Rooney: beauty and the beast combined

GOD, I hate Sheffield. Even for Yorkshire, Satan’s own county, it’s grim. A relative used to live there so I stayed often and I can assure you the people are as hideous as the architecture of the city itself.

There’s a big shop-filled hole in the city centre that resembles a French toilet and it’s perfectly apt. Anyhooo.... ‘are you Wednesday in disguise?’ the spud-faced Sheffield United fans sang after they went a goal up on Saturday. Mmm. If they meant “do United, like the Owls, outclass the Blades in every historical way possible?” then I guess we are.

Rio Ferdinand was at fault for that goal, incidentally, a fact noted by only one newspaper; he continues to lead a charmed life when it comes to press coverage in general. Quite unlike his mate and the man who saved us with his brilliance, Wayne Rooney. Even in a great footballing week for him such as this past one, there’s always a media-related ointment fly, in this case being questioned by police over an alleged assault on a snapper outside the Panacea club on October 15.

The off-field Rooney does, admittedly, remain a slight concern for Reds — the player himself sometimes complains that he is “bored”, always a danger sign in the game. He also has legal trouble ahead in the shape of a libel writ from the loathsome David Moyes, whose onetime matey relationship with Fergie must now be under some threat.

Yet at the moments of his exquisite goals in Sheffield, as that almost cartoonish grin spreads across his ginger-tinged face, you just want to bask in his magnificence and believe all is well with the world, don’t you?

He is magic in a way that no player since Cantona has been; Ronaldo can be sensational, of course, and was so quite often on Saturday, but Rooney carries something else with him as he moves, a sense of imminent joyous explosion coupled with frightening momentum and power.

He is in that motion beauty and the beast combined, thus everything that you want in a player, and we adore the Scouse oik.

Kudos too to our full-backs, overlapping and banging in sensational goal-assist crosses in a manner we haven’t been accustomed to in recent years. Evra in particular was quite brilliant at times, although it was always known when he came that he was actually more impressive going forward than defending. As for Gary Neville, who has featured more in upfront moves in one week than in the entire previous six months, what a delightful flourishing: leadership suits him, it seems. As someone who has always disdained full-backs for being relatively unimportant slackers in a team, I do like to see the mincers get stuck in down the wings and earn that 50K.

So we are happy Red bunnies allround and that will still apply even if we lost to the Celts last night — and even if any poor result is down to the tinkering Fergie promised us at the weekend.

(How the heart sinks when he gets cocky and starts publicly ruminating about imminent shuffles...you can almost see the beartrap ahead gaping, as O’Shea et al strip for action.)

Because whatever the Pictish hordes and/or Fergie hurled at us last night, we have another chance left at Old Trafford to wrap that one up — and we are all too busy drooling ahead of Sunday.

This is, after all, something we have wanted for a long time — Chelsea, faced before they have gone out of sight, without any injury or form crisis on our part, in front of our lads at their most hyper.

Of course, there can be no excuses if we are well beaten in these propitious circumstances and we will be duly devastated if so.

But this is what we want — a true test, the only way to see if all the managerial pronouncements of the past few months have been anything more than just whistling Dixie.

* RICHARD KURT, author of ‘the red army years’