Wayne Rooney’s more than used to finding his face sprawled across the back pages but the Manchester United and England captain discovered himself on the front of The Sun earlier this week after being pictured looking rather bleary-eyed at five in the morning.
The story goes that Wazza Roo stayed at The Grove hotel, frequently used by the England national team, after his team-mates had left and crashed a wedding party – apparently necking a bottle of red wine until the early hours and getting “comedy drunk,” to quote one of The Sun’s anonymous sources.
The aftermath has been sincere to say the least, with England’s all-time record goalscorer formally apologising to interim manager Gareth Southgate and FA head honcho Dan Ashworth before releasing an official statement.
Perhaps we’re alone here, but Football FanCast just can’t work out what all the fuss is about – an adult, getting drunk in sanctioned time off? It’s no different to what we get up to every weekend!
Here’s four reasons why the world needs to get off Rooney’s back.
Hyperbole galore
It’s hard to dispute the pictures The Sun published as evidence of an at the very least tipsy Wayne Rooney. He looks like most of us would at five in the morning after a full bottle of wine – red lipped, struggling to hold his head up and rather blurry-eyed.
But The Sun have never been the most balanced of sources and once again, their report on Rooney’s antics is absurd in its hyperbole. They even bring his Irish heritage into the equation, quoting an unnamed agent as saying; “Wayne’s always liked a drink. That’s the culture and type of Irish-origin family he comes from.”
And their attempts to paint Rooney as some sort of alcohol-based time-bomb waiting to explode into a world of addiction continued with bizarre comparisons to Paul Gascoigne – a man with so many problems England team-mates used to calm him down by letting him fish in a bath tub.
“The worry is because of how big a part football is in his life when it goes there’s a big hole there and he replaces it with drink. There are echoes of Gazza here and we just hope he can come back from that, and keep his head screwed on,” their unnamed source added.
In the original article and the follow-up, phrases like ‘hit the bottle’ and ‘paralytic’ are littered throughout, suggesting Rooney – a professional athlete who plays football at the highest level twice a week – is a genuine alcoholic. Ridiculous.
Entitled to a drink
Wayne Rooney is a fully-grown adult in a high-pressure industry, who knew he’d be out of action for a few days after picking up a knee injury. He’s fully entitled to take a night off and unwind in the same manner most of us would, regardless of his position as Manchester United and England captain.
In fact, poor old Wazza deserves a drinking session more than most of us. Amid an incredibly difficult period of his career, the forward has received endless criticism over the past 18 months, with the vast majority of the tabloids constantly declaring he’s past it.
That must place enormous pressure on the 31-year-old, especially whilst trying to perform skipper duties for club and country and turn around his admittedly underwhelming form.
So if anybody deserved the chance to celebrate a win over Scotland it’s surely one of the 22 players who started, currently with the world on his shoulders.
And it’s not as if Rooney’s done something hugely irresponsible; he’s not taken drugs, hired a prostitute or killed someone – he just had a little too much to drink. If that was a crime, we’d all be jailbirds.
England staff were with him
It has since emerged that Rooney was by no means acting rogue last weekend. In fact, team-mate Phil Jagielka gatecrashed the wedding with him, alongside England backroom staff (including an unnamed coach) and FA employees.
So the fact Rooney’s had to apologise to the England boss and the FA’s technical director is nothing short of ridiculous. That’s like a teacher encouraging you to graffiti “Iceland Sucks” across the front of the school, and then the head master issuing you a month’s worth of detentions for it.
England staff should be experienced and savvy enough to sniff out a potential PR disaster and on this front, they undoubtedly let Rooney down.
Of course, he’s an adult who can make his own choices but to let the United forward stay at a wedding until 5am and take pictures with guests whilst looking suspiciously intoxicated and in an England training top was incredibly naive.
Whilst we still stand by the claim Rooney was entitled to a little booze-up, the present England staff should have provided much better protection from the media circus that has since ensued.
Service for club and country
It’s impossible to deny Wayne Rooney is on the decline. In truth, the United skipper peaked during the first five years of his career and has since been on a downward trajectory – that could well end with him leaving Old Trafford at the end of the season.
But regardless, Wazza Roo has been an exceptional servant for both club and country throughout the years. He’s England’s all-time record goalscorer and will likely take the same title at Manchester United, the biggest club in the country, before the end of the campaign.
But instead of the media focusing on Rooney’s unprecedented achievements, they constantly remind us of his failings, whether on or off the pitch.
The drunken photo scandal is just one episode in what seems to be a campaign against Rooney – and a particularly unjustified one at that. If Bobby Charlton was treated in the same way after 1966, the world would be mortified.