By Myles Palmer
____________________________________________
WAYNE ROONEY has been rubbish for Everton because Everton are a rubbish team.
He is wasting his time there.
That much is obvious.
Rooney is a diehard Blue but he is wasting his time at Everton because they can’t afford to build a team round him.
They’ve kept a lid on a creative, dynamic footballer at a time when he should be expressing himself, on and off the field.
UNLIKE EVERTON, ENGLAND CAN BUILD ROUND ROONEY.
BUT THEY DON’T.
THEY SHOULD- but they don’t because Sven has his icons and his pecking order
Why have Rooney’s minders kept a lid on him?
Because they fear the tabloids.
And with good reason, since the tabs are irresponsible and dumb and judgemental.
They sell papers by creating stars and then slagging them off.
The tabloids feed off a lottery culture of celebs and mini-celebs.
They create a love-hate culture of build ’em up/knock ’em down.
If you are young and famous and rich, the tabs love you till they hate you.
They prefer trivia about stars to stories about people.
WAYNE ROONEY should be allowed to live his life without fear and he should be allowed to play his football without fear.
Sven should liberate Rooney.
How?
By building an England team that can keep clean sheets.
If Sven did that, every pass and every shot by Rooney would be important.
I never stress about David James making a mistake, or about Roonaldo being too young.
James is a formidable athlete and smarter than a lot of our footballers.
He has been around the England camp for years.
Once I watched England playing a practice game with small goals at Bisham and he was unbeatable.
No goal was possible because the goal was too small and James was far too big, too alert, too athletic, to allow a ball to go past him.
He was six foot five and the goal was only ten feet wide and he was stopping everything until a ball flew towards Matt Le Tissier and he volleyed it into the corner of this small goal and James did not move.
That shot by Le Tiss was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in football. It was uncanny, surreal.
I wondered whether my eyes were playing tricks and whether I had seen what I had seen.
Five minutes later, the ball went to Le Tissier again and he hit it so sweetly and so early and so perfectly and it flew into the other side of the small goal.
MIND-BOGGLING !
I had NOT imagined the first one.
Well, Rooney is a freak like Le Tiss, like Gazza.
Rooney has that freakish level of eye-foot co-ordination.
Used in the right format, Rooney could be fantastic in Euro 2004.
But Michael Owen is hard to play with because he destroys his partners, as Ian Wright did.
Sven has three good football brains to call on.
Steve McClaren, Tord Grip and white-haired veteran Dave Sexton.
Four managers, four brains.
Better people than the yes-men and old cronies that Keegan and Hoddle had round them.
Sven, Tord, Steve and Dave should be able to figure out how to liberate Wayne Rooney.
——–
FRANCE (4-4-2 ):16-Fabien Barthez; 15-Lilian Thuram, 5-William Gallas, 13-Mikael Silvestre, 3-Bixente Lizarazu; 7-Robert Pires, 4-Patrick Vieira, 6-Claude Makelele, 10-Zinedine Zidane; 12-Thierry Henry, 20-David Trezeguet.
ENGLAND (4-4-2): 1-David James; 2-Gary Neville, 15-Ledley King, 6-Sol Campbell, 3-Ashley Cole; 7-David Beckham, 11-Frank Lampard, 4-Steven Gerrard,8-Paul Scholes; 9-Wayne Rooney, 10-Michael Owen.
REFEREE: Markus Merk (Germany)
—————
MY DARK HORSES?
Well, Sweden play English football better than we do. Methodical with a bit of flair. They punch above their weight.
Also, GERMANY.
The Germans are always good when they have no players.
The worse they are, the better they are.
They get to finals by being German, not by being good.
For the past year the best German player has been living secretly in a villa in Paraguay with Lord Lucan.
Nobody has seen him or heard about him.
He has been wholly invisible.
But if Michael Ballack suddenly reappears in Porto on June 15th, don’t be surprised.
June 11th 2004.
PS
They have just lit up the arch at the new Wembley Stadium.
We can see it from our bedroom window.
It’s a massive curved structure of white steel.
Seen from a distance in darkness, illuminated by greeny-white lights, it looks spectacular.