Manchester United faithful lose faith in unfaithful Wayne Rooney
Liverpool and Liverpudlians are much in the news these days, for good reasons and bad.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that John Lennon’s 70th birthday was celebrated, an occasion he might have enjoyed himself had he not left Merseyside for New York, with all the tragic consequences that brought about.
Then there was the saga of Liverpool-born dim bulb Wayne Rooney and his ludicrous love-hate relationship with Manchester United, not to mention his equally ludicrous relationship with, shall we say, women of a dubious “profession.”
In 2004, Rooney abandoned Everton, the Liverpool-based club that the Galaxy’s Landon Donovan says he wants to return to in January, and signed with Manchester United. There, the player known for obvious reasons as Shrek became both a global star and a global embarrassment for England.
On Wednesday, during United’s European Champions League victory over Bursaspor of Turkey, United fans held aloft banners at Old Trafford, the least offensive of which read: “Coleen forgave you, we won’t.”
“Who’s the whore now, Wayne?” was another.
The reference was to Rooney’s sordid and widely publicized flings with a $1,500-a-night prostitute last year at a time when his wife, Coleen, was expecting their first child, and to Rooney’s declaration last week that he wanted to leave United because he doubted “the continued ability of the club to attract the top players in the world.”
Said Rooney, who turns 25 Sunday: “For me, it’s all about winning trophies.”
Rubbish. It was a mercenary move geared to getting his salary jacked up from $140,000 a week to $250,000 a week, and he succeeded. On Friday, he signed a new contract that will keep him at United for the next five years, assuming he is more faithful to his club than he has been to his wife.
Americans play into this story, too, with principal owner Malcolm Glazer and his family deserving the blame not only for putting United in a precarious financial position by borrowing heavily to buy the team, but also for not having the fortitude to tell Rooney to take a hike when he essentially held the club to ransom.
Apparently, you can insult the Glazers by questioning their commitment to winning, embarrass the Glazers by your off-field behavior, and still get them to open the bank vault for you.
Amazing.
Before Rooney put pen to paper, the Glazers also promised Manchester United Coach Alex Ferguson $50 million next year to spend on new players.
So if Rooney is smiling Sunday at his lavish birthday bash, so is Ferguson, but the Scot’s most memorable contribution to the week came in a quote:
“Some players like to think there’s a better world somewhere else but it never really works,” Ferguson said. “They look in a field and see a cow and they think it’s a better cow than the one in their own field, and it never really works out that way.”
Liverpool’s former coach, Rafael Benitez, now coaching Inter Milan, also made indirect reference to cows in the strangely bovine week gone by.
In launching his latest attack on Liverpool’s recently ousted North American ownership duo of George Gillett and Tom Hicks, Benitez blamed Christian Purslow, the man they installed as Liverpool’s managing director, for the club’s downfall.
“We have a saying in Spanish: ‘White liquid in a bottle has to be milk,’” Benitez told bemused reporters.
“What does this mean? It means that after 86 points and finishing second in the league [in 2009], what changed? The Americans, they chose a new managing director and everything changed.”
Liverpool, an 18-time English champion and five-time European champion, languished in 18th place in the Premier League, two from the bottom, ahead of Sunday’s game against Blackburn Rovers.
Thankfully, however, the club does have a new owner — John Henry, the man not the horse.
As owner of the Boston Red Sox, Henry’s decision to splash out $470 million on the Anfield club takes on an even more interesting aspect when you consider that it was almost a decade ago that Manchester United, Liverpool’s longtime rival, signed a marketing agreement with the New York Yankees.
The Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, in other words, now has a transatlantic twist.
Henry was at Everton last Sunday to see his newest team. But American goalkeeper Tim Howard shut out Liverpool and gave English headline writers an instant angle. Here was one two-line effort: “Blue Sox 2, Red Sox 0.”
Henry, meanwhile, said he would do everything necessary “to get this club where it needs to be.”
Whether Roy Hodgson, Benitez’s successor and a more-than-capable coach, stays, is questionable, especially when Henry cannot help but realize that he has a potential coach in his own back yard: New England Revolution coach and former Liverpool icon Steve Nicol.
Now there would be an interesting and potentially popular move.
