The Mirror
 

Wayne could have been a God, but now he's a Devil
By Brian Reade,  4 September 2004

IT'S been fascinating hearing many of the hundreds of ex-players who make a cushy living out of stating the obvious about the cream of the Premiership, sighing tetchily at Evertonians.

Treating them like love-sick pre-pubescent girls who have just found out their boy band heart-throb is gay, patting them on the head, telling them it's the way of the world, and it's time to grow up.

They sit there in London studios saying how Wayne Rooney deserves a bigger stage, and how his move to Manchester United is healthy for every party involved. Especially English football.

And although they see themselves as the inside experts, their words and their instincts, like the chauffeur-driven cars that occasionally take them to matches, define them as outsiders.

Because those who applaud the lamentable set of circumstances that have prised Rooney away from Everton at an age when kids usually leave school for college, have become blind to the destruction being wreaked on the game.

Shivers

Evertonians, due to two decades of brutal disappointments, are the most hardened of cynics. But seeing Rooney change overnight from the fanatic who turned up for a Liverpool trial in a blue shirt, who had the club crest in his bedroom window, who said running out at Goodison to Johnny Todd sent shivers down his spine, who swore to always be a Blue, has felt like a kick in the solar plexus.

Because try as they will, they just don't get it. And they have every right not to. When they said he could have been a God but he became a Devil, they meant it. He really could have been the greatest Evertonian of all. Bigger than Dixie and the Golden Vision put together.

And they can't figure out how someone so young and so soaked in their tradition can prize that above playing for a rival club down the road, on the same salary, simply because he'll get the odd game against European opposition.

So they piece together the evidence. They hear stories of a skint, incompetent board sounding out Chelsea last April to see if they fancied Rooney. They see photos of Paul Stretford, who two years ago smooth-talked Rooney into ditching his local agent, playing golf with his chum Alex Ferguson and they know what's gone on here. The lad has been stolen from them like a piece of meat from a butcher's shop.

United are delivered the brightest talent in world football to cover-up for their own stuttering youth policy, Bill Kenwright gets a hug from the bankers, Rooney takes his soap opera to a new level, and Stretford waltzes away with £1.5m. Meanwhile what have Everton got to stop them sliding out of the Premiership? £10m. With the shops shut.

As for the fans Wayne used to feel so proud standing among, they've been left feeling like they've just been screwed by the Auld Slapper. They're aching with anger and disillusion. Not just with Rooney, Stretford and Everton. But with football. And it runs very deep.

The fact that this move is deemed so inevitable and acceptable simply exposes the cancer biting at football's soul.

It blows away the pretence that the game is anything other than a cash cow for unprincipled businessmen and their obscenely overpaid young clients who siphon hard-earned wages out of a foolishly loyal public. And the endgame is a sterile monopoly with guaranteed success for the handful of clubs who possess the wealth that goes with a worldwide brand, and mass disillusion from supporters of the also-rans.

Look at fine-print of the Rooney deal. Five million quid of it is dependent on United's success. Which not only suggests Evertonians should start buying their subscriptions for MUTV, but that this proud institution, which up until a few years ago was United's equal, is effectively its feeder club.

And if the "experts" can't see the dangers here, then they are more cosetted from reality than first thought. Because it's not just at Everton. Feel the disgust among Newcastle fans at the way Sir Bobby Robson has been treated by young upstarts and middle-aged sharks.

One player called him a "senile old ****", another has barely spoken to him for eight months because he listened to an outside offer, and Kieron "66 clicks" Dyer, was allowed to treat the captain's arm-band like a piece of dog crap. And all of them survived.

Meanwhile Robson's reward for trying to do what's right is to be driven out of the club he's loved since birth by a sleazy chairman who once bragged in a Marbella brothel of his joy in charging thick Newcastle fans £50 for shirts that cost £5.

But the "experts" sigh and ask what do you do? Well if you want football to exist simply for leeches to bleed dry, you think like the experts. If you want it to exist for the fans, you think like them.

Everton deflected the mob fury on to Rooney by saying they were doing everything in their power to keep him. They weren't. Everything in your power means holding employees to their contract. They had no intention. If there was any sanity left both Dyer and Rooney would be spending a lengthy spell in Newcastle's and Everton's reserves banned from speaking to their agents, learning respect and humility.

But that's not the way of the world that the moral cowards have allowed football to become. Instead we're told to say nothing unless it's to wish these "ambitious" young lads all the best.

So I will wish Rooney well. And hope that if there's any justice left in the world, he will do as well as the last Scouse superstar striker to move to Old Trafford. Peter Davenport.

[The above is unedited and provided within ToffeeWeb for archival purposes.]