There is something fitting, in the week after David Beckham’s new documentary was released, about Wayne Rooney taking a job at an earthy Championship club where his appointment will be unpopular with a large majority. The two superstars of consecutive England generations are roughly opposites in everything else.
Beckham is the smooth touchstone of every culture in which he has existed, one of those rare celebrities who acts as a snapshot in time. Manchester United’s Class of ’92 rose – Beckham was the poster boy. Footballers became celebrities – Beckham was the fashion icon. Ex-footballers earned wages that set them up for life – Beckham became an income generation machine, making money because he made money. Sport became intertwined with geopolitics – Beckham sang like a canary for Qatar.
Rooney’s persona appears simpler and, counterintuitively, therefore demands greater inspection. Whereas with Beckham we were always sold an image, with Rooney you saw nothing but the real thing for better and for worse. His transparency was the entirety of the image.
He was the street footballer kid, like so many other hundreds of thousands, who became a superstar through extraordinary talent and unbreakable determination. And yet somehow, despite all that, Beckham ended up being the more cherished of the two. Lesson: sometimes life is weird.
There’s another dichotomy here. If Rooney’s playing career was played out entirely in the public eye, his managerial career has bobbed along almost exclusively away from it. It paints Rooney as a glutton for punishment, a coaching masochist. He started at Derby County, who were in the process of falling into one of the most serious financial hangovers in English football history. Rooney found out about the club’s administration on Sky Sports News and still stayed for the forlorn fight against relegation after the 21-point deduction.
DC United were hardly in rude health either, second bottom of the Eastern Conference having just suffered their worst loss in MLS history days before he arrived. The club was a mass of disconnected souls and, ostensibly using younger players, Rooney improved their record from one season to the next. Do not let the lack of play-off qualification distract you: DC United were a mess before and significantly less of a mess with him.
Now Rooney is reportedly taking over at Birmingham City, who have just sacked their most popular manager in a while who had them sixth in the table, because the new owners have decided that they want a “no fear” style. The “not many defeats” style was working out pretty well, but you pay your money and take your choice in football ownership. Rooney will begin this race from several metres behind the start line.
This is certainly not a campaign for Rooney to have been over-promoted, parachuted into a job that he hadn’t earned, but it is true that in few other countries would the best player of their generation be slogging themselves in jobs like these. Rooney hardly needs the money. This must be hard work: the catcalls, the financial uncertainty of clubs, the “we don’t want you here” from St Andrew’s if it begins to go wrong.
The managerial career has become disconnected from what came before, to the extent that Rooney the player and Rooney the manager feel like different identities entirely. It’s hard to believe that he was still playing less than three years ago. The memories of that gloriously bundle of unexpended energy and anger now belong to a different time entirely. Had Rooney managed to start and stay at the top, that disunion would have been postponed.
But then that all answers its own question. Rooney could easily have taken the easier options: quiet retirement, easy money for easy sponsorship work, guest appearances on Monday Night Football or punditry for TNT Sports. But he had always considered his best – and most life-affirming – work to come when he was fighting. This was a player who scored one of his best goals after literally running straight from an argument with a referee to belt a volley in from 25 yards. We can be sure: Rooney needs to stay close to the edge, close to what he considers to be real, to be satisfied.
The amateur psychologist wonders whether this is the inevitable endgame of the boy wonder. Rooney’s defining club goal was arguably his first; by then we had remembered the name. His defining England goals came during his first major tournament in 2004. The supreme start to his career was elongated for at least six years, but that was matched by a slow march into retirement that was at least half a decade in the making and the fitness waned. That Rooney is a month younger than Luka Modric doesn’t seem real.
That can, must, create an inherent guilt, a determination to chase that early buzz and prove that you still deserve relevance and recognition, not from outsiders but from your own conscience. Rooney puts himself in difficult positions because that is the only way he knows how to make it all feel like 2002 and 2004 again. So he fights the fires, corrals the players and vows to keep you remembering the name
Who knows if it works – Rooney is certainly not going to be a better manager than he was a player; that brings its own emotional baggage. Birmingham City is a risky choice. But there is something to admire in his post-playing career. Rooney is not Beckham, a vast team tasked with manufacturing PR. The concept of “Brand Wayne” is risible.
Instead, Rooney is working for a career in management the only way he knows how: suffering just to prove that he is prepared to suffer, raging against the dying of the light because football is all he wants.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/fgqHeaI
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