Rooney in total control – and Fergie knows it
The way Manchester United lost control of the match in the second half will have irritated Ferguson, but perhaps the most annoying aspect of the game was the extent to which it exposed his team’s utter reliance on Wayne Rooney.
After The London Independent ran a story suggesting Ferguson’s patience with his star player had finally been exhausted, Rooney turned up in full ‘I Love This Club’ mode, kissing his badge after scoring and assuring ITV that “there is no problem for me at this club. I want to be at this club for a long time.”
A few minutes later, Ferguson appeared for his post-match interview and drew an extraordinary parallel.
“What Wayne has got to realise is the press have got another [Paul] Gascoigne and he’s got to suffer with that. Wayne Rooney is a headline-maker, good or bad. We have seen the good stuff today but any flaws will be absolutely annihilated by the press.”
Of course, it wasn’t the press who put Rooney in the spotlight last week by fining and dropping him, it was Ferguson. But if he can recast that falling-out as an ‘us against the world’ situation, then all the better for him.
What is more curious is why he decided to invoke the spectre of Gascoigne. If you were asked to write down all the reasons why Gascoigne ultimately ended up ruined, press harassment might figure somewhere on the list, but it would be a long distance behind the psychological torment that stalked him all his life and the alcoholism that went along with it.
If Ferguson intends the example of Gascoigne to be a cautionary tale for his current star, the likely response from Rooney is bemusement. Beyond being the most talented English player of his generation, Rooney has little in common with Gascoigne. If he sometimes doesn’t do justice to his talent, it looks more like the result of ordinary complacency than the kind of inner turmoil that plagued Gascoigne.
While Gascoigne’s career meandered randomly, propelled by occasional manic spurts, Rooney seems calm and in control of his own destiny. When he announced he wanted to leave United in 2010, the decision was evidently based on a couple of apparently sound calculations: firstly, that United no longer compete in the market for the best players, which threatens their ability to keep winning trophies in the long term, and secondly, that another club might happily pay him more.
United soothed Rooney by doubling his wages and he accepted their reassurances that they would remain competitive. Sure enough they became champions last May, but oddly their victory over City yesterday did little more to calm the anxiety over their future than did their defeats to Newcastle and Blackburn.
Rooney’s quality won them the match in the first half, but in the second they barely withstood a comeback from opponents who were a man short and who had substituted their best attacking player at half time.
Moreover, the return of Paul Scholes, though greeted with joy by the travelling supporters, is a withering indictment of the quality of United’s reserve players in midfield. Joey Barton tweeted what everyone was thinking: “If ur Anderson and a player that has been retired for 6 months and gets on before u. Surely u have got to reconsider the club ur at.”
From Rooney’s perspective, the match confirmed just as surely as the defeat last week to Blackburn that he is the most important person at the club. No wonder Ferguson didn’t seem happy.
