As the latest updates from what
must certainly now all but be confirmed as this summer’s long running will he/won’t
he/do we even care anyway transfer saga come through and we prepare ourselves
to hear constantly from each of the three parties involved one thought
overrides all the others, haven’t we been here before?
Here with Rooney sure (his desire
to ask to be put on the transfer list already established when he used the same
tactic a couple of years ago to snag the mega contract that Man Utd are so apparently
so comfortable running down, something to think about the next time you hear
him talk of feeling unwanted) but also here before with Chelsea. The drawn out signing of Torres in January
2011 was another time Chelsea targeted an established Premier League striker quite
fancying a move away and who’d been successful at his present club (with both players
being similarly less prolific in the period leading up to their potential
transfers). As with the Torres transfer
what looks like both weakening a rival and a decent piece of business could end
up as an unmitigated failure.
He’s a special case is Rooney. He was one of the last street footballers that
came through (more through his playing style than his background) before
Premier League youth prospects seemed uniformly to adopt a kind of drummed in conformity;
a kind of technically gifted, Playstation playing, slightly boring ubiquity. When Rooney came through it was
different. After his debut there were
stories that David Moyles literally had to drag him away from playing football
with his friends in the street. He slept
with grandmas. Can’t see Theo Walcott
doing that. And on the field he played
as if he make anything happen. And often
it did. With all the excellence of
Rooney once he’d moved to Man Utd and settled down, and at his best he really
was one of the best in the world, (156 goals in 292 appearances in the Premier
League, 34 goals in 2009-10 alone) he seemed to have had either lost that sense
of unpredictability or had it coached out of him. Which however he finishes his career will
always be the biggest shame about it.
Chelsea signed Torres just as he
went through the kind of mid career slump that must still have him waking in
the middle of the night in a cold sweat.
The El Nino they signed and the one that started playing for them were
two different players. Even now and
after a season where he scored 22 goals there’s the sense that he’s lost that
extra yard of pace that once made him so explosive. With the benefit of hindsight Chelsea
overpaid for a player prematurely leaving his prime, possibly due to playing so
much top level football at such a young age.
They may be about to do exactly the same with Rooney.
The similarities with them don’t
end there. At 29 Torres is two years older. He moved to Chelsea at 26, one year younger
than Wayne is now. Both of them started
early, Wayne bursting into the first team at Everton when he was 16, Torres
playing regularly for Atletico Madrid at 17.
They were both fixtures in their international teams in their teenage
years. The old accepted wisdom over
footballers entering their prime was around 27-28. As the great football thinker Indiana Jones
says it ain’t the years, it’s the mileage.
Both of them have a lot of miles under the clock. With players starting earlier, playing more
football and the possibility of burnout we could see that dropping by at least
a few years. Speaking frankly, Rooney
like Torres could very well have already seen his best years.
The suspicion that Rooney has
lost something about his play, that extra bit of desire that let him impose himself
on games, had been in the background even before Fergusson left him out the
team before the Real Madrid game. Everyone
points to the signing of Van Persie as the moment Rooney fell down the pecking
order but at least as significant was the signing of Kagawa. After Shinji’s first season settling in he
should be a good bet for a run in the number 10 role behind Van Persie this
year, something Moyles pretty much said outright when he talked about Rooney
featuring if anything happened to the Dutchman (and this is without them yet
making a signing this year, Cesc Fabregas’ arrival would make the queue at ten
even longer). With a World Cup looming
and facing no longer being first choice it looks ever more likely he’ll be
leaving.
It’s been a very twenty first
century transfer saga so far, with updates given from Thailand, Malaysia and
Australia and twenty four hour news updates on nothing much happening with
claims and denials crawling out at a snail’s pace and everyone apart from the
people directly involved thoroughly bored of the whole thing already. Although it’s the first thing that landed in
Moyles’ in-tray Fergusson’s fingerprints are all over this. From dropping him, implying he was carrying a
bit too much timber then declaring after his last game that Rooney had handed
in a transfer request (something the player still denies) Fergusson has done
most of the heavy lifting to ensure Rooney can be moved on while making it look
like the club weren’t the ones agitating for the move. It would be extremely naive to think that
three weeks into the Moyles era he isn’t still in contact with Fergusson. Moyles’ press conferences have managed to
walk this line perfectly, giving lip service to the idea of keeping Rooney
while offering him no assurances on his role this season.
It’s all been set up perfectly to
force Rooney to admit he’s looking to leave before he’s sold, perfect revenge
for Fergusson after failing to deal with his transfer request properly the last
time (paying an alleged £250,000 a week to a player asking for a move has
proven one of his more debatable decisions).
Sympathy for Rooney will be in short supply, mainly because with demands
like that he’s done as much as any other player as to provide us with plenty of
opportunity to be cynical about modern football. It may just have been because watching him go
from an unpolished sixteen year old to a managed entitled professional was
always going to be disappointing but he’s not helped himself along the
way. In short, he’s come across as a bit
of a knob.
Mourinho seems to be enjoying the
whole thing, far more than Moyles. For
him he’s in a win/win situation. Sign
Rooney and he’s taken a marquee player from one of his main rivals. Fail to sign him and he’s managed to ruin
their preparation for the new season. Since
his opening salvos back in English football were so unthreatening it’s a relief
to see him get his teeth into something he can really have fun with again.
The actual transfer being a
success is harder to predict. Jose would
be gambling on his management being able to restore Rooney to something
approaching his peak, no certainty by any means. It’ll also be, by proxy, an admission that he
doesn’t think doing the same will be possible with Torres. Chelsea will play in the same 4,3,3/4,5,1 that
Real Madrid did last season. Rooney and
Torres would be in direct competition with each other for one spot (as well as
Demba Ba and Romelu Lukaku). Chelsea
could find that if they sign him Rooney could well end up in a similar run of
form as the man he’s intended to replace.