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6th January 2024
02:25pm GMT
"Rooney felt “13 weeks” was not enough time to “oversee the changes that were needed” at Birmingham. Nowadays managers must hit the ground running. He knew this.
"Experience is half the battle. Gerrard, Lampard and Rooney were naive to expect to compete with coaches who have 10-year head starts. Their limitations, from in-game tactical decisions to being club spokesperson, were immediately obvious.
"Vincent Kompany is an exception but his last three years playing at Manchester City were under Pep Guardiola and, like Pep, Kompany had his first club to fall back on when smoothly changing career as Anderlecht player-coach.
"There are outliers such as Carlo Ancelotti and Zinédine Zidane – great players who became great managers – but Rooney is not in that category. Nor should he be lumped definitively into the Gerrard and Lampard box.
"Not yet. We’ve known him forever, but he is only 38, several years younger than those two former England team-mates and he’s never been in charge of a club with the kind of resources that Lampard inherited at Chelsea and Gerrard had at Aston Villa.
"There’s a future in media if the managerial merry-go-round turns Rooney out, but that’s not a foregone conclusion. The thing is, he’s likely to struggle to interest a club with the conditions to enable success. That’s his catch-22 now."
Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo have had a love-hate relationship throughout their careers. First they were foes with Ronaldo at Man United already, and the Englishman at Everton.
Then they became teammates when the striker made the move to Old Trafford, only for them to fall out again following an altercation at the 2006 World Cup when Ronaldo's Portugal beat England.
All was forgotten tough when the two were reunited for the Red Devil's and they lead their club to great success with harmony and grace, before parting ways as the flashy winger made his way to Real Madrid.
All was good for the next few years until Ronaldo returned to united, and Rooney was critical of his behaviour, sparking another fall out between the two.
However, before all of this, there was one incident that has been long forgotten, when the young goal getter deliberatly went in to clatter Ronaldo.
Kilbane explains why the then Everton youngsters went in with such a crunching tackle back in 2003.
"Rooney would horse into tackles. Remember how he reacted to Cristiano Ronaldo humiliating his pal Tony Hibbert at Old Trafford?"The scything lunge earned him a yellow card. That was Wayne. He identified the problem, anywhere on the pitch, and sorted it out.
"Unique. I’ve never come across a similar sportsperson. Luke Littler lost the world Darts final this week. At the same age Rooney was a Premier League star.
"He risked injuring himself and others but that intimidating intensity washed away in the showers. A genuinely good lad, a scouser full of devilment, people were out to get him straight away"
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