The answer to the Rooney riddle
Posted on 06/09/2010Wayne Rooney's failure to shine at the World Cup in South Africa was put down to fatigue after a long season with Manchester United. But Oliver Holt in The Mirror believes the answer behind Rooney's problems may have just surfaced.
When Wayne Rooney scowled and scuffed his way through England’s game against Algeria, everyone asked the question.When he stared into the camera in Cape Town and snarled about England’s fans booing, they asked it again.
When he wrote 'Fcuk U Floyd' on his trainers on his way to a golf trip to Sun City and turned his feet inwards so the paparazzi could see, they asked once more.
"What's wrong with Rooney?" was one of the most common phrases to spill from the mouths of England supporters and journalists during the World Cup.
Click here to find out more!The more he struggled and the worse his body language became, the more varied the theories grew.
The most popular was that he was struggling with the after-effects of the injury he suffered against Bayern Munich in March.
Another was that his detestation of Capello?s regime had reached such a level that he had come to hate playing for him.
Maybe 4:4:2 didn't suit him, everyone said. Maybe the secret to rediscovering his genius was pushing Steven Gerrard into a supporting role behind him.
Sir Alex Ferguson said he thought Rooney had been crushed by the weight of expectation.
His Manchester United assistant, Mike Phelan, admitted that Rooney had returned from South Africa in a state of dishevelment.
Then yesterday, allegations about Rooney?s private life emerged and it felt for the first time as though one of England?s World Cup mysteries was finally unravelling.
Rumours about Rooney's private conduct have been swirling around the media world for several months.
Some of the details that emerged in weekend newspaper exposes were familiar to many who first heard them mooted several weeks before the World Cup.
So it is almost certain that by the end of the Premier League season and as he prepared to leave for South Africa, Rooney knew the details of his liaisons were seeping into the public domain.
Once that happened, he must have realised that it was only a matter of time until they found their way into print.
However you care to judge him, that knowledge and worry about the impact the revelations might have on his family life with wife Coleen and new baby Kai must have been a heavy burden to carry.
And it is the most convincing explanation so far for why the Wayne Rooney we saw in South Africa was so far removed from the player who has grown into England?s most exciting talent since Paul Gascoigne.
Something was eating at him, that?s for sure, and history is full of great sportsmen temporarily derailed by private torments.
The irony of the timing of the publication of the allegations made by an escort girl is that Rooney appeared to be returning to something close to his best against Bulgaria on Friday night.
He created all four of England?s goals for Jermain Defoe and Adam Johnson in the team?s first Euro 2012 qualifier and was brimming with the kind of creative energy that deserted him in South Africa.
Capello will be thankful that, contrary to initial suggestions yesterday, Rooney is intending to travel to Switzerland today with the rest of the England squad.
England need to him to be at his best in Basel for the tie against a Swiss team tomorrow night that will present a sterner test than the hapless Bulgarians.
In those circumstances, it would be useful if Capello does not persevere with the ludicrous policy of punishing players for transgressions in their private lives.
That cost John Terry the England captaincy back in February. It is to be hoped Capello has recognised the foolishness of that move and that Rooney will be allowed to travel to Switzerland without the England manager barking instructions on morality into his ear.
The allegations surrounding Rooney's private life, along with the Pakistani cricket scandal have kept the media on their toes this week, but, writes Simon Briggs in Telegraph, cheating and sport go back as far as the ancient Greeks.
"There are always crooked people looking to exploit every loophole to make a quick profit.” So said Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the chairman of cricket’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit, in a briefing last week.It is a bleak message. But now, more than ever, it is an inescapable one.
Flanagan’s ongoing investigation into Pakistan’s alleged spot-fixing is only the latest in a series of outrages. The dying days of summer have turned into the sporting equivalent of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. But the jokes - and there have been plenty doing the rounds - are ringing increasingly hollow.
Dr Wendy Chapman received a formal warning for her part in the ‘Bloodgate’ affair. Next up is John Higgins, the snooker player, who will attend an inquiry into his alleged match-fixing on Tuesday.
Then, on Wednesday, Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa must face the World Motor Sports Council to explain their part in the alleged use of team orders during German Grand Prix at Hockenheim in July.
These four scandals, coming on top of one another, have reminded us that sport is every bit as susceptible to graft, greed and sleaze as any other walk of life. “God created the world,” as the saying goes, “but it is the devil who keeps it going.” Clearly, the recent rash of moral panics has had a corrosive effect.
Some have given up on sport completely, while others have called for a new international body to be instituted – some sort of overgrown WADA – with far-reaching powers to police all aspects of sporting corruption. Yet there is a danger that, in our anger and disenchantment, we exaggerate the scale of the problem. Or, at least, its novelty.
Cheating, we should remember, is older than Christianity. A quick scan through the history books will turn up instances of bribery, impersonation and rigged juries at the original Olympic Games. Not to mention fines for the guilty parties, which were used to finance bronze statues of Zeus along the road to the stadium.
“Anything that pins this down as a 2010 phenomenon, I don’t accept,” says Professor Lincoln Allison, the author of Amateurism in Sport.
“Cricket has always had its flash aspect as well as its aspiration to nobility. It is one of the three old professional sports – the others being horse racing and boxing – that have been gambled on in this country for centuries.”
Allison distinguishes between two different types of cheating. As he points out, cheating to win is an inevitable outcome of top-level sport. We expect people to push themselves to the limit, and we rail against those that do not. Who is the more reprehensible: a mercenary footballer more interested in his pay cheque than the result, or a rugby coach who cares so much that he buys fake blood capsules from a joke shop?
The first type of cheating - cheating to lose - is surely worse. But, again, there are special circumstances in the cricket scandal unfolding around us. In Allison’s view: “I believe this story is more about Pakistan than it is about cricket. I have been to Pakistan, and in my view, you would have to travel to a very far-flung part of the former Soviet Union to find anywhere so riddled with corruption.”
This argument is supported by Geoff Lawson, who found a culture of venality and nepotism when he was made Pakistan coach in 2007. Some selectors were on the take; others faced the threat of violence if they did not pick certain players. Yet he believed the players to be honest and genuine - a view which now seems optimistic, at best.
Cultural differences can be hard to bridge. According to Allison: “In this country, we place great store by the idea of sport for its own sake. But I know a Ugandan boxer who cannot see why anyone would want to go into the ring without being paid for it.”
Most of our sports were created by the 19th-century public schools in an attempt to build moral fibre. For them, sport really was about taking part; in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the hero’s team lose the climactic match, yet his response - which was to send the visitors off with three ringing cheers - means that “such a defeat is a victory”.
Then, as now, there were plenty of people who followed that romantic model. And there were plenty of people who did not. Outside the hallowed walls of Rugby School, WG Grace was about to embark on a chequered career, full of intimidation, skulduggery and avarice, that would make him the most celebrated Victorian sportsman of them all.
Yet, were he alive today, WG would probably have Sir Ronnie Flanagan on his tail.