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Football365 said:
Rooney has been Deified and now Destroyed
It’s easy on a basic human level to sympathise with Wayne Rooney. Few of us have not been drunk in public and stared with bleary eyes into a lens, and even fewer would be hypocritical enough to criticise someone else for doing so.
The subsequent confected tabloid outrage is as bilious as it is predictable, disrespectful and unfair.
But then, the football world is an unfair world. Sometimes it has been unfair in Wayne’s favour; now it’s unfair to his detriment.
Unfair because he’s always been subjected to over-the-top language. For years the papers have been obsessed with him. For years he has benefited by being over-praised and over-vaunted by a slavering media, keen to find a working-class, boy-made-good hero to help sell newspapers and subscriptions. From the age of 17, they built him up into a superhero. His average was called good. His good was called great. His great called genius. Even just two weeks ago, members of the press were saying ‘the big man, unquestionably, is back’. All of that was unfair.
For years this has annoyed many observers, not because they have anything against the player necessarily, but because the disparity between reported quality and actual quality was, at times, so deep and wide, it felt like everyone was being taken for a fool. No number of statistical records could hide the fact that Wayne has blown hot and cold throughout large parts of his career.
Even now, Rooney’s defenders are claiming he’s been under-appreciated, which does seem an utterly remarkable claim to make for a man who earns over £42,000 per day and whose every move or utterance has made hellish ‘Roo’ punning headlines for well over a decade.
For years, average or poor performances for club and country were largely airbrushed out of existence or understated, the barren stretches excused, the awful first touches not even commented on. Then, when in one of his rich veins of form, he was hailed almost as a living football God walking amongst us, a man we should feel privileged to witness while his critics were derided as idiots. Again, very unfair. Unfair because it misrepresented him, in exactly the same way they’re now misrepresenting him as some sort of lecherous alcoholic tramp. He has had to try and live up to the hyperbole; this put pressure on him because he simply couldn’t, and thus somehow looked worse than he ever was. All unfair.
There was mileage in painting him as brilliant; now there’s mileage in painting him as washed-up. Neither was or is true, but we live in an age of extremes with little nuance and a broad disregard for truth.
It’s easy to see why it is galling to Wayne. We all want to believe our good press and dismiss our bad press, even if both are a distortion of the truth. But even after the brightest sunshine comes darkness.
Football’s current obsession with fitness and athleticism over and above anything else means that going on the drink is seen by some as a venal sin against the holy temple of the body. This sort of crushing dullness is but one more brick in the wall which separates football and footballers from the populace.
And as Jurgen Klopp reminded us this week, some of the finest players ever to entertain us with their feet were hellraisers, drinkers and smokers. We shouldn’t care about this sort of thing, and indeed, many fans don’t. Many see it, as they’ve always seen it, as just part of a normal human’s life, albeit a normal human with an abnormal – some might say unfair – degree of wealth.
But make no mistake, just as they once waited for him to make a simple, accurate pass in order to call it world class, now they will wait for him to make an error, or look unfit, and they will hammer home the drinking narrative, as they set about bringing him down to earth from the lofty peak they had placed him on. For the media that have so long misrepresented him, it is all simply part of a natural life cycle.
As Wayne said, “enough is enough” and the truth is, it has been for some time now. Enough of the unwarranted praise and fawning, enough of the unwarranted criticism and disrespect. But when it comes to Wayne Rooney, for the press, for years now, too much is never enough and this will be as true of his football obituary as it was about the rest of his career. They’re doing it because they think there are more copies and clicks in documenting his decline. It’s perfect. The higher you build someone up, the more mileage there is in knocking him down.
So even though enough is enough about Wayne Rooney, I doubt it ever will be until the day he retires and opens a tobacconists…and even then…