The Rooney Delusion
This piece appeared in Red Issue magazine [R.I.P. in peace ur with the angels now etc] in October 2014
Regular readers of RI may by now be familiar with the idea of cognitive dissonance: the curious mental process by which a person contrives to believe two contradictory ideas, or cope with facts that do not match his existing opinions. You’ll also know it usually crops up with regard to Liverpool FC.
But that’s just the most extreme example. Most football fandom requires an almost perpetual state of cognitive dissonance of some kind or other. United fans needed plenty of it to reconcile Fergie’s post-Glazer-takeover record as manager with his role as the supposed custodian of the club’s interests. Or, come to that, to square our famous insistence upon scintillating, attacking football with the functional, effective and, for the most part, boring play that brought an over-achieving squad two titles in Fergie’s last four years.
That particular hallucination was fed by the media, most of all by TV pundits, who told us again and again, as we watched results ground out, that we were seeing United’s best traditions in action. “They don’t know any other way to play,” and so forth. With Fergie gone, so has the fear of having a pop at United. Commentators and analysts who once wouldn’t have said boo to any goose with a United squad number now happily pile in. And well they might. There’s been plenty to criticise.
But one sacred cow remains. If you were going to pick out an individual player whose performances most frequently fail to match expectations, his salary or his status at the club, it would have to be Wayne Rooney. Put United on television, though, with the sound on and the picture off (obviously, the opposite of the optimum way round), and you’d think he was still the business.
I say, “still,” because although it’s undoubtedly the case Rooney never became the player he should have been, he was brilliant once. That he didn’t flourish as he might has had a great deal to do with one of his better qualities: his selflessness as a team player. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — his contemporaries, whom it was once assumed would be his peers — have long benefited from having teams set up around them. Rooney was part of one of those teams, and was frequently obliged to play in less favoured roles both to help free Ronaldo (which worked) and to compensate for a lack of quality elsewhere in the squad. No wonder he ended up loathing Fergie. He might well look at Messi and Ronaldo and think that there, but for his former manager, could go he.
But that’s only part of the story. There haven’t been the same questions over those other two players’ fitness or lifestyles as with Rooney’s. And neither his talents being sacrificed for the benefit of the team, nor his sometime porkiness and fondness for a fag, can explain why, now that he looks in good physical shape and is indulged in every way by his newest manager [Louis van Gaal], he has played so poorly, so often.
Rooney was once that rare type of footballer, one both excellent and versatile. As a centre-forward he could be devastating; a little further back, in a playmaker role, he had the vision to see passes and the ability to make them. Louis van Gaal, having awarded him the captaincy, started him in every league game for which he was available, and having given him a run up front in what Rooney once said is his preferred position, then decided— justly, on the evidence — that Rooney wasn’t cutting it as the front man. So van Gaal moved him to perhaps the squad’s most contested spot — what he calls the Number 10 role, behind the strikers — and kept him there despite another series of frustrating turns. It took Rooney’s own poor judgement against West Ham to dislodge him from the position [Rooney incurred a three-game ban after being sent off in United’s 2–1 home win at the end of September].
Yet both pundits and, weirdly, the majority of fans have kept faith with him, as if what’s happening and what they’re seeing are two different things. Again and again he miscontrols the ball, passes to an opponent, saves the other side the trouble of breaking up a promising attack — and the men on the telly babble about how “his workrate, his commitment, are incredible,” as he goes haring about trying to remedy yet another fuck-up. Still the fans chant his name when he scores, which is the one thing he may be relied upon to do. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that the whole point of the game? Well, not quite. Firstly, the point of United’s game is to be good to watch. Secondly, for every goal he scores, how many potential opportunities does he scupper before they develop? Somebody probably has a stat about that, but they can keep it. I’m talking rather about what feels to the spectator like a very high ratio of frustration to satisfaction, particularly for a star player who’s meant to be at his peak, and is feted and paid accordingly.
Rooney’s importance to the England set-up no doubt has something to do with this; that’s a boat nobody wants to rock. Away from the telly, a few voices in the press have noted Rooney’s decline: Paul Scholes (who then backtracked somewhat); The Mirror’s Derek McGovern, a wind-up merchant who, aptly for a tipster, is generally right only by accident. But for the most part, The Rooney Delusion holds sway. It’s as if neither United nor England fans can afford to admit the truth to themselves: that not only is Rooney not the great player he could have been, he’s not even the decent player he still could and ought to be right now.
