game – as Hull City demonstrated in the EFL Cup semi-final first legMarco Silva would probably prefer to be picking up league points than examining the possibilities presented by cup football in England, though perhaps the Hull City manager should view his first two games as a honeymoon period.Quite an eventful one at that. Victory at the first time of asking in the FA Cup at the weekend may have been marred by a shortage of home fans – Hull supporters were staging a protest against the club owners – but this occasion was even weirder. First...
The Old Trafford captain has missed the chance to break the club’s goalscoring record when his team visit Goodison Park to take on his first club, EvertonWayne Rooney may be having a chequered season, both on the pitch and off it, though he is at that stage in an illustrious career where history beckons at every turn.Last week against Feyenoord he not only produced one of his most convincing displays of the season but the opening goal he both made and scored confirmed him as Manchester United’s all-time leading scorer in Europe, as well as pushing his club tally to a within a single strike of Bobby Charlton’s record of 249. Related: Manchester United sink West Ham with Ibrahimovic and...
Even without physical comparisons with his former team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo, Rooney is unable to keep up with today’s hard-running demandsIn between buffing and burnishing his alarmingly sculpted physique, Cristiano Ronaldo likes to take 3am ice baths to boost his metabolism. He eats six high-protein meals a day, rarely drinks alcohol and refuses soft drinks. Away from the constant task of tweaking his already unimprovable musculature, Ronaldo relaxes by swimming, sleeping a strict eight hours and – oh yes – doing 3,000 sit ups a day in front of the television.It is of course pointless to compare mere mortals with such extreme athletic obsession. But this does still seem to be the lot of Wayne Rooney, in part because of the...