Wayne Rooney: My Decade in the Premier League (10 page)

We all know it’s a long shot. But at United, we never give up.

*****

Ruud isn’t happy. I think he knows his time at United is coming to an end and that the style of football we’re playing isn’t suited to him. He’s still an amazing goalscorer, but the players that The Manager has brought in like Ronaldo, Louis and myself are more geared to playing quick, counter-attacking football. We play with pace; Ruud likes to slow the ball down and bring other players into the action, but we’re not playing that way anymore.

I’ve had the feeling that he’s been unhappy from the minute I signed for United. Ronnie and I have been getting the headlines and I don’t think he’s been too chuffed about that – it hasn’t been our fault, we haven’t written them, but we’re definitely getting most of the attention. It’s not so bad for me, I get on with Ruud, but I don’t think him and Ronnie are the best of pals. There’s been one or two arguments on the training ground and Ruud’s become dead annoyed when Ronnie hasn’t released the ball to him as quickly as he’d like.

Then The Manager drops Ruud for the Carling Cup final against Wigan in February and he’s really not happy. He sits on the bench alongside our new January signings, Patrice Evra, a French full-back we’ve bought from Monaco, and our Serbian centre-half, Nemanja Vidic. Patrice already loves it here. He came from the sun and the sea in Monte Carlo and he knew Prince Albert of Monaco. But when it rains on the training ground, he starts dancing.

‘Welcome to England!’ he shouts.

It’s taken Patrice and Vida a while to settle because they can’t hack the pace of English football, they’re shocked by it. After their first training session at Carrington they both looked absolutely wrecked. Three weeks later they still look wrecked.

I wind them both up for a laugh.

‘Here, Rio,’ I say in the dressing room one day, knowing they can both hear. ‘These two are terrible, they can’t hack it.’

Vida and Patrice chuck some abuse back, but I can tell the Premier League has been a massive shock for them both. It is for all the foreign players when they first come here.

Despite Ruud’s bad mood before kick-off, we’re really fired up for the Carling Cup final, having beaten Barnet, West Brom, Birmingham and Blackburn to get here. The biggest motivator, though, is the pain of losing the FA Cup final to Arsenal the previous season. It still hurts and The Manager knows it’s driving us on. Before the game he’s calm. We’re strong favourites today, and he reckons that if we play our normal game against Wigan, we’ll win.

He’s not wrong. We score four, I get two. My first falls to me after the ball gets played up to Louis. He wins the header, the ball drops down and two defenders collide as they try to deal with it. The blunder leaves me with a one-on-one with the keeper and I lift the ball over his head into the corner of the net. Then I slot in my second after Rio wins a knockdown from a free-kick.

Wigan don’t have anything to hit us back with, they haven’t got a chance. Despite their lack of Premier League experience, both Patrice and Vida get on the pitch at the Millennium Stadium. Ruud doesn’t and he’s not happy. To be fair, I’d be moody in his situation, too. I know right then that he’ll probably leave the club in the summer.

*****

The Carling Cup is my first United trophy but it’s not enough because The Big One, the Premier League, looks like slipping away again.

Chelsea.

It’s the same story as last year: they’re strong up front, they defend hard all season. We run them close, though, cutting back the 11-point gap from New Year’s Eve and by the end of the campaign we have a slim chance to nick the title off them if we can beat them at their place on 26 April. The snag is that they then have to lose their final games against Blackburn and Newcastle. Meanwhile, we’ll have to beat Boro’ and Charlton in our remaining fixtures (and score a lot of goals). If Chelsea draw with us, though, they’ll win the title with matches to spare. The game is like another cup final; everything’s on a knife edge.

It’s a disaster for us from start to finish. Their defender, William Gallas, scores early on. Not long afterwards I go into a 50–50 tackle with John Terry, but I’m that fired up I get the ball but go straight through him. He lies still on the floor for ages and a stretcher is brought on for him but he manages to
get himself together. He plays on afterwards, but he’s clearly in pain. At the next corner, as we jostle in the penalty area, he whispers in my ear.

‘I’ve got a hole in my foot where your stud landed.’

I feel bad for him, but not that bad. It’s one of those things.

Get on with the game.

Then after 20 minutes, I go clean through on goal. Their keeper Petr Cech looms up in front of me and I put the ball wide. I know it’s a chance to put the squeeze on Chelsea, but I’ve blown it.
I feel sick
.

It doesn’t get any better in the second half. In fact, it’s a horror show: Joe Cole scores a second for Chelsea as he wriggles past a couple of defenders and bangs a shot past Edwin; I bust my foot when I go into a challenge with Chelsea defender Paulo Ferreira. It’s a nothing tackle really, but it’s enough to fracture a metatarsal and it’s bloody agony, though the pain is probably more mental than physical because as I leave the pitch, loads of questions race around my head.

Is the title race over?

Am I out for the World Cup in Germany in the summer?

The first is answered pretty shortly after I’m carried off. Chelsea score a third and our chances of winning the league are gone.

After the game, both me and John Terry are on crutches in the tunnel at Stamford Bridge. I reckon he’s in less pain than me because he’s got another Premier League winners’ medal around his neck and when we bump into one another,
we’re both going in different directions: me to the team bus back to Manchester, him to the pitch to celebrate with the Chelsea fans. He asks for a signed shirt.

Sure, JT, here you go, mate.

When I hand it back, he sees that I’ve written a personal message, as well as my signature:

‘To JT, can I have my stud back?’

He doesn’t look too happy, but then neither do I most probably. It’s my second season at Old Trafford and Chelsea have won the league both times. We’ve not even got close to challenging them. I look at the Premier League standings a couple of days later:

I’ll admit it: as we make the journey back home, a little bit of doubt creeps in.

Are we going to be good enough to win the league?

Old Trafford, 20 August 2006; the first day of the season. There’s a mirror by Ronaldo’s seat in the Old Trafford dressing room. In the time I’ve been playing with Ronnie the one thing I’ve noticed about him is that he can’t walk past his reflection without admiring it, even if we’re about to play a game of football. Every match, before the team goes out for the warm-up, he runs through the same routine. The kit goes on, the boots go on. Not long after, Ronnie turns to his reflection and stares, psyching himself up for the game.

If there’s one person with a bigger self-belief than Ronaldo then I haven’t met him yet. He’s not shy; he loves his clothes and the clobber he wears is always super-expensive and covered in shiny logos – Dolce & Gabbana, Armani, you name it, he’s swaggered into the training
ground wearing it, looking immaculate from head to foot. He must spend a fortune on his wardrobe.

But Ronaldo’s biggest love is football.

At the training ground he tells us he wants to be The Best Player In The World, that he’s desperate to be The Greatest. He has the determination about him to make it happen, too. Fair play to him, I like that attitude, but it’s not for me. I’m more into helping the team to win things rather than getting any personal accolades or special gongs for the mantelpiece at home, but if Ronnie wants to be the best footy player on the planet and it helps United to our first Premier League title since I’ve been here, well, I’m all for it.

Ronnie’s ambition isn’t just talk, either. In the changing rooms at Carrington before the 2006/07 season I notice something different about him. He’s bigger. He’s come back from the World Cup in Germany muscly and buffed up, like he’s been on the weights all summer. On the pitch in pre-season, he’s started cutting out all the fancy tricks and flicks and finding an end product to his mazy runs down the park. Gary Nev is done in. During the week he has to mark Ronaldo in training matches. When he’s not marking Ronnie, he’s trying to do a job on Ryan Giggs. Every morning he grumbles about having to retire early, though at least he hasn’t got to worry about marking Ruud in training as well. Real Madrid signed him in the summer.

I know one thing: this change in Ronaldo hasn’t come about by luck. He works bloody hard all week. Some players go home straight after training, but he’s usually out there with a bag of balls long after clocking-off time, working on
different drills – free-kicks, headers, long-range shooting. I think it’s something a lot of people haven’t recognised in him just yet; fans think players like Ronaldo are born with a talent and that’s it. ‘Everything comes easy for him,’ they say; they think he can’t be coached. Part of that might be true but a lot of hard work goes into maintaining his ability. When I watch him train or see him scoring great goals for fun in pre-season friendlies, I think he really could become the best player in the world.

Now, before the first game of the season at Old Trafford, he goes through his usual pre-match routine. He looks pristine.

The lads start laughing, pulling his leg. Then he goes out and scores a cracking goal as we spank Fulham 5–1. I score two. It’s United’s biggest opening day win since before World War II. And we don’t let up all season.

*****

The mad thing is, Ronaldo and I aren’t supposed to be getting on. The papers decide we’re not going to work together because of an incident that happened during the World Cup. In England’s quarter-final against Portugal –
Ronaldo’s Portugal
– I got tangled up with their defender, Ricardo Carvalho, and accidentally stuck a boot on him. It looked bad but actually it was a total accident. As I protested my innocence, Ronnie started waving an imaginary card around, getting in the ref’s face. The official pulled out the red and I was off.

An early bath.

Tournament over.

When I walked to the tunnel, I knew I couldn’t really blame Ronaldo for what had happened because he was trying to win the game for his country. Besides, in the first half I’d tried to get him booked for diving, so I was as bad as him really. But moments after my card, Ronaldo started winking at the sidelines, and to people watching the game on the telly it looked bad, like he was dead pleased about it. Down to 10 men, England then went out on pens and all hell broke loose – everyone immediately decided that Ronaldo and I were the best of enemies and his wink would spell trouble for United in the coming months. I knew what was in store so when I bumped into him in the tunnel after the game I gave him a heads up.

‘The fans will be going mad over this one,’ I said. ‘They’ll be trying to make a big deal of it, so we’ll just have to get on with things as normal because there will be talk all summer.’

He understood, he’s a bright lad, but not long afterwards the papers reckoned he was off to Real Madrid; apparently me and him weren’t talking, which was absolute rubbish. The truth is, I like Ronaldo, always have done. He’s a good lad, he’s great to have around the dressing room. The Manager knew we’d be fine together, too. He didn’t sit us down for a pep talk when we arrived for the first day back at pre-season. There was no need. He understood it would be business as usual with the two of us.

The United lads loved the drama though. Everyone gave us stick in the dressing room, and when we turned up for the first session back at the club someone even brought in a pair of boxing gloves, as if the pair of us were going to have a scrap before we warmed up for the morning. But after our first practice game together everything was as right as rain: Ronnie looked sharp and we were playing well together, everyone was. I could tell that we were going to have a cracking season.