Wayne Rooney: My Decade in the Premier League (9 page)

The opening day of the 2005/06 season begins at home: Everton, Goodison Park. Back to all the boos and the jeers that their lot can chuck at me. Like I’m bothered. I’ve got plenty of pre-match habits to get my head right, as most footballers have, and before this game I pray, which is something I’ve started to do because Coleen’s mum and dad are religious, so it’s become important to me, too. I have faith now.

It’s funny, I’m not afraid to be a believer in God, but I do all my praying in private. I’m not going to show it to people because I don’t need to. I don’t want people to see me praying every time I go on to a footy pitch. I’m not one for crossing myself as I run over the white line; I’m not looking up to the sky if ever I miss a sitter. Instead, in the away dressing room at Goodison – my United kit on, my boots
laced – I go off into a quiet corner and have a moment to myself.

I pray for the health of my family and my friends.

I pray that I don’t get badly injured or hurt.

I don’t pray for victory or a goal, I pray for my safety.

I’ve got other rituals, too.

Last night I collared the club’s kit man because I wanted to know exactly what combination of colours I’ll be wearing the next day.

‘Er, it’s the home shirt tomorrow, Wayne, black shorts, black socks. Why?’

Just wondered.

What I don’t tell him is that I’ve started visualising my performances the night before a game. As I get into bed I imagine the players I’m going to be coming up against the next day and I spend 20 minutes seeing situations where I’m in front of goal. I’m planning for what I’m going to do. I’ve realised that if I do my thinking before a match my head will be ready when the action starts.

I think if Everton’s defender, Tony Hibbert, is weak on one side, I can exploit it. Then I see the Gwladys Street End, I see Ronaldo moving quickly out wide and firing in a cross towards me. I see how I’m going to move once the ball comes my way. My first touch is perfect, I’m getting a shot off at goal. It flies past their keeper, Nigel Martyn.

1–0!

My eyes start to get heavy, I’m drifting off to sleep. Physically, I’m winding down, but mentally I’m like a golfer standing over his ball: I’m visualising shots, living perfect
results in my head. The thing is, I have to visualise everything in the right kit, otherwise it’ll throw me out of sync if we’re wearing different colours when it comes to kick-off the next day.

Everything’s happening in a red shirt, black shorts and black socks.

In my mind I watch a long ball from our defence landing at my feet. I’m on the edge of the Everton box. Their skipper, Phil Neville, is coming towards me. I know he’s committed, putting his tackles in hard all over the park. He dives in, skidding across the grass. I shape to shoot with my right, dropping a shoulder, before chopping the ball back inside as he passes me. I bang the ball past Martyn with my left peg.

2–0!

The next day when I wake up, I know I’m fully prepared.

Red shirt, black shorts and black socks.

When a chance comes my way, I’ll be ready for it.

Funny thing is, when the game starts for real the result in my head is right, only the details are different. Before the match, the boos are louder than ever before and everyone’s lobbing stick at me. Then Ruud puts us one-up in the 43rd minute and everything goes dead quiet.

Only seconds after we come out after the break, Everton defender Joseph Yobo has the ball in their half. I can see he’s looking to knock it back to Nigel Martyn, and as he plays the pass, I anticipate exactly where it’s going to go. I’m on it in a flash.

I’m 12 yards out with only the keeper to beat.

The ball’s running nicely into my path; Nigel Martyn realises he hasn’t got the advantage in distance so he stands still.

He’s not coming off his line; I’ve got buckets of space to aim at.

I make my choice.

Bottom left.

The ball hits the net and Goodison Park goes silent again. The boos that rang out every time I touched the ball in the first half have stopped. It’s great.

I love the silence here as much as I love the roar of 76,000 fans at Old Trafford.

I had it in my head that I was going to get a lot of stick this afternoon and I promised myself that if I scored a goal I wouldn’t celebrate, but the abuse was so bad in the first half that it’s been hard for me not to get emotional and wound up.

Sod it, I’m celebrating.

I run towards the United fans, sliding on my knees, screaming my head off as the rest of the team jump on me. Right now, I’m the only happy Everton fan in the country.

*****

As the season moves from August into September, the one thing I notice after a full year at United is that everyone tries so much harder against us, especially at Old Trafford. I expected it when I first signed – even The Manager and players like Gary Neville warned me that teams often up their
game against us, but it takes a bit of getting used to. Players I competed against in a blue shirt a couple of years back seem so much more fired up when I compete against them in red, it’s mad. Like Blackburn, who come to our place in September and win 2–1. They shouldn’t be beating us, we’re a team of top players, but we give away a couple of silly goals.

I suppose some of it is down to inexperience; we’re a bit naive. Everyone knows we’re a team in transition. Sure, we’ve got seasoned players like Giggsy, Scholesy and Gary Neville in the team; Edwin van der Sar has joined us from Fulham and he’s a top goalie. But there’s plenty of inexperience as well. Players like myself, Ronaldo and Darren Fletcher are still learning about breaking down teams who are desperate to defend. We don’t yet know how to see out games, we haven’t got much patience and it’s costing us silly points.

I do everything I can to make it easier for myself. I always watch our next opponents on the telly in the week before a match, just to get a feel for what I’m coming up against. One Saturday night in October I have a Chinese takeaway with a glass of wine;
Match of the Day
is on the telly and I take a look at next week’s team, Boro’. They’re terrible; they lose 2–1 to West Ham.

We should beat these 10
–
0 next week.

When we kick off seven days later at the Riverside Stadium in the cold and the wet, they’re like a different side – faster, stronger, hungrier than they were the previous week. They’ve been transformed. It’s like the thought of playing us has turned them into a better team. It does my
head in. We can’t get a grip on the game. In the opening minutes, their defenders target me and Ronnie and I can’t influence the play at all. Suddenly their midfielder, Gaizka Mendieta, hits a hopeful long-range shot which Edwin should save, but instead it hits the back of the net and the whole place goes mental. Boro’ are so pumped up that they then score another three and we get properly thumped.

The Manager is furious afterwards.

‘That was not a Manchester United performance,’ he screams as all of us sit in the dressing room afterwards, staring at our shoes. ‘You’re not fit to wear the shirts.’

He’s right and we know it. It takes half an hour before anyone can muster the energy to get into the shower.

It’s not been much better in the Champions League, either. Our lack of experience and impatience means we can’t break down the likes of Benfica, Villarreal and Lille in the group stages. Against Villarreal I lose my temper and sarcastically applaud the ref (Kim Milton Nielsen, the bloke who sent off David Beckham for England in the 1998 World Cup game against Argentina) when he books me for a late tackle. He then shows me another yellow and sends me off. We only win one game in the group and lose three, but it’s weird because going into the last match of the group against Benfica we know that if we win, we’ll qualify. Instead we lose and finish bottom of the table. Serves us right for not knowing how to break teams down when they sit back against us.

I’ve been on the other side of it, though. Whenever I played for Everton against United it always felt like a
massive game and we were always determined to defend. At Goodison, the fans were louder and players pushed the ball around at a higher tempo. When we went to Old Trafford, we battled like it was a fight to save the club. In October 2002 we even kept a clean sheet, well, for most of the game.

I was a sub that day. It was funny because when I came off the bench with 15 minutes to go, the game at 0–0, the United fans gave me loads of stick. They had their reasons, I suppose – I was a Scouser and lots had been written about me in the press. There was plenty of hype flying around about the sort of footballer I could become and it probably didn’t help that I was an aggressive lad on the pitch and I loved a tackle. The boos started straightaway, but I knew that was because we were clinging on to a draw and they didn’t want me to nick a winner.

Then, on 86 minutes, United scored the first of three goals.

Three!

Once they got the opener, there was absolutely nothing we could do to stop the battering. Our legs became heavier, our touch went out of the window. We were wrecked. The first goal blew us apart, like a pin bursting a balloon.

An equaliser against this lot at Old Trafford? No chance, pal.

Their second and third goals went in shortly afterwards. We were done in.

It’s funny, some of the lads at United don’t see the difference in our opponents – how they up their game when they
play us – but I do because I love studying the game and the teams we’re playing against in the league. I treat it as being part of the job. It’s homework,
overtime
.

I watch Spanish and Italian football. I’ll even watch the Championship teams. I don’t get anything from the games lower down the leagues, but if there’s a match on, I’ll take a look at it because I love it. I want to know who’s playing and how they’re playing. Most of all, I love watching strikers. I can learn something by watching anybody, no matter what standard they’re playing at.

*****

Roy Keane leaves the club in November 2005, which is massive news. The United fans love him, but he busts his foot against Liverpool in September and doesn’t really play again. I guess The Manager has decided it’s the end of the line for him and so Roy’s off to Celtic. It hasn’t helped that he’s criticised some of the younger players after the battering Boro’ gave us. Still, when he leaves Old Trafford it’s a bit of a shock for everyone.

‘It’s something we’ll have to deal with,’ says The Manager when he gets the squad together to break the news. No big fuss is made among the players, and Gary Nev is made skipper, which seems like a sound choice to me. Gary’s perfect for the job, a player’s player. I know he’ll do everything that’s best for the team because he’s a real leader and he’s great for everyone around the club, not just the lads in the first team, but the reserve and youth team players, too. Whenever any
of the kids have problems or questions about their contracts, they always go to him for advice.

Because of players like Gary, I’ve settled at United really easily. Old Trafford feels like home and being relaxed gives me self-belief – I know I can score goals and create chances for other players. A lot of the game is about confidence. With it, I’m unstoppable. Without it, I’m not the same footballer. There are some days when the goal looks huge and I just know I’m going to score. Then there are times when it seems to shrink to the size of a letterbox. All of it’s in my head.

For a month in 2005/06 between the end of October and the end of November, I go a handful of games without scoring, but I keep calm, which is hard. Sometimes in the middle of a bad run of form, or a few weeks without a goal, it’s easy to get wound up.

Why haven’t I scored?

What am I doing wrong?

What should I be doing?

But I have to stay focused, otherwise it’ll affect the way I think on the park. I shut it out. Instead, I keep going. I keep working. I know if I keep the game simple, then the goals will come. Luckily for me, when I’m not scoring for United, other players step in and do it for me, like Ruud, Ronaldo and Louis Saha, who we signed from Fulham in 2004. Louis and I really click on the pitch sometimes. He’s got a lot of pace to his game and he’s so good on the ball that I’m not sure whether he’s left- or right-footed, even after months of training and playing with him.

The Manager knows the goals will come back too, he knows how to keep me going during a lean spell. He tells me that when I’m not scoring goals it’s important that I make up for it in other areas, so in games I always chase down defenders and set up chances. I run my marker hard, pulling him wide, knackering him out. I make spaces for other players to leg it into. After the 90 minutes are done, I don’t beat myself up if I haven’t got a goal, but that’s not the case with the other forwards at the club. When Ruud or Ronnie haven’t scored in a game, they get a cob on, even if we’ve won. With me, if United have won I’m happy whether I’ve scored or not. Maybe I need more of that focus, that greed. Maybe I should be more moody if I haven’t scored a goal. At the moment, though, I only get upset if we lose.

It takes four league games, but my next goal comes in a 2–1 away win at West Ham in November and then I hit a bit of a hot streak, scoring against Pompey (3–0 win), Wigan (4–0), Villa (2–0) and Birmingham (2–2). On New Year’s Eve we hammer Bolton 4–1 and the team sits in second place. We’re miles away from Chelsea, but I reckon we’ve got it in us to win the league, provided we can cut out the silly mistakes and Chelsea slip up.