Rooney: The Making Of A Dream

As Wayne Rooney prepares for his Manchester United testimonial match, features editor Steve Bartram recalls how the striker began his journey to Old Trafford...

“He dreams about goals and everything is geared to the back of the net.”

Penned by Everton coach Andy Windsor in 1996, at the end of Wayne Rooney’s first season in the club’s Centre of Excellence, the summary proved a spectacularly prescient assessment of a player who would go on to become the all-time record goalscorer for England and, barring a shock turn of events, Manchester United.

It was also a relative understatement for a player whose 29-game season with Everton’s Under-10s had yielded 114 goals (an average of just under four per game). For Rooney, however, just one game was memorable.

“The only match I remember now was against Manchester United, when we hammered them 12-2 and I scored with an overhead kick from the edge of the box,” he later recounted. “When I scored, I heard both sets of parents start clapping. I’ll always remember that day.”

The same applied to Paul McGuinness, the coach of a United side whose Under-10s were playing their first-ever game together. So short stocked were his ranks that Peter Schmeichel’s son, Kasper, was roped into playing because they had no goalkeeper. Having watched Rooney score half of Everton’s dozen, McGuinness provided Alex Ferguson with mixed news after the match.

“I remember coming back and saying that we’d been beaten by 10 goals," he recalled. "You don’t generally want to advertise that fact to the manager - but I did mention that we’d seen a kid who had done very well."

United’s interest was under way, although early enquiries revealed that Rooney was a devout Evertonian playing for the club of his dreams and would not countenance leaving Merseyside. Undeterred, the player was very much on the club’s watch list. According to Ferguson, United tried to sign Rooney twice before eventually getting him. The first attempt, when the striker was 14, stemmed from a youth meeting between the Under-15 Reds and Blues at Altrincham’s Moss Lane, an encounter which gave United coach Jim Ryan his first look at young Rooney.

“It was a good game which I think we won 5-1 or 5-2, but despite the fact they’d been beaten by quite a few goals and been under the cosh, you could see this lad just would not surrender,” recalls the Scot. “Even in the last five or 10 minutes he was zooming in from the left wing and firing in shots at goal. If he didn’t score the goal, he was punching the air in frustration, and that’s quite an unusual thing to find in a 14 or 15-year-old.

“He was up there with the best I’ve ever seen at that age. The problem with kids who play football is that you can’t really compare them. David Beckham reached the same sort of level as Wayne, but you wouldn’t compare them as players because they’re entirely different types. I’m looking at Wayne at the time and thinking he’s got all these qualities: this determination, this never-say-die spirit, this efficiency. I was really impressed not only by his skills, because he’d played so well, but also his fighting spirit and the assumption that his side could still rescue the game. For most kids of that age, if they go three or four goals down in the second half they tend to give it up, but it was that kind of quality which stood out. I was almost laughing to myself: ‘He’s still going!’

“I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t really make out just how big he was from my vantage point, and I thought to myself: ‘I’ve got to see what size he is.’ After the game, there was a reception for the Everton boys who had travelled. They were all having their sandwiches and drinks, but I saw one of their coaches so I walked up to say 'hello' - what I really wanted to do was stand beside Wayne to see exactly how big he was!"

“I didn’t submit a written report about Wayne, I just kept mentioning him to the manager from then on. That was my approach: just keep on pestering him about this kid.”

Despite his obvious brilliance, the kid was going through a tough time. He felt the dramatic progress of his first few years at Everton had slowed, he had repeatedly clashed with his coach and he was also battling knee and back pain. A chat with former Toffees manager Colin Harvey was later cited as a turning point in Rooney’s life. Having begun to question his love for the game during the course of the season, the 14-year-old was taken aside by Harvey for a pep talk which Rooney still recalls vividly.

“He said he hadn’t seen a player with the talent that I had, so I would be making a mistake if I quit.”

Suitably lifted, Rooney also found progress in the medical room, where he was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease, a common growing-pains-related complaint. Furthermore, Everton insisted that he give up his beloved twice-weekly amateur boxing sessions, a difficult sacrifice, but one which ultimately took care of the back pain.

Though free of his aches, Rooney later admitted: “During that difficult year, I seemed to develop a terrible temper and found myself getting into lots of fights on the pitch.” England and Burnley goalkeeper Tom Heaton, a product of the United Academy, vouched for such an altercation, chuckling that seeing the Everton striker and Reds defender Mark Howard both receive red cards for an altercation, “was pretty unheard of that level.”

Wayne’s reasoning was simple: “It was all down to this mad desire to win, that’s all.”

With Rooney in the ranks, Everton’s youth teams won more than they lost. Word had spread of his capabilities and his presence in matches - and, by the age of 15, he was already featuring for the Under-19s – always ensured a swollen attendance. United’s scouts were invariably among the audience and had been for years. Like all burgeoning talents, Rooney was subject to peaks and troughs in form, and there were occasional quiet performances which did little to justify his hype. According to United’s former head of recruitment Geoff Watson, however, it was Everton’s attitude to their own asset which was most telling.

“One thing you learn in this business is that the club always know better about their own player than anyone else,” said Watson. “When you spoke to the Everton people they were always so confident that they had a star in the making. They were so convinced about Wayne's ability. Everton knew what they'd got from an early age. I think Wayne was always waiting for the bigger stage.”

He wouldn’t have to wait too long. Rooney starred in three successive FA Youth Cup campaigns for Everton’s Under-18s, between the age of 14 and 16, the third of which catapulted him to the attention of the wider football world. Ahead of the semi-final second leg against Tottenham at White Hart Lane, former Spurs boss David Pleat held a question-and-answer session for some of the home supporters. Discussing the game ahead, Pleat warned the fans to watch out for Everton’s centre-forward, young Wayne Rooney, who had apparently attracted the attention of Sir Alex Ferguson and had been tipped to appear for teh Toffees' first team before the season was out.

That call would ultimately rest on David Moyes, who had become Everton manager exactly three weeks earlier. Soon after taking the Goodison Park post, the Scot had been told about a special talent in his club’s ranks. He drove down to London for the semi-final decider against Spurs and saw Rooney net twice in the first 39 minutes, the second a 30-yard screamer after his initial free-kick had been blocked.

“When I first saw him I thought: ‘This boy’s outstanding,’” recalls Moyes. “That kind of talent doesn’t come along often. I was very lucky to have joined a club that had Wayne Rooney.”

After the match, Rooney was informed that he would be a first-team squad member the following season. But even then, Wayne still found time to skip ahead of schedule, making it onto the bench 17 days later for Everton’s Premier League trip to Southampton. The Merseysiders won 1-0 and, though the travelling supporters were baying for Rooney’s introduction while he warmed up, he remained on the bench.

Rooney’s reaction to being involved in a first-team squad at just 16 years, five months and 28 days old? “I was well choked,” he later recalled.” In the dressing room afterwards, I moaned, saying I should have been used, but only to myself as I didn’t really know the first-team players, never having trained with them.”

By this point, Wayne’s school week had been reduced to two days so that he could spend the remainder of the week training full-time with Everton. That privilege was, in his words: “The first time I realised I might be special as a footballer.” Within long, the world had arrived at the same conclusion. He partook in Everton’s full pre-season programme, then made his Premier League debut and notched an assist – wearing the no.18 shirt previously worn by Paul Gascoigne – in a 2-2 draw with Tottenham, aged 16 years and 298 days. After the match, he celebrated by playing football in the streets with his mates.

Despite starting the opening game, Rooney would be carefully managed by Moyes, who drip-fed the prodigy’s potent energy into his side. Wayne's eighth first-team appearance, coming in a League Cup win at Wrexham, yielded two goals and made him Everton’s youngest-ever goalscorer, at which point things really began to take off. Six days later, he made his maiden appearance at Old Trafford as a substitute, entering the fray with 16 minutes left of a tense, goalless Premier League match.

Mikael Silvestre, who started alongside Laurent Blanc for the Reds that evening, laughs: “I remember Jimmy Ryan telling me: ‘Watch that boy. He’s fast.’ He was! He was lightning fast. He was unpredictable and, back then, there weren’t many videos of him to use to stop him. I think even if we'd had some videos, he would have been able to go past us. It was difficult to stop him.”

Just four minutes after the substitution, Silvestre almost found that to his cost as Rooney, leading a counter-attack from the halfway line, surged away from the Frenchman, then jinked past Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs before unleashing a low shot which goalkeeper Fabien Barthez just about managed to clutch.

United went on to score three late goals and take the points, but Rooney’s impact had been noted. A dozen days on, champions Arsenal felt it jarringly as he cracked in a 30-yard injury-time winner to end the Gunners’ 31-game unbeaten run. A fortnight later, it was a sublime solo goal at Leeds which took the headlines but, just as he was becoming accustomed to positive press, the youngster soon sampled the wrong kind of attention after picking up the first red card of his career in a Boxing Day draw at Birmingham City. Less than three months after his 17th birthday, the narrative was set as far as the media was concerned: English football had a new flawed genius on which to pin its merciless scrutiny and relentless hope.

As Wayne later conceded, having found himself criticised in newspapers for his attire and demeanour at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year dinner (despite winning the award’s junior equivalent): “All season, they had been building me up, saying what a breath of fresh air this brilliant new young player was, and now they were putting the boot in and portraying me as a young, yobbish thug. You can’t win.”

While the spotlight and scrutiny would burn ever brighter as the youngster’s career progressed, there was still overwhelming positivity and excitement around what he looked likely to bring to both the Premier League and the England national team during the course of his career. The country knew the potential he possessed. By association, it allowed England, its supporters and its press to dream.

“It was [then-Bolton manager] Sam Allardyce who said to me after one of Wayne’s early games: ‘You’re so lucky to have such a good young talent,’” recalls Moyes, who had a battle on his hands to keep the youngster sated, especially when his softly-softly approach to Wayne’s club career was juxtaposed with life on the international fast track. Sven-Goran Eriksson had given Rooney his international bow in February 2003 against Australia and brought him on in a vital Euro 2004 qualifier at Liechtenstein the following month. Four days after the latter, Moyes received a call from the Swede.

“Sven phoned to say Wayne was going to make his first start for England up at Sunderland against Turkey that night, and I got in the car right away and drove up,” says the Scot. “I was proud of Wayne for his achievement at such a young age. At Everton at the time, we didn’t have any England internationals. We were rebuilding the club and trying to get them back to a good level, so Wayne was really the first of that group who started that. I was thrilled. But it was always going to be difficult to keep hold of him because at that time at Everton, we weren’t yet ready to compete with the top teams in the country. If Wayne had come along three or four years later, it would have been a different situation with the chance of keeping him.”

Unfortunately for Moyes, Rooney’s second season in senior football did nothing to convince him that Goodison Park was the place to be. There was little change domestically, where eight goals in 37 Everton appearances in 2001/02 were followed by nine in 40 in 2003/04, but it was his nine goals in 12 England outings, and a barnstorming series of displays at Euro 2004, which hastened events. Although the teen’s tournament ended disastrously with a broken metatarsal bone suffered during England’s quarter-final exit against Portugal, the football world was besotted with the otherwise unstoppable man-boy.

“I have genuinely always believed that if Wayne hadn’t been injured against Portugal then we would have gone on to beat them and reached the semi-finals,” says Gary Neville. “He was just phenomenal. What he was doing at that time, nobody could handle him. He could turn, run with the ball, play passes, score goals, he was aggressive… he was everything you want in a football player. He was electric. The fearlessness of him was unbelievable. The bigger the game, the more he seemed to enjoy it. Sometimes you’d see players, particularly young players, become a bit more anxious as we got closer to the game but he was never like that at all. He never appeared to have any fear about football whatsoever. In that tournament he was absolutely unbelievable.”

Despite the rave reviews stacking up, plus mountains of scouting reports dating back over the previous years, United were unmoved. “Alex had followed him since he broke into the Everton youth ranks and the first team,” says former Reds chief executive David Gill. “Clearly we were interested but, truth be told, we weren’t looking to do anything that summer because we didn’t think he’d be available. Suddenly, Newcastle expressed an interest.”

The step from Goodison Park to St James’ Park might not have seemed sizeable to outsiders, but during the course of the 2003/04 season, Rooney’s relationship with Moyes had deteriorated dramatically, with the striker feeling that his manager was holding him back. Allied to persistent doubts about the Toffees’ ambition matching his own and a desire to get out of the city of Liverpool where he felt under incessant scrutiny, Rooney was determined to leave and would have signed for the Magpies if they had been the only bidders. In the event, despite buying Louis Saha and Alan Smith in the previous eight months, Ferguson’s resolve cracked and he persuaded the United board to join the bidding.

“The minute they appeared, I knew that was the club I wanted to join.”

Everton’s supporters, unaware of the hidden political landscape at Goodison, were irate. Rooney’s house was covered in graffiti and death threats were made against the striker and his agent, Paul Stretford. The youngster was desperate for the move to take place, but Everton were intent on maximising the return on their star player.

“It took a bit of negotiation, as you can imagine,” smiles Gill. “Especially with it being at the end of the transfer window, but we got him.” The deal was agreed on the day Everton visited Old Trafford for a goalless Premier League draw. Gill, Ferguson, club solicitor Maurice Watkins, Everton chairman Bill Kenwright and Moyes thrashed out an agreement in Ferguson’s office after the game.

As news of the agreement began to spread around the club, United's players could barely contain their excitement. "Ron Atkinson said that signing Bryan Robson was a sure thing, like buying gold," recalls Neville. "And it was the exactly the same when we were signing Wayne Rooney."

Rooney transferred the following day, August 31, 2004, deadline day, and delighted supporters by signing autographs for a thronging crowd outside Old Trafford. He was quickly run through the standard photoshoot and in-house media requirements, including an interview for the club’s magazine during which the journalist in question – then 29, athletic and a few inches taller than Rooney – challenged the teenager to an arm wrestle.

“Wayne takes a few seconds to weigh up my offer,” wrote the reporter. “And about as much time again to crush my fingers and take my arm down with a thud that would have done Hulk Hogan proud.”

Keenly felt at first, the reverberations of Rooney’s move dulled to a low rumble over the following weeks as he spent the best part of a month away from the squad. His metatarsal was healing, but had to be carefully managed in order to have him fighting fit for his new club. Part of the youngster’s way of passing the time was to wander around Carrington, getting to know people in every area of the training centre, from the kitchens to the laundry room.

A regular haunt was the gymnasium, where power development coach Mick Clegg spoke to Rooney about their shared love of boxing. That would develop over time, but the short-term focus for both parties was getting United’s new no.8 back in action.

“Wayne was absolutely champing at the bit to get fit,” recalls Clegg. “He really just wanted to get out there and play football. If anything was stopping him playing football, in this case an injury, he would do whatever you wanted to make sure he was back out there playing again. He just wanted to play football.”

Ferguson found that more than most, with Rooney nagging him daily and assuring him that he was ready to return. But, though he was living out of a suitcase in an Alderley Edge hotel, the striker’s itchy feet were of no concern to the manager until they were both fully fit for use. After Wayne had joined in group training, and a scan had shown that his broken bone had fully healed, Ferguson told his weekly press conference: "He's been excellent, he's enjoyed it and showed a great enthusiasm in his training. What we already know about him is that the boy has fantastic potential: he's two-footed, he's brave and he's quick. He's a surprisingly good header of the ball. So all the parts are there. He’s looking great.”

The manager suggested that a place on the bench would be the limit of Rooney’s involvement for the Champions League visit of Fenerbahce, three days later, on condition that he emerged unscathed from training. Prior to the press conference, however, he had told already Rooney that he would be starting.

The day before the game, visiting goalkeeper Rustu Recber was unfazed by the prospect of the youngster's involvement, starting or otherwise. "People expect great things of Rooney but he has no experience of club football at this level,” scoffed the Turkish international. “I have no worries about him, Ruud van Nistelrooy or any of the other United strikers."

The following evening would unfold into a nightmare for Recber and his team-mates. For Rooney, the teak-tough tempest who only ever had eyes for the back of the net, it would be a beautiful dream.

Credit: Manutd.com