Wayne Rooney: My Decade in the Premier League (21 page)

When the medicals are done and everyone has finished their lunch in the canteen, I drive home with one thought in my head:
I’ll be playing up front all season
.

I’m made up, especially after playing so many games on the wing over the last couple of years. It’s going to be an exciting campaign. If there’s one downer to the day it’s that I know tomorrow will be a lot tougher at Carrington.

I’m going to pay for that holiday.

*****

The next morning the footballs come out and everything we do involves running with the ball – sprinting, jogging, five-a-sides, all of us are getting used to having a footy at our feet again after the long break. Not all clubs are the same, though. At Everton, I don’t remember seeing a football until the second week of pre-season and the coaches used to make us run until we couldn’t move another step.

Today, the longest run we do lasts 45 seconds. It’s carried out at a high intensity; it’s not the hardest burst of physical exercise I’ll ever do in my life, but then the drills get harder. The Manager wants us to do a double training session – morning and afternoon work. We have an Asian tour coming up and he wants us to be fit for it. The pitches get longer, the full-size goals come out. Suddenly I’m going for those long sprints, the ones I’ll have to make during every match in the Premier League. My lungs burn; I move up and down the park non-stop.

We play a 90-minute game and my heart’s banging. Everyone’s battered after an hour. The following day, we play again. It takes 75 minutes for the pain to kick in. A week later the whole team are still strong at full-time. That’s how United like us to be. It’s important that we maintain our high levels of fitness because we’ve had so much success in the past by pressing and attacking until the final whistle. We’ve always pushed to score, whether we’ve been winning, losing, or on level terms. We’ve never lumped hopeful balls into the box, hoping to get lucky. We’ve always played passes out wide and fired crosses into dangerous areas. To do that, we’ve had to be dead fit.

Now we are.

A couple of days later we go on tour to Asia: Malaysia, South Korea and China. We fly 16 hours to Malaysia and play a Malaysian XI in the Bukit Jalil Stadium, Kuala Lumpur. We fly to South Korea and play FC Seoul in the World Cup Stadium. And then we fly to China and play Hangzhou Greentown FC in the Yellow Dragon Stadium. Then we fly home.

The trip last 10 days. It takes a lot out of the players with the jet lag and the travelling, but the support when we’re there is incredible. The stadiums are packed with 70,000 people whenever we play; there are hundreds of fans taking pictures wherever we go. I can’t leave my hotel because it’s like Beatlemania outside, but The Manager still gives the lads a night off, so we all go out for a meal. The whole team sits down for tea in a fancy restaurant, but before the menus have even come out, camera phones point at us from all angles.

*****

When the season starts a couple of weeks after the Asia tour, we start with a win against Birmingham (I get a goal) and a loss to Burnley away. Then I score in the next four games:

22 August, Wigan 0 Manchester United 5

29 August, Manchester United 2 Arsenal 1

12 September, Spurs 1 Manchester United 3

20 September, Manchester United 4 City 3

I love playing upfront on my own
. Most of the time, I’m the focal point of the attack in a 4–5–1 formation and I buzz off it. I’m not involved in the game as much as I could be because I don’t have to drop deep and defend anymore, but this means I’m conserving my energy until the very end of the game. My focus is on being in the right place at the right time, taking my chances and scoring goals.

The City game is the maddest result because Michael Owen scores the winner in the sixth minute of injury time and everyone goes nuts, most of all the City lot because they think we’ve had extra-time handed to us. ‘Fergie Time’ the papers call it; people start making out that The Manager is intimidating officials into giving us more minutes on the clock at the end of games when we need to score a goal.

How stupid is that? As far as I can tell, both teams were drawing and City had the same amount of stoppage time as us. I can’t see what the problem is. If City are an ambitious team, as they keep saying they are, then they should be making the most of those seven minutes. They should be thinking: ‘We’ve got time to get a goal.’

They didn’t and we did; we knew that if we made chances, someone like myself or Michael would score a winner. That’s one of the reasons why he was brought into the squad in the first place, to help me upfront whenever we switch to 4–4–2. He can make the difference in big games.

I get 13 goals by Christmas and one of the reasons for my improved goal rate is Antonio Valencia. He’s a quick winger – good with his feet and a great passer of the ball. Ever since joining, he’s been on fire. The crosses have flown into the box thick and fast in games and I’ve managed to get on the end of a lot of them, mainly because I’ve learnt in training that I have to be on my toes with him, probably more than I ever did with Ronaldo. Ronnie was sharp, but this fella moves in on the byline and crosses more quickly. His first instinct is to play the pass and that makes it easier for me to know when to burst into the box, or to get across my defender. I score against Blackburn, Pompey, West Ham and Wolves, and the team sits in second place behind Chelsea. I’ve got loads of confidence. Everything I try on the pitch seems to work. If I keep this up, 2009/10 could be my best season so far.

Maybe I can beat Ronnie’s 42 goals from the other year …

*****

I mess up.

Against Hull in the KC Stadium at the end of December, I score the opening goal in stoppage time at the end of the
first half, an easy tap-in that lands on my plate after the Hull defence fails to sort out a Darren Fletcher cross. During the opening minutes of the second half we keep the ball and stay defensively tight. The plan is to score a second goal on the break, but then I make the type of mistake that gives every player ’mares: I underhit a back pass to our keeper, Tomasz Kuszczak.

I’m on the halfway line, under pressure and I decide to play the ball home so we can start again and build another attack, but I can tell from the moment I lay off the pass that I’ve underhit it – it’s not going to reach the penalty area. Their striker, Craig Fagan nips in to thieve my soft pass and he’s through on goal.

No! Where did he come from?

If it had happened at the other end, the fans would have been calling it a near-perfect through ball because it’s perfectly weighted. Instead it’s a prezzie that leaves Fagan with a one-on-one in our area. From that moment, I’m glued to the spot, like in one of those dreams where there’s a chase but I can’t leg it because my feet are dead heavy, like they’re stuck in thick mud. It’s horrible.

Fagan takes the ball past Kuszczak.

Please spoon it, please spoon it.

I feel helpless. I stand and watch as the game goes on around me. Everyone’s watching me in the ground and on the telly. I feel like a divvy. I’m on my own with millions of people staring at my mistake. There are United fans swearing at me from their front rooms at home, most probably.

Please spoon it, please spoon it.

Fagan takes the ball too far; he floats a cross over Kuszczak. As Hull’s Jozy Altidore comes over to nod the ball in, our full-back, Rafael Da Silva, bundles him over and the ref blows his whistle.

Penalty.
My fault
.

They score.
My fault
.

1–1.
My fault
.

A TV camera points at me and I look directly into the front rooms of everyone watching on the box. My face says it all: I’m terrified of losing and terrified of what The Manager will say to me about cocking up. Nobody in football would swap boots with me at this moment.

Then I hear that dreaded sound: The Manager shouting at me. My position on the halfway line means I’m close to the dugout. He’s off the bench, yelling. I can’t quite make out what he’s shouting, but I know it isn’t anything complimentary. I’m not going to turn around to get a better idea of what he’s saying though; I don’t want to get The Hairdryer.

I know the only way I can avoid a rollicking is if United win and I play out of my skin for the next half an hour. Luckily, both of these things happen. We win 3–1 and I set up the next two goals. I play so well that the people on Sky telly even give me the Man of the Match award afterwards.

When I get back to the dressing room, The Manager shakes the players’ hands. Then he lets on to me.

‘You were lucky,’ he says and walks off.

I take a deep breath. I know then that if we’d lost or drawn against Hull, I’d have taken the blame.

*****

*****

After Christmas we batter Wigan by five, draw with Birmingham and then win against Burnley, Hull (again; I score all four in a 4–0 victory), Arsenal and Pompey. We share honours at Villa. By mid-February we’re still in second place. Then I get The Hairdryer again after a 3–1 defeat to Everton at Goodison later in the month.

It’s no surprise because I play crap; it’s one of my worst games ever and I give the ball away, miss chances and fluff passes. The ball keeps bouncing off me. There’s nothing I can do to correct my mistakes and I feel terrible.

I can always tell in the early stages of a game if I’m off colour. My touch doesn’t feel right almost immediately. The passes go wrong and the ball seems difficult to control, as if my footy boots are shaped like 50p pieces. I try a difficult pass, it doesn’t go my way and I get frustrated. I try to make a tackle to settle my game down, but instead I kick the player. Eventually when I do get a chance in front of goal, I send it wide.

It’s always important in games like this to fix the problem quickly. I go back to basics and make a few simple
passes. I try to play the game calmly because I don’t want to make any silly mistakes. After a few minutes of doing this, my confidence usually comes back.

Not today though. We go a goal up but Everton strike back within minutes. I can’t really get a grip on this game. My touch is all wrong and I can feel a mood coming on. I try harder and harder, but it makes all the bad touches and misplaced balls that much more frustrating. I can’t get past their defence. I can’t
imagine
getting past their defence. They’ve become a mental block: they’re bigger, faster, stronger than me.

I know low confidence is an enemy. I know it’s all in my head, but there’s nothing I can do. It’s killing my normal game. Everything seems that much harder today and it’s one of the worst feelings I know in football. By half-time I feel exposed, like I’m a goldfish in a bowl. It feels as if everyone’s staring at me, but I can’t perform. It’s a bit like that nightmare again: I’m stuck in the mud and I can’t run.

Then it gets worse because the Everton fans suss that I’m having a bad day. Every time I give the ball away they let out a sarky cheer.

The second half doesn’t get much better.

When I’m playing like this, one of two things happen to me. The first is that I don’t want the ball as much as normal because I worry I might give it away. I don’t want to get involved in the game. I don’t want to make a mistake. Thankfully, that happens so rarely, and it definitely won’t happen today, not in front of the Everton lot.

The other thing that can happen is that I work too hard. I try to force myself back into the action; I drop deep to win the ball back, but the deeper I drop into my own half, the harder it is for me to score. It also means that if I mess up, I can give the ball away in a dangerous area.

There have been games when I’ve run all over the park in this mood. When I’ve tried to change a game on my own: I’ve cleared the ball off the United goal line, I’ve closed down attackers in our penalty area. Then I’ve often been too tired for the closing stages of the game. When Everton score another two goals, that’s exactly what happens: I start running all over the pitch, trying to regain possession.

Sometimes The Manager sees me having a bad day and tries to calm me down. Other times, he subs me.

I hate getting subbed
. When I see a fourth official holding up the board with the Number 10 on it, I usually feel annoyed. I get fed up with myself. If I’ve not played well, I always know it, but I want to stay on to make up for the mistakes I’ve made.

But I’ll admit it: there have been times when I’ve felt relieved to come off. If I’ve been having a ’mare and I’ve noticed the fourth official punching numbers into his board, I’ve sometimes thought,
Why don’t you get me off? It’s not going to happen today
.

Then once I’m sitting on the bench, I stew.

People say I often look moody when I’ve come off the pitch. Well, that’s because I am moody, but that anger’s not directed at The Manager, because I usually understand why
he’s made the decision. I look moody because I’m frustrated with myself. I take pride in my game. If I don’t play well, I get upset.

Today The Manager keeps me on till the end and we lose 3–1.