The Roonation of all mankind

SO what are we to make of the upholding of that two-match ban on W***e R****y then? Right, wrong or, as leading human rights activist Rio Ferdinand would have it, the workings of a lynch mob?

When in doubt on matters philosophical, I always turn to Brian’s mum. “He’s not the Messiah,” she tells me exclusively, “he’s a very naughty boy.”

Spot on, Brian’s mum. Wayne Rooney might not be a Pele-in-waiting, as some excitable types suggested a couple of years back, but neither is he the spawn of the devil.

When you consider some of the serious violence which goes unpunished on a football pitch, a two-match ban for swearing into a camera strikes me as officialdom playing to the gallery.

Sure, Rooney’s outburst was stupid and, no doubt, the many genteel types who regularly watch football on Sky must have been on the point of dropping their cucumber sandwiches into their pints at the unprecedented horror of it all, but by dragging the thing out, the FA managed to turn a moment of minor madness into what passes these days for international scandal.

It’s a terrible thing when a man finds himself in agreement with Alan Shearer, whose use of language I find offensive for many entirely different reasons, but mainly to do with his unfailing ability to state the bleeding obvious at wearisome length. It’s like finding yourself nodding in solemn agreement with the acute observation that, at the end of the day and when all is said and done, water is wet, like.

Still, Big Al got it right on MOTD on Sunday, noting that Rooney had apologised for what he’d done and it was time to move on.

Some hope. While the authorities began their deliberations, our two old friends, All & Sundry, rowed in to keep the pot boiling. There were many po-faced interventions but my favourite came from former England rugby coach Clive Woodward, now director of sport at the British Olympic Association.

“Rooney’s behaviour has been very uncool, to say the least. Children will see it and say ‘if he can do it I can do it too’ and behave like that towards parents and teachers.”

Uncool, eh? I suspect most kids consider that one a swear word too. Of course, whenever a sporting ‘role model’ disgraces himself, sooner or later we are obliged to address what we might call the ‘Tommie Gorman question’.

As in: but what about the little children? Clive Woodward might be worried about kids swearing at their parents but I have spent enough time on touchlines over the years to develop a much greater sensitivity to the problem of parents swearing at their kids.

Most kids already have enough cop-on to know that Rooney was a man behaving badly on the box, and if they didn’t, a word in their ear from Brian’s mum would have been enough to put them straight (and, you also suspect, a doubtless choice word or two in Rooney’s ear from Fergie would have had a similarly sobering effect on the main protagonist).

Instead, the inevitable media overkill and official investigation which followed served only to produce the bizarre and endlessly repeated spectacle of Rooney’s swear words being ‘beeped’ while a fuzzy blob covered his mouth to protect sensitive and/or slow-witted lip-readers. Goodness gracious even Section 31 didn’t put Gerry Adams through that.

Understandably, most people seem to have been exercised by the fact that Rooney had, as they say in television land, beamed it down the bottle — in other words, unlike Aldo’s famous touchline rant in US ‘94 when viewers were inadvertently exposed to collateral damage, this time it seemed like the audience at home were the intended targets.

Rooney’s plea for mitigation didn’t help either. Arguing that his swearing had not been aimed at “anyone in particular” was surely an ill-advised defence of the not-bad-but-mad kind, an approach which appeared to put him on a par with those poor unfortunates you meet in the street from time to time, ranting and railing at the world at large.

In truth, I’m not sure Rooney himself knew who or what he was getting at.

There has been talk since that it was a reaction to being goaded by the West Ham fans but even if the abuse of football supporters can often border on the truly sickening, Rooney must know by now that such grief comes with the territory. And, anyway, having just completed a hat-trick, surely he’d already retaliated in the best and most effective way.

In fact, this disconnect between what should have been a personally joyous moment and the seething anger with which Rooney instead chose to mark the achievement is — as Harry Redknapp has pointed out — by far the most disturbing aspect of the whole episode.

Because if Rooney’s angst can be triggered by the good stuff, what manner of spontaneous combustion will ensue when the bad stuff comes around again?

Still, I maintain that his one-day blunder was never going to lead to the Roonation of all mankind. Unfortunately, that hasn’t prevented a molehill from being inflated into a mountain , with the result that a mouth-watering Manchester cup derby has been robbed of a player who can still generate far more light than heat when the mood takes him.

But at least the kiddies can sleep safely in their beds, so that’s alright.