Wayne Rooney: My Decade in the Premier League (5 page)

At Old Trafford I’m nothing special; I’m not a standout player. But I reckon I can help United to be a standout team.

*****

Despite my brilliant start, it doesn’t take long for me to get up Roy Keane’s nose.

On the pitch, Roy’s a leader; I can see that from training with him. He yells a lot, he inspires through example, but he rarely dishes out instructions – he’s just really demanding, always telling us to graft harder.

He can be just as demanding off the pitch.

On the night before my first away game against Birmingham City (a 0–0 draw), the squad sits down for tea in the team hotel, a fancy place with a private dining room just for us, complete with plasma screen telly. Roy’s watching the rugby, but the minute he gets up to go to the loo, I swipe the controls and flip the channel so the lads can watch
The X Factor
on the other side. Then I stuff the remote in my trackie pocket.

When Roy comes back and notices Simon Cowell’s face on the telly, he’s not happy. He starts shouting.

‘Who’s turned it over? Where’s the remote?’

I don’t say a word. Nobody does. Everyone starts looking around the room, trying to avoid his glare.

‘Well, if no one’s watching this, I’ll turn it off.’

Roy walks up to the telly and yanks the plug out of the wall. The lads sit there in silence. There isn’t a sound, apart from the scrape of cutlery on plates. It’s moody.

After dinner we all crash out early, but at around midnight, I get a knock on the door. It’s the club security guard.

‘Alright Wayne,’ he says. ‘Roy’s sent me. He wants to know where the remote controls are.’

I realise it’s Roy’s way of letting on to me that he knows exactly what’s happened. It’s a message.

You’re for it now.

I hand them over and wonder what’s going to happen. But the next day he says nothing about it.

*****

When I first sign for United, I think back to the times I’d watched them winning trophies and league titles on the telly. It happened a lot. I’d see their ex-players being interviewed on
Sky Sports News
or
Football Focus
and whenever their names came up on the screen it would always read: ‘Steve Bruce: Premier League Winner’, or ‘Teddy Sheringham: Treble Winner.’

I want that to be me.

Later, when I train at Carrington for the first time, Gary Neville gives me some advice. He says, ‘The thing with this team is, no matter how much you’ve achieved, no matter how many medals you’ve won, you’re never allowed to think that you’ve made it.’

I’m a bit nervous about meeting Gary Neville again. I’d whacked him during that reserve game after all – I worry that he’ll remember it. It doesn’t help that just before my arrival one of the papers runs a story about Gary hating Scousers. Apparently he’s told a reporter, ‘I can’t stand Liverpool, I can’t stand Liverpool people, I can’t stand anything about them.’ I’m a bit worried that me and him won’t get on.

I ask him whether he’s really said it, whether he really hates Scousers. He tells me it’s rubbish – he’d been chatting about the Liverpool side of the ’80s. He’d grown up watching them win trophy after trophy. He hated their team; he wasn’t having a pop at the people in the city, just the club. That’s good enough for me. As an Evertonian I can see his point.

I like Gary straightaway, he’s a funny lad. We warm up together in training by playing keep ball in one of the boxes marked out on the training ground turf. I spoon the ball and give a pass away. From behind me I hear him winding me up. ‘Flippin’ heck, how much did we pay for Wazza?’

At lunch after the practice game, he doesn’t stop talking, he goes on and on and on, but in a nice way. Sometimes when he’s off on one – about music, his guitar playing, football – it’s as if he doesn’t have the time to stop for breath, especially if he’s talking about United. He’s the most passionate player I’ve ever met. He’s hard too, on the pitch and off it. He gets stuck into tackles; in the dressing room I notice that The Manager has a go at Gaz probably more than any of the other players in the team because he can handle it. He isn’t soft like some footballers can be.

When he’s out there playing, he’s the spirit of The Manager. He carries that same ambition to win, that same desire. There’s one game where I sit on the bench with him and he even acts like The Manager. He watches the way our match unfolds and he studies the tactics of the opposition. Then with 20 minutes to go he sends a youth team player out to warm up on the touchlines for a laugh without The Manager knowing. Talk about cheek.

Gary and players like Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs bring a lot of experience to the dressing room. In my first few months at the club there are times when teams who can’t live with us on paper defend for their lives and nearly get away with it, even at Old Trafford. They hassle us and battle for every tackle; they park the team bus in front of their goal every time we win back possession. I get frustrated. I lose my patience and start hitting risky long balls and taking pot shots in a desperate attempt to win the game, but Gary calms me down.

‘Keep trying, Wazza, keep playing. A chance will come.’

Nine times out of ten, he’s right.

I’m not the only one to hear the advice. There’s a young lad called Ronaldo who signed a season earlier from Sporting Lisbon for a cool £12.2 million, and everyone starts talking about how he’s going to be the future of the club alongside me. There’s nothing on him though: he’s a bag of tricks, but he’s skinny. He’s got braces on his teeth, slicked hair and he’s spotty. Ronaldo looks like a boy. It’s hard to believe we’re around the same age.

Wonder how he’s going to turn out?

*****

As I get settled at the club, the size of United amazes me. I watch the news at home and no matter where the cameras are, the Middle East, somewhere in Africa, wherever, there’s always a little kid wearing an old United shirt. At first it freaks me out, but then fame always has done.

The first time I’d heard that fans were going into the Everton club shop for my shirt, it felt weird. It used to confuse me when people wanted my autograph in the street. I was 14 when it happened for the first time, playing a youth team game for Everton. When the final whistle went, a bloke came up to me and asked for my signature.

‘I’m going to keep this because when you grow up it’s going to be worth a lot of money,’ he says.

Seeing myself on the box was even weirder.

I played in both legs of the FA Youth Cup final in 2002 against Aston Villa and picked up the Man of the Match award afterwards, even though we lost. Sky interviewed me for the show after one game and I watched it back when I got home because my mum had videoed it. I hated it when I saw the clip: it didn’t look like me, it didn’t sound like me. It was weird.

At United I realise straightaway that the attention is much more intense and the players are treated like rock stars. It’s scary because the team has fans everywhere and people recognise me wherever I go. In the street, blokes, mums and kids come up to me for autographs, and most of the time I’m comfortable with it, but there are moments when it gets too much. I’m only 18 years old; it’s difficult to deal with the attention sometimes.

Every time I go shopping I see a picture of myself in the papers the next day; one night I go out for a meal and people point and stare when I’m sitting with my family. It’s like I’m a waxwork from Madame Tussauds rather than a person. A party of people starts telling the family on the next table
that ‘it’s that Wayne Rooney over there’. Then they start pointing and taking pictures with their phones on the sly. In the shops I’m happy to sign stuff, pose for photos and talk to people, but it’s a bit much when I’m eating my tea.

I decide I’m not going to bang on about fame to my mates or moan about it to the lads at the club though, because that’s what so many other footballers do. Signing for United means I have to deal with this situation. It’s part of my job, but I realise I’m growing up fast. I’m learning how to live my life under a mad spotlight.

One afternoon, shortly after the Fenerbahçe game, I go to the garage to fill the car up. As I put the petrol in, a bloke pulls up next to me and winds his window down.

‘Here, Wayne, you fill up your own car yourself, do you?’

Like anyone else is going to do it.

The Manager’s office is right in the thick of things at Carrington, United’s training ground, upstairs from the changing rooms, next to the canteen. If someone was to wander into the club at lunch on a Monday without checking the footy results first, they’d know exactly how United have got on just by taking a look at The Manager’s body language. As he buzzes around the dining tables at lunch, having a crack with people, chatting, joking (or not chatting, not joking), it’s written all over his face.

If we’ve won, like against Fenerbahçe, he laughs with everyone; he talks about the last game and gets excited about the next. If we’ve been playing really well, he tells unfunny jokes and shouts out silly trivia questions while we eat our lunch or get changed.

‘Lads, name the current players from the Premier League with a World Cup winners’ medal?’ he says.

He keeps us guessing for ages. I don’t think he actually knows the answers half the time. If he does, he never gives them to us when we pester him afterwards.

When he’s in a really good mood, the stories start. He goes on about his playing career and the goals he scored as a striker for Dunfermline and Rangers. He tells the tale about the time he once played with a broken back. Apparently everyone in the squad’s heard it – how bad the pain was, how he got the injury. The Manager tells the ‘Broke Back’ tale so many times that it’s not long before I know it from beginning to end. But it doesn’t stop him from telling it again, especially when he feels there’s a point to be made about injuries. The funny thing is, even though he talks about his playing days a lot, I’ve never seen any video evidence of his goals, so I don’t know how good or not good he was. I doubt he was as great as he makes out.

In my first few months at the club, I realise that when the atmosphere around Carrington is good – when we’re winning – I can go into The Manager’s office whenever I want, just for a chat. To be honest, I like going in there. It’s a big room, bigger than some dressing rooms I’ve been in. A huge window overlooks the training pitches so he can see just about everything that’s going on.

‘Wayne, the door is always open if you need to speak to me,’ he says.

When I go in there for the first time, shortly after my debut, we talk about the game, our upcoming opponents,
how I should play to exploit their weaknesses. We talk about the title race and the league’s best players: Chelsea are strong he reckons, Arsenal and Liverpool, too. He tells me how he sees our team shaping up, how me and Ronaldo are going to do. We talk about horses, he tells me about his wine collection – apparently he has a big cellar at home. He doesn’t mention retirement, even though he’s at an age when most people would be happy to put their feet up, but that’s the measure of the man, I suppose.

I feel I can have a laugh with him as we’re playing well. I even make out that I already know the team for our next match, days before he’s announced it.

‘Who’s playing up front with me, boss? Am I playing up top on my own?’

He laughs. ‘Oh, so you think you’re playing, do you? Who else is in the team then?’

I rattle off a few names.

‘Yeah, well, you’re not too far off.’

As the season progresses, I discover that the only time I don’t like going in there is when I’ve been called up to see him. That usually means he’s unhappy with something I’m doing, or not doing, and it always happens when training has finished for the day. There’s a telephone in the players’ changing room. When it starts to ring, the lads know what’s coming next: a summons from The Manager. Someone’s going to get it.

‘Can you send Wayne to my office, please?’

When it’s me, the lads make funny noises, like I’m going to be in loads of trouble. Some of them make a sharp intake of breath, or whistle, just to wind me up.

Like the time in January 2005 when we’re preparing to play Liverpool. He makes the phone call. When I go into his office and sit on the big settee, he tells me I’m not playing well enough. He tells me I haven’t been thinking properly on the pitch.

‘You’ve got to start concentrating more, Wayne,’ he says. ‘I want you to keep things simple. You’re going out wide too much and I want you to stay up in the penalty area.’

I argue. I think it’s an unfair assumption of my game, but I accept his advice and get on with it. At Anfield I stay in the box as much as I can, I don’t drift wide. Then I answer him in the best way possible: I score the winning goal. Maybe that was his plan all along. Maybe he wanted to wind me up.

After a defeat, The Manager’s mood can be quite dark; he doesn’t talk to the players or joke around for a couple of weeks. He speaks to us as a group in team talks, but that’s as far as it goes. If anyone passes him at the training ground, he doesn’t say a word to them. I learn pretty quickly that it’s best to stay out of his way after a bad result. In my first few months at the club, when I see him eating in the canteen after a defeat, I steer clear. I get my food, keep my head down and walk to my table as quickly as I can.