Wayne Rooney: Boots of Gold E-Book

John Sweeney

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 521

Beschreibung

This book is not your usual whitewash. Irreverent, hilarious and surprising, Wayne Rooney: Boots of Gold is a tarts-and-all biography of England's most famous sportsman and an exposé of the iniquities of some of those who have sought their pound of flesh from his celebrity. Short-tempered and sweary he may be, but there's no doubting Rooney's passion for the beautiful game. But who is the real Wayne Rooney? On the one hand there was the disastrous World Cup in 2010, sex scandals and the unedifying spectacle of his grotesque contract negotiations with Manchester United; on the other, unprecedented success as the best British footballer of his time. On form, he's an unstoppable force, and the jewel in the crown of one of the most powerful club sides in history. But then there's the infamous entourage: a controversial agent, a crooked lawyer, tarts and gangsters, all attracted to the fabulous money Rooney gets for kicking a pig's bladder around a field. Wayne Rooney: Boots of Gold charts the rise and fall - and rise and fall again - of football's most intriguing star.

Leseprobe

To Tomiko

Without her constant mockery and unstinting criticism, I wouldn’t have had to prove to her that this book would one day exist.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Iain Dale

Introduction

1. The truth about the Crocky Boy Wonder

2. A genius with a gob on him is born

3. Everton’s puppy of war

4. Boy meets girl

5. ‘No tip or nothing. The cheek of them, these millionaires’

6. The Hairdryer, the dodgy agent, the gangster, his friend who kept his .45 Magnum underneath his mother’s flowerpot, and the left leg in the lay-by

7. ‘He couldn’t write properly and didn’t seem all that bright’ – call girl on Rooney

8. ‘You scheming little prick’

9. ‘You’ve ruined my daughter’s night’

10. ‘He was a knobhead’

11. The myth of the Auld Slapper

12. The heavy mob came too

13. ‘There’s no fucking problem with my fucking temper’

14. England’s glory?

15. ‘With this bling I thee wed’

16. World cup at his feet

17. The wronged woman

Index

Plates

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No Wayne, no book, so thanks to Big Wayne and Jeanette Rooney for bringing him into the world. No Wayne, no great stories; no Coleen, no romance, so thanks to them too.

In London, thanks to half of Fleet Street for stimulating, entertaining and, only occasionally, revolting copy on the Crocky Cyclone. Thanks, in particular, to his ghost, Hunter Davies, and to tabloid sleuth Graham Johnson.

In Liverpool and Birkenhead, thanks to a string of people and a grand selection of pubs, including the Wezzy.

In Manchester, thanks to those who wear green and gold.

In Russia, thanks to the staff of Novaya Gazeta and the friends of the late Yuri Shchekochikhin, whose poisoners, one day, will be brought to justice.

Having a glass of wine with my then agent, Caroline Michel, was one of the best things I have done in my career. Thanks to Iain Dale at Biteback, who is steady under fire.

Thanks to a slew of characters at my day job, who know who they are, in particular the Chelsea fan, the Spurs fan, the Swindon Town fan, the West Ham fan, the Wycombe fan; also, fans of Tranmere everywhere and the Leeds scum.

Special thanks to Sam, Molly, my mother, Barbara, and to the memory of my father, Leonard, who didn’t drink in the Western Approaches but fought there.

FOREWORD

BY IAIN DALE

The last time I was quoted in a front-page article in the Daily StarSunday it was under the headline ‘HORSE FART SIGNALS END OF DOCK STRIKE’. Actually, come to think of it, it may have been the Sunday Sport. No matter, on 7 June 2010, this was the Daily Star Sunday’s front-page headline: ‘ROONEY ATTACK FURY – BOOK SLURS ROCK WORLD CUP HOPES’.

The article concerned the hardback edition of Rooney’s Gold, which Biteback published at the end of May 2010. The book was intended for publication by Random House in 2007, but they took fright over libel issues relating to Rooney’s agent, Paul Stretford. Since then, however, Stretford, has been discredited in court and banned from being an agent for nine months. Late in 2009, I met Sweeney’s agent, Caroline Michel, who gave me the manuscript to read. Certainly no conventional football biography, I found it hugely entertaining and informative, and decided to take it on.

Clearly, as it had been written in 2006, there was a lot that needed to be changed. Indeed, it effectively became a very different book, with new chapters and a whole series of vastly rewritten ones.

And then Schillings, Rooney’s lawyers, got involved. We had several letters demanding to see a copy of the manuscript. We refused. We assured them that the book was not the same book as the one they thought it was and that we, as a responsible publisher, had taken every possible step to ensure that their client’s rights would not be infringed. We told them that the book was very positive about Mr Rooney and praised him in many ways. We, naturally, had the whole book extensively read for libel and consulted our insurers at all stages.

Days before the book went to print Schillings were continuing to demand sight of the manuscript. As a reputable publisher, I felt that if we acceded to their demands we’d be a joke, and might as well pack up and go home. We had a choice: publish and be damned or shelve the whole book and put it down to experience. Believe me, it’s not nice getting letters from Schillings, laced with threats. Random House, a big company, bowed down and caved in. We decided to proceed, and the book came out on 27 May 2010. I don’t mind admitting I was nervous.

But between the book going to print and it being published, Schillings tried another tack. Writing to Waterstone’s and WH Smith, they threatened that if both stores sold the book they would be liable for damages if Schillings carried through with their threat to injunct us and sue for damages.

Let’s put it this way. If you publish a book like this and it isn’t sold in either Waterstone’s or WH Smith it is difficult to get good sales. Even today, you can’t just rely on Amazon. Schillings knew that this threat would hit us where it hurts: in our pockets.

Waterstone’s contacted us and asked for an indemnity, so if it came to legal action we’d cover them. For a small company like us, we had to really think hard as to whether we could do this, but we had no choice. If we wanted the book out there we had to.

WH Smith asked for the same and we gave them an indemnity too. Unfortunately, in the end, they chose not to stock the book.

The point here is that Schillings tried to interfere with our commercial trading relations by intimidating our customers. In one case it worked, in another it did not.

But think about what this means for the wider publishing community. If publishers accede to threats like this it effectively means that no one can write a celebrity biography any longer unless it is a complete hagiography. Our libel laws are allowing the likes of Schillings to threaten, bully and intimidate authors and publishers into abandoning perfectly legitimate books for fear of their whole company’s existence coming under threat. This cannot be right and any reform of the libel laws must surely encompass this aspect of the law.

We stood up to Schillings but it’s impossible to know how many others have opted for a quiet life and caved in.

In the end we didn’t hear a peep from Schillings after publication. I had to assume that having read the book they realised that their fears were unjustified and that the book is actually far more positive about their client than they had anticipated. It even dismisses as fiction the story that he had sex with a plastic-clad grandmother.

But let’s finally go back to the Daily Star story. It’s something Lord Justice Leveson would find amusing. At the time, I deconstructed it on my blog. My comments are in italics.

A book about Wayne Rooney is threatening to derail England’s World Cup dreams.

Nice bit of hyperbole for a journalist that has clearly not read a word of the book.

The controversial biography, called Rooney’s Gold, has been released ahead of England’s campaign in South Africa. Rooney, 24, is said to be furious about the publication. And fans say the release could not have been more badly timed.

I doubt whether Rooney even knows about the book.

The book, which Rooney’s representatives tried but failed to ban, details embarrassing material on the England hero.

Such as? If it did, surely the Daily Star would be detailing it?

Summing up the book in sneering style, the book’s publishers say: ‘Rough, working class, surrounded by an unlikely crew – including a dodgy agent, a crooked lawyer, tarts and gangsters – Rooney’s Gold looks at the characters who have been attracted to the fabulous money Rooney gets for kicking a pig’s bladder around a field.’

LOL. Pity they didn’t carry on with the publicity blurb… ‘Of all the contenders to be captain of England at this summer’s World Cup, it isRooney who has become the model husband and father, Rooney who changes the electricity of a game the moment he walks on the pitch, Rooney who scores the most goals, Rooney who fights the hardest. And that’s how we like our lions.’

Lifelong England supporter Darren Law, 39, of Blackburn, Lancs, said: ‘This is appalling timing to release a book which is bound to be so controversial. It is the last thing that Wayne Rooney and the England team needs.’

Oh get a life. Read the book. If you can read, that is.

‘We can’t afford for our best player to be distracted by negative headlines and his private life being exposed to public ridicule. The publishers should have at least waited until after the World Cup for its release.’

Yeah, because that would make good commercial sense, wouldn’t it?

Another fan, Alan Gavan, who lives in Rooney’s village of Prestbury, Cheshire, fumed: ‘This is ridiculous. This is a great chance for England to finally lift the World Cup again and having Rooney in the right frame of mind is essential for any success. Printing gossip about his private life and his wealth is counter-productive.’

Rubbish. The book is very positive about Rooney as the above quote makes clear. But a biography is not a hagiography. Or shouldn’t be, and this isn’t.

A source close to Rooney revealed: ‘He is absolutely livid. His people wanted to get the book banned but they failed. This book was due to be published years ago but the publishers got cold feet because they feared they could be sued because of the highly controversial content. But it has had a re-write and a new publisher has taken it on. To say that Wayne is upset and angry is an understatement. He is even more furious about the timing of the release, which has come in the build-up to England’s campaign. It is a distraction that he could do without but he has to try to concentrate on his football. It is very regrettable.’

So basically, if he misses a penalty, it’s my fault…

Frankly, I have my doubts whether this book will ever turn any kind of profit because of the money we have had to spend on legal fees. But do you know what? I don’t care. We’ve stood up for a principle and stood up for freedom of speech. I refuse to be bullied into shelving what I consider to be a perfectly legitimate book. Wayne Rooney should very carefully consider what his lawyers have done on his behalf. They’ve no doubt charged him a shed load in fees but was it worth it to try to stop a book which is actually rather friendly towards him in a strange sort of way?

And to you, the person who has bought this book. Thank you. I hope by the end of it you’ll appreciate why we decided to publish and be damned.

INTRODUCTION

The English like their lions rough, not smooth. None rougher than Wayne Rooney, a brilliantly gifted footballer with millions in the bank and the mind of a duck. He sleeps with the wrong kind of lionesses, employs an agent who mixes with people who know people who kill people and cannot see a TV camera at a football ground without telling it to fuck off. This is the story of the rise and fall and rise and fall – and who knows what will happen next – of a moral idiot in our age of moral idiocy. He has the fools’ gift of saying the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. He plays brilliantly for his club, Manchester United, but when it really matters for his country his boots of gold turn to dross. But then he does something with a football that makes you roar with pride.

On the pitch, some of the time, a hero. Off it, the centrepiece, with his wife Coleen, of perhaps the most vacuous media soap opera of modern times. His enormous talent with a football and his foolishness without one have created a very twenty-first century monster. But he is not bad bad. And when you reflect on the morality of the people with money who have in their various ways entrapped his gift, none of Wayne Rooney’s follies seem beyond redemption. At times, when you consider how he has risen from the raw poverty of his background in one of the most deprived parts of Liverpool, he is something of a hero. At others, you feel he is a moron with boots of gold.

If he is a hero, he is a very lumpy one. Attracted to his money are a motley crew, of wannabe gangsters, a crooked lawyer, a succession of tarts and hangers-on. Boots of Gold is an attempt to tell his story fair and square. Four years ago Wayne, Coleen and, perhaps most of all, his dodgy agent Paul Stretford did their best to get this book killed. It sat on my laptop, waiting for a publisher, until Biteback Publishing came along. In the meantime, Stretford was fined £300,000 and banned for nine months for bringing the Football Association into disrespect.

Oh dear.

This book is also about others who may have behaved badly – including women who get paid for sleeping with men and men who get paid for chopping up other men. And, funnily enough for a book about a footballer, it’s about something bigger than a game of two halves. ‘The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man,’ wrote the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who never played for Tranmere, let alone Man United. Perhaps more than any male celebrity in the modern age, Wayne Rooney has been surrounded from the word go with the demons of temptation. To begin with, the demons were winning, big time. But not now. Other members of the England team are getting all the wrong headlines.

Not Rooney.

Above all, this is the story of a boy who, despite all the forces pulling him down, rose up to become a hero.

Cynics might say this is a book about an angry potato by an exploding tomato. The cynics would be dead right. My own personal brush with 1’37” of fame – if you don’t know what I am blethering on about, look me up on YouTube – has perhaps helped me understand and empathise in some small way with the pressures on real celebrities. It said in the papers that I said: ‘Don’t make me angry. You won’t like it if you make me angry.’ I never said that. It doesn’t matter. If you’re in the papers, they control you. You don’t control them. Is that unfair? Yes. Can you do much about it? No, not much. Is free speech more important than embarrassing stories – even if they may sometimes be horribly unfair – for celebrities and those who wield power? Yes. If you disagree, go to North Korea. Pyongyang rocks, some say.

One of the themes of Boots of Gold is that we should not judge the man unless and until we have taken a good look at the context, at the story behind the story, at his circle, at our society, at our world and the Big Money that makes it go round and round.

Why does a man with a genius for computing how a ball arcs through a parabola in space-time faster than seven billion people make a king’s ransom for himself? Well, that’s a consequence of our moral idiocy. That’s not his fault.

The life and times of Wayne Rooney make, perhaps, the dysfunctional fairy story of our time – Beauty and the Beast meets Alien v. Predator meets Cinderella-in-Football Boots, not forgetting the Curse of the Black Thong. Perhaps more than any other pantomime nonsense from the beginning of the twenty-first century, it shines a light on our moronic celebrity culture. He and his circle often appear to have been the victim of creatures that creep on the face of the earth – hedge-fund managers, whores, newspaper barons, thugs, reporters, gangsters – in no easy order of virtue.

That’s not his fault, either.

Brand Rooney may be a living symbol of a world that has lost its marbles. In our new age of austerity with the country up to its eyes in debt and millions on the dole, he is paid £4.68 million a year to kick a football and £1.5 million a year to allow his image to grace household-name products – for example, for a teeth-rotting-fat-bulging-belch-inducing-hyper-making-super-sugary carbonated water which rhymes with ‘poke’.

But Wayne Rooney is a great athlete and, not just by the standards of the grim place he hails from, not a bad man. He has come a very, very long way from Croxteth: holidays in the Caribbean with a butler thrown in, now a pad of his own in Barbados, a gin-palace off the south of France, a whole Vroom-Vroom of motor cars, enough to make Jeremy Clarkson, TV’s anti-pope of global warming, snot green with envy, a new-build mansionette in Cheshire – albeit one that brings to mind the architecture of a gas showroom – a good woman as his wife and a son he adores.

Like muck to a farmer’s boots, dirt sticks to Rooney’s gold. One cannot hope to understand the full majesty of the fairy story – Boy becomes footballing star at the age of seven, the myth of Auld Slapper, The Dodgy Agent, the Gangster and his Friend who kept his .45 Magnum underneath his Mother’s Flowerpot and the Leg in the Lay-By – without getting a little bit mucky. After he left Everton and scarpered down the East Lancs Road for a Manchester United shirt and a barrel load of cash, the Toffees had their revenge. The Everton fans chanted:

He’s fat,

He’s round,

He’ll shag your nan for £40.

Rooney!

Stop there. There is not a shred of reliable evidence that Wayne Rooney ever slept with the PVC-clad prostitute baptised by the tabloids as the Auld Slapper. She is one of a number of people in this narrative who emerge, not perhaps brilliantly, but less badly than some of the people poking their fingers and crying ‘Shame!’ So does Wayne Rooney.

As a teenager, pumped full of adrenalin and cash, he did have sex with consenting adults for money. For the record, he paid them. That was foolish but it’s not the worst thing you can do in your life, by a long chalk. Some of the others in this story – a senior police officer whose mind froze at the worst possible moment, a whole slew of newspaper bosses, a thuggery of gangsters and an agent on whose word a criminal court could not rely – come out much, much worse than the Boy Wonder himself. Some people preyed on the young and silly superstar.

That’s not his fault.

For the moment, Rooney appears to be the best striker and also the best money-generator of Manchester United, one of the richest sporting clubs in the world, and also one of the most heavily borrowed against. If the amount of money paid to Rooney seems bonkers, then one should also consider the financial genius of former Florida trailer-park entrepreneur Malcolm Glazer, whose family business bought the club in the mid-noughties by borrowing roughly half a billion quid. The interest on that loan cost the Glazers a reported £60 million a year, so in 2010 they issued a £500 million bond. This is all fancy money talk. In plain English? Well, the Burnley fans did chant about United’s finances while Rooney put one in the back of their net: ‘We’ve got more money than you have …’

You can make a lot of money out of taxing passion – and in the modern world the passion engendered by the most famous team on the planet is a very profitable passion indeed. Perhaps that’s why, since the Glazers took over, seat prices at Old Trafford have gone up, critics say, more than 40 per cent. Perhaps that’s why Manchester United’s corporate bond bid wasn’t based in Manchester at all, but 180 miles south in London’s ever-so-posh clubland, Pall Mall. The man in charge of the corporate side is that modern folk devil, a banker. To anyone who believes in the truth rather than the fairy story of the beautiful game, perhaps Manchester United should more appropriately be named Pall Mall Rovers. That probably won’t be happening any time soon.

But a whole new set of wannabe owners have ridden into the glen, garbed in green and gold – harking back to the club colours of Newton Heath, the old name of the Reds. The Manchester United Supporters Trust, MUST, have little time for what they say is the mountain of debt built up by the Glazers. They want the Glazers out. At the time of writing, MUST has 150,000 fans signed up to its website and on away days the Man United end is awash with green and gold. But wanting something is not the same as having it. Enter the Red Knights, led by United hardcore fan and Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill. Bankers? He knows buckets of them. If MUST and the Red Knights are all they are cracked up to be, this could mark a moment of revolution in British football – the time when the fans stood up to Big Money and shouted them down. If football’s number one fashionista is a guide, then when AC Milan played United, David Beckham looked very fetching in his green and gold scarf.

This space will be watched. For their part, the Glazers’ spokesman has said: ‘Manchester United is the most profitable club in the world.’ The £500 million bond issue was subscribed twice over. The Glazers have said, loud and clear, that Man United is not for sale.

As far as the man himself is concerned, Rooney’s genius on the pitch used to be cast into shadow by his genius at getting into pitch off it. The verdict of one woman he paid to have sex with when he was seventeen before he started dating Coleen – he signed a note, graciously thanking her for the shag – that he can’t write properly and didn’t seem all that bright, was, back then, hard to refute.

He’s changed. The tabloids are still after his head. Or, better, his dick. He’s still got problems in that area but he is showing a bit of improvement. Rooney is not a multimillionaire because he has something amazing inside his head.

That, too, is not his fault.

In our society, his skill is rewarded massively more than people who face the battle of the classroom every morning, who look after the old, the sick and the dying, who save people’s lives, who arrest the nasty bastards, who risk their lives fighting wars started by other people, who put out fires.

That’s wrong but not his fault.

A lot of mush has been written about Rooney and Coleen, some of it even, allegedly, by themselves, and hopefully this book won’t add to it. Wayne and Coleen’s lifestyle choices may sometimes appear like a crude satire on the banality of materialism. The bling – the rocks and frocks and motor cars (some that all but triple the speed limit in Britain) – they spend their money on seems proof, if proof were needed, of Alexander Pope’s sally: ‘One can tell the contempt God holds for riches by the people whom he chooses to give them to.’

Boots of Gold casts a critical eye on all and everyone whose stories have entered Wayne’s World, from a top police officer who told a terrible lie to the Director of Public Prosecutions to a psychotic gangster who chopped body parts up and dumped them across the Home Counties in matching luggage, to Britain’s most crooked lawyer, to a whole gallery of soccer players.

As I have mentioned already, Rooney’s agent Paul Stretford comes in for a measure of criticism in this book. He did charm the socks off Wayne’s mum and dad when he met them in 2002, while Wayne was still contracted to another agent. In that year Wayne Rooney signed a footballing contract with Proactive – the agency Stretford set up – while still contracted to the other agent. That is against the rules of the Football Association.

To make matters worse the Rooneys ended up getting independent legal advice to look over the paperwork from Kevin Dooley. Once upon a time, Dooley had been the lawyer of choice for Liverpool FC’s stars. He was a character, a fixture at Anfield and a legend in his own lunchtime. But by the turn of the twenty-first century, Kevin Dooley was a very bent lawyer in a hurry, under investigation by the authorities for his part in a well-publicised scandal involving other people’s money disappearing into the hands of a conman known as ‘Long John Silver’.

Dooley & Co. had been raided in 2000, then shut down for good by the authorities in 2002. Although Dooley’s firm had been closed down, he still had a solicitor’s ticket and he moved to another firm, albeit working under a cloud. In July 2002 he was tried by the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal for his role in the Long John Silver scam and while awaiting the verdict, in August, Dooley advised the Rooneys. In September, the bent lawyer was struck off for good. And who introduced the Rooneys to Dooley, one of the most crooked lawyers in Britain? That, according to Stretford on oath, was either him or a colleague at Proactive. Stretford has made it clear he had no idea that Dooley was in deep trouble when the lawyer was introduced to the Rooneys.

Later, Stretford, suspected of muscling in on Rooney, became prey to threats of violence. He sat down at a meeting with people who wanted to take Rooney away from him or get a slice of the Roo action. Also present was a very nasty London gangster indeed. A while later, a large ex-boxer Scouser, accompanied by two Australian cage fighters, burst into a meeting and frightened the life out of Stretford. Whatever you may think about the agent, he didn’t deserve that. You cannot read a description of the boxer-cum-cage-fighters-incident without feeling sorry for the agent. A blackmail trial followed with Stretford as the Crown’s star witness. But the trial collapsed after Stretford gave evidence on the stand which did not stack up. The prosecution told the court they could no longer rely on his word. He continues to deny he had misled the court, blaming the prosecution for bungling his evidence. The Football Association investigated and found that Stretford had given ‘false and/or misleading evidence’ to the police and ‘false and/or misleading testimony’ in eight instances at the trial, including his denial that he had ‘muscled in’ on the previous agent. Stretford appealed and lost and ultimately accepted a £300,000 fine and a nine-month ban. Late on in 2008, after the FA’s Disciplinary Committee had poured a bucket of the brown stuff over Stretford, he and Proactive – now part of Formation Group PLC – parted company.

The posh blokes with wigs on their bonces – they call themselves lawyers – argued about the slicing of the Rooney cake. Wayne Rooney still trusts Stretford and the whole family sticks by him. In the flesh, Stretford appears like a northern clone of Arthur Daley, the entrepreneur in ITV’s Minder – a wheeler-dealer played by George Cole.

To sum up Stretford in four words: easy patter, dodgy charm.

He has an eye out for the main chance, he looks after his own interests, but in the shark-infested world of British football Paul Stretford, just like Arthur Daley, is, on the sliding scale of sharkishness, not so much a Great Killer White, more a dogfish.

The world of Wayne Rooney can be mucky and messy and the money is silly. But let’s note that in Christmas 2009 Wayne and Coleen dumped their fancy holiday plans and stayed at home to visit Coleen’s adopted invalid sister, seriously ill in hospital. Two months later his mum, Jeanette, and dad, Wayne Senior, went in to bat for him in court surrounded by an unease of pin-striped lawyers and, by their lights, they did their boy proud. When Jeanette was invited by a learned friend to leaf through one of the bundles – an enormous ring-binder containing a yawn of legal documents – and it exploded, bursting out its contents, Jeanette started to giggle like a schoolgirl, a refreshing moment of humanity in the bleak courtroom. Wayne Senior and Jeanette and the rest of the Rooney clan may have left finishing school a term too early but on the essential things of life – looking after your family and friends – they’re not bad people. Coleen is gracious and good for him. And Wayne? If your house was on fire and he was passing, you could rely on him to kick the door down, rescue your loved ones and do the right thing. He’s rough as rough can be, but he’s still a hero.

A word about Liverpool because the city, too, is a character in this book. Overseen by the two Liver Birds – the female bird looking out to sea, checking to see whether there are any handsome sailors coming in to port, the male bird looking over the city, waiting for the pubs to open – Liverpool comes in for a fair amount of stick in this book. It can be too big for its boots. Take the Mersey ferry on a sunny winter’s day. Observe the quick brown slosh of the river chopping against the ferry’s bow. To the north, Liverpool Bay and beyond that the Irish Sea and the Atlantic. To the south, Stanlow oil refinery. To the west Tranmere oil refinery, an old U-boat and the empty sheds of the great Cammell Laird shipyard. To the east, Liverpool, the Pier Head dominated by a snazzy new-fangled ferry terminal, and behind that the Chicago mobster era architecture of the Liver Building, empty docks, canyons of brick and concrete and rows of terraced houses. The commentary from the ferry’s tannoy booms: ‘Liverpool’s Maritime Mercantile City has been named as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along with the Taj Mahal.’ In Liverpool, you’re never five minutes from something that makes you howl with laughter.

Some of the stories in this book might give you the idea that Liverpool is populated only by unsaintly football players and gangsters and prostitutes – I didn’t make them up – but that wider impression is not fair and not true. I know that because the Mersey runs in my blood, er, so to speak. My mother was born in Liverpool. Her mother, Edith Owen, was a theatrical landlady with a wicked sense of humour. She looked after young actors at the Liverpool Rep like Richard Briers and the lady who played Mavis in Coronation Street. On a film set once doing a story, I bumped into Briers and he instantly remembered my gran: ‘Oh, of course, Mrs Owen. She cooked our wedding breakfast.’ My father was born on the west bank of the Mersey in Birkenhead, and grew up to become a ship’s engineer in the Battle of the Atlantic. I learnt the arguments why Everton was the best team in the world from my uncles, why Liverpool was the best from my Auntie Jean and why Tranmere Rovers was the best from my dad. For some reason I cannot explain, I follow my dad’s team.

True, Liverpool was once an imperial city through which, in the early part of the nineteenth century, passed 40 per cent of the world’s trade – including profits from the slave ships. Those days are long gone. In living memory, Liverpool did its bit in the Second World War, the base from which Britain fought Hitler’s U-boats. In those days the Mersey was full of ships and, come midnight on New Year’s Eve, the whole city would echo with the sound of the ship’s foghorns. The ships have gone too, and the old docks, and for a while it was a city that seemed to be dying.

But the Liverpool I know is full of life and fun. I remember visiting my gran, who lived in Page Moss, not far from the Eagle and Child pub, when I was a schoolboy, and sitting on a bus when a bread van cut in ahead of us, causing the bus driver to stamp on the brakes. Quick as a flash, the bus driver yelled through his open window: ‘Use your loaf!’ I remember visiting Knowsley Safari Park in Auntie Jean’s Mini, and the monkeys ate the windscreen wipers. If New York never sleeps, then Liverpool never bores.

The former Conservative leader Michael Howard, born in Wales but a long-time Liverpool fan, is a very different kettle of fish from Wayne Rooney. He once said that the difference between Liverpool and London is that when you step into a lift in London, when you arrive at the ground floor everybody gets out unsmiling; in Liverpool, everybody gets out laughing.

Boots of Gold pokes fun at Brand Rooney and Wayne Rooney. But it also recognises that celebrities, however moronic they can sometimes be, are human, too. It’s hard to imagine the pressure on someone like Wayne Rooney. If you’re in the public eye, you shouldn’t lose your temper – not several times, not even once. He loses his temper too often and that is his fault. But he is still a great footballer and football is a great thing: it converts the passions and hatreds of tribe, war and battle into a game, which sometimes can be beautiful. And if you lose, no one dies. The challenge for Wayne Rooney has been for him to unlock the genius but lock up the anger inside him.

That way we can be proud of him, all of the time.

But we know he’s only human.

That’s how we like our lions.

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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE CROCKY BOY WONDER

It’s the morning of Halloween night in Crocky and yellow-and-blue police scene-of-crime tape flutters in the breeze outside the Wezzy. Deep purple storm clouds pile up over the Welsh hills and billow eastwards towards Liverpool, bearing with them the certainty of rain.

The police tape is not a pre-Halloween stunt. Gangsters shot someone, a seventeen-year-old, in the leg, just behind ‘the Wezzy’ – the Western Approaches public house – the previous night. The pub boasts a fine sign of a steamship ploughing bravely through the grey Atlantic. It gets its name from the patch of ocean to the left of the British Isles where our brave merchant seamen brought home the bacon while Hitler’s U-boats lurked in the depths intent on murder and mayhem, just like, critics might say, the regulars today. Drinkers in the Wezzy treat strangers to their pub with a circumspection that can be chilling. I’ve been to Chechnya twice and the Wezzy twice and, to be frank, I can’t recommend a weekend break in either.

Welcome to Planet Rooney.

It feels rather too much like a war zone. If you don’t believe me, go there, buy a pint and just clock the hostility of the faces clocking you, with a thousand-mile stare that the Khmer Rouge would have thought a bit over the top. I wasn’t wearing a sequinned hot-pink ensemble, I didn’t squeal ‘Can I have a banana daiquiri?’ in a falsetto, and I didn’t have a tarantula on my nose, but I might as well have done. If you’re an outsider, the Wezzy is a contender for being the least friendly pub in the western hemisphere.

Bleak isn’t the word for Crocky, Liverpool 11. Bleak doesn’t begin to describe the too-wide avenues and the dogshitty grass and the razor-wire fences and the shutters on the front of every shop – even the public library – and the hunch-shouldered not-much-hopery of the smudge-faced people walking to the bus stop so that they can get into the city and a bit of life.

You only go to Crocky if you turn off the East Lancs Road by mistake. The taxi driver was apologetic: ‘There’s not much, the pub, a few shops, a bookie’s,’ and he was so guilty of over-selling he ought to retrain as an estate agent. The place where Wayne Rooney was born and bred is an alien environment, somewhere you drive through in a hurry with the car doors on lockdown. Croxteth, to give it the name only people in uniforms call it, is not an inner-city slum but somehow something worse, more depressing, an edge-of-city slum, a modern, state-of-the-art dystopia, a £2 bus ride from anything civic worth shaking a stick at; spaced out, not crowded in but no less deprived, circles of asphalt and concrete, swathes of grass, banished to the eastern rim of England’s poorest big city. Crocky was built postwar on farmland, first to house people from the Scotland Road area of Liverpool (where my mother was born) made homeless by Hitler’s bombs. A second wave of council houses were built to replace the slum clearance made necessary by the second Mersey tunnel.

The suburb’s greatest export was raised inside a small grid just to the south of the East Lancs Road, and this is where you can find most of Roo’s extended family and his infants’, junior and secondary schools, all within a few hundred yards of each other. It is where he first snogged Coleen McLoughlin, his teenage sweetheart who, the snotty used to say, was the Crowned Queen of Chavs.

Trying to make sense of what Wayne and Coleen have done with the celebrity (and the bucketloads of cash) that have been thrust at them requires getting to know a little bit about Crocky. The East Lancs Road – the main artery between Liverpool and Manchester, before the motorways were built – runs west to east. To the north is the sewage works. Turn to the south, down Lower House Lane, and you pass on your left the drive-in McDonald’s where the staff called Rooney all sorts of names after he quit Everton for the fool’s gold – they would say – of Manchester United; and then a long grey wall, and behind that a lot of greenery. Before you get too excited by the rural idyll, closer inspection reveals gravestone after gravestone. West Derby cemetery is the most restful part of Crocky, though some say a few of its inhabitants still collect their benefit. Of course people fiddle the system here – and why not? – because you can’t help thinking the system has screwed them. Poverty, deprivation, long-term unemployment, children forcibly removed from ‘abusive’ families, high crime, bad diet, vandalism, more than half the children at school claiming free school meals, high premature death rates: this place ticks nearly every box of the ‘you don’t want to live here’ checklist.

The Wezzy – a formidable brick two-storey monument to 1940s utility architecture – stands on the corner of Lower House Lane and Storrington Avenue. Inside, the clientele sport trackies, have ruby-veined noses and seem lost in their alcohol.

They drink to remember.

They drink to forget.

They drink because there is nothing else to do.

Turn right into Storrington Avenue, past the parked police cars and the scene-of-crime officers investigating the previous night’s shooting, and there is a newsagent’s-cum-post office and a bookie’s, boasting antiram-raid shutters which will come down the moment the shop shuts at the end of the day. I don’t think I saw a single shop in the whole Liverpool 11 area without these tell-tale metal defences from their own customers. Crocky is Shutter City.

Storrington Avenue is the bottom of the grid, running parallel to the East Lancs Road. Immediately to the west lies Norris Green, which is as rough as Crocky but doesn’t quite sound it. The amenities stick out like a sore thumb. If, for whatever reason, you don’t fancy the Wezzy, you could go and drink at Wayne’s dad’s old local of choice, the Dog and Gun. The local joke had it that it was unwise to step past the threshold of the Dog and Gun unless you had a gun and a dog. On my visit, it had been boarded up and closed down, according to the taxi driver because of police pressure: ‘There were too many guns and not enough dogs.’

Hang a left just past the derelict Dog and Gun and you’re on Stonebridge Lane, running north towards the East Lancs Road. Halfway down Stonebridge Lane is the old Rooney family home. A giant poster stuck to the door sports a vomit-green-faced Frankenstein monster beneath Gothic letters in blood proclaiming ‘Happy Halloween’. The monster’s eyes flash off and on, off and on.

It’s Halloween night every night in Crocky.

Ordinary people do extraordinary things. Many – most – in Croxteth are decent souls, trying to get by and get a little extra for their loved ones without doing anything very wicked to anyone else. The professionals help, during the day. And then they go away. For example, at Wayne’s old school, De La Salle Comprehensive, at midday I counted about thirty cars neatly parked in the car park behind automatic gates and a security fence so high that I had last seen something like it surrounding a Royal Ulster Constabulary post in South Armagh. You get the feeling that if a tough teacher known to discipline left his car out on the street, the tyres wouldn’t last very long. Or the engine block. Or the chassis. And by five o’clock there were about five cars left behind the security fence. Everybody else had commuted out and gone home to somewhere, pretty much anywhere, nicer. Money, the middle classes, the ambitious or self-starting working classes have so drained away from areas like Croxteth that all you have left is a hard-core sump of deprived families. A few individuals may stand up for community values and stay in Crocky, but not enough to keep the place from giving off a sense of long-term neglect and defeat. Worse, the decay feels continuing, remorseless, unopposed.

The neighbourhood has gone further down the nick since Roo left, after the soccer money started flooding through his letter box, and that’s not that many years ago. The gunplay at the back of the Wezzy in October 2006 was part of a tit-for-tat chain of shootings which started before the murder of Liam ‘Smigger’ Smith, aged nineteen, and ended in something much, much worse. Smigger was shot in the head outside Altcourse prison in August 2006.

Imagine contempt for the forces of law and order so profound that you are willing to whack a rival outside a nick.

Smigger’s killing was one episode of a long turf war between two gangs of scrotes, his Nogga Dogs or Nogzy Soldiers or the Strand Crew from Norris Green and the Crocky Crew from Croxteth, just on the other side of the dog dirt.

What happened was that Smigger, while seeing a friend in the prison’s visiting hall, was spotted by a prisoner from the rival Crocky Crew, Ryan Lloyd, who was in the visiting hall chatting to his sisters. Lloyd ran out of the visiting hall back into the prison wing shouting: ‘Quick, quick, give us the phone, I’ll get the boys up here to pop them.’ Lloyd got a contraband phone and made a call. Smigger left the prison within an hour. He was shot in the head by a sawn-off shotgun fired from five yards away.

After Smigger’s death, the pathologist dug out old shotgun pellets from his body, dating back to a previous shooting months before the one that killed him. Immediately before his funeral, the Nogga Dogs redecorated eighteen premises in the small parade of shops in Norris Green with graffiti proclaiming ‘Smigger RIP’. The teenage gangsters ordered that the shops and pubs shut down for the day of the funeral ‘as a mark of respect’. Or else their businesses would be torched. The taxi driver told me the gangsters went round telling the shopkeepers that if they didn’t do as they were told, they would be firebombed. Taxi-driver talk? The Times reported exactly the same thing, adding that the Merseyside Police took this warning seriously enough to urge shopkeepers and publicans to comply.

And shut down the shops did.

Some parents kept their children off school. Smigger had a proper mobster’s funeral, even though he died still a teenager. Black-suited mourners and, de rigueur for all the gangsters who go to stick up the Pearly Gates, a horse-drawn hearse. You’re not honoured unless you go to your grave – or the crem – in the transport of choice before the internal combustion engine was invented. The only off-notes were the cortège of hoodies in trackies immediately behind the hearse, a score of dayglo policemen, backed up by mobile video vans watching and identifying the hoodies, and a gang of council workmen who began washing away the ‘Smigger RIP’ graffiti immediately the mourning hoodies had passed by. The floral tributes remained.

One cannot but sympathise with a family that has lost a son before he is twenty. But the Nogga Dogs are a different matter. Being able to enforce public grief – or else your shop gets torched – is evidence that the gangstereens in this part of Liverpool have got too much power. Gang law rules in Liverpool 11. The Liverpool Echo and the local worthies gave good ‘the violence must stop’ quotes. Local West Derby MP Bob Wareing compared the scene to Chicago in the 1920s: ‘I am absolutely appalled by the idea of ordinary, decent people running businesses and shoppers being intimidated in this way. We have to put an end to this. We cannot have part of a city run by gangsters. What they do between themselves is one thing but to make the lives of hundreds of ordinary, decent people miserable is something we cannot accept.’

Merseyside Police seemed rather embarrassed about this display of submission to teen gangsterdom and pulled their finger out. After the murder of Smigger, they had a bit of a crackdown and seized mobile phones and came up with a battery of not-so-happy ‘happy snaps’. One shows a victim, blood pouring from gunshot wounds in his face, posing for the camera; a second, a hooded youngster brandishing a shotgun, careful to avoid getting fingerprints on the stock and barrel; a third, a loaded handgun; a fourth, two fighting dogs ripping at each other, urged on by their owners; a fifth, a cache of weapons and ammunition laid out for the camera; a sixth, huge knives displayed on the wall of a gang member’s home; a seventh, a wheel-spinning Ferrari in a car park, thought to be that stolen from Everton FC’s Andy Van der Meyde; and the eighth, a dog ripping at the trouser leg of a young girl.

Young Wayne is sometimes compared to one of the Bash Street Kids, from the comic strip in The Beano. The sad thing is that Bash Street is less depressing and more life-enriching than the real thing. It’s certainly safer. The sequence of events in the mid-noughties – a series of shootings ending in a shotgun assassination outside a prison – can be seen as a depressing confirmation that the gangs noted the official displeasure and the heightened police activity, and decided they have more important things to do, like continuing to try to kill each other.

Because the police crackdown in Crocky in 2006 did not change much. That October I saw the police scene-of-crime tapes at the back of the Wezzy with my own eyes. The gunplay hadn’t stopped. Worst of all, one August evening in 2007, a year after Smigger was shot dead, Sean Mercer of the Crocky Crew took out his gun by the Fir Tree pub – fifteen minutes’ walk from the Wezzy – and went ‘bang-bang-bang’. One of the bullets blasted Rhys Jones, a wholly innocent bystander, who was going home after a game of soccer. The bullet entered through Rhys’s shoulder blade and exited through his neck, killing him. Rhys was eleven. The murder of a schoolboy caused outrage across the world, but for weeks many of Mercer’s gang members and his mother kept silent. Mercer was convicted of murder with a recommendation that he serve twenty-two years. (While in prison Mercer used a pair of tweezers to stab Jake Fahri, who killed altar boy Jimmy Mizen in a bakery shop in London.) Mercer’s mum got three years for keeping back evidence that would have helped the police catch her son.

This is what has become of home sweet Crocky home for Wayne Rooney. Many of his ‘rellies’ – Scouse for relatives, extended family – still live there, including his uncles, aunties and cousins. The Rooney family, rough as a brick outhouse though they may be, are by no means the roughest customers in Crocky. On the contrary, for that part of the world, you use the words ‘respectable’ and ‘Rooneys’ in the same breath.

To some, Wayne Rooney is a monstrous sign of our time, an out-of-control, gum-chewing, bad-mannered, whore-mongering, ill-tempered thug who earns multiples of money on the soccer pitch for kicking a ball around. For his critics, Rooney is the emblem of our national malaise: a yob with boots of gold. But, to be fair, it’s not Rooney’s fault if we throw money at his form of genius. It’s not his fault that his education wasn’t of the best. A man’s life is dyed with the colour of his own imagination, said Marcus Aurelius – not a Lazio fullback but the last of the great Roman emperors – suggesting, perhaps, that every man is a prisoner of his own mind, framed by home, family and circumstance.

Before condemning Rooney out of hand, it would be necessary, or at least polite, to ask two questions: first, is it the little monster (Rooney) or is it the swamp (Crocky)? Second, is the monster or the swamp to blame for the extreme Darwinian nature of football, or, for that matter, many other parts of our national life today – crazy riches if you are a winner, a cup of cold sick if you are a loser?

The petrol-head Voltaire of our day, Jeremy Clarkson, summed up Rooney’s autobiography in four phrases: ‘Wayne gets born, grows big ears, kicks a football, shags a grandmother.’

I’m not so sure he did shag a grandmother but I defy anyone to spend five minutes in Liverpool 11 without beginning to have at least a sneaking admiration for someone from Crocky who gets out of the place. Here, Wayne Rooney feels like a hero.

Wayne Mark Rooney was born on 24 October 1985, at Fazakerley Hospital, Liverpool, just down the road from Crocky, the first-born son of Thomas Wayne ‘Big Wayne’ Rooney, unemployed hod-carrier and labourer, and Jeanette Rooney, née Morrey, dinner lady and part-time cleaner. The couple lived at 28 Armill Road, Croxteth.

If you seek this address, you find a stretch of razor fencing, with a red-and-white plastic bag twisting poignantly – plastic bags never twist any other way – in the wind. Roo’s first house has been demolished and is now the car park of a community centre. The street is otherwise wholly unremarkable.

But he was conceived in the middle of an eighteen-game unbeaten run that swept Everton to the 1984–5 title, and that’s much more important than his birthdate. The Rooneys and the Morreys were Blues, lifelong Everton fans. Time was when religious bigotry cut across Liverpool as it does, even today, across Northern Ireland. In 1958 Cardinal Heenan was stoned while visiting a sick woman who lived close to an Orange Lodge. People say that Liverpool was the mainly Protestant team, Everton for Catholics, but those old religious divides have faded.

But if you live on the east bank of the Mersey, you’re either Liverpool or Everton. There is no doubt that young Rooney’s family home in Crocky was a shrine to the other Liverpool club. What Everton lacks in money and trophies, it makes up for in character, graft and that special loyalty people have for the underdogs. They call Everton ‘the Toffees’, some say after Mother Noblett’s toffee shop, which was close by.

You can get some idea of Everton from what happens when the team walks out on to the pitch at Goodison Park: the Toffees rise and sing the theme from Z Cars, the black-and-white TV cop show from the 1960s set in Merseyside, which made a feature of panda cars, Scouse wit and storylines with working-class grit. No one in Z Cars died in the library, having been killed by a candlestick wielded by Professor Plum. It could be said that it is a sign of Everton’s lowly status in the football fashion food chain that its theme tune was first heard in 1962 and belongs to a long-dead TV show featuring the late Inspector Barlow and the late Sergeant Watt. And yet it’s a bloody good tune to mass-hum – and the beauty of supporting Everton is that the Toffees don’t give a damn.

Little Wayne’s immersion in the family cult was total. He said: ‘All I ever wanted to do was walk out at Goodison Park with our theme tune, Z Cars, playing in the background. I wanted it so much … As a kid, I used to get shivers down my spine when I heard it and still do today.’ Later on, a combination of pressures – big money, a claimed unhappiness with the manager, a hunger to win the big competitions – gobbled up Roo’s loyalty to Everton and spat it out. For the moment, the future Evertonian was safe enough in his pram.

Wayne Rooney opens his autobiography, My Story So Far, with the shocking admission ‘I was nearly called Adrian’. My Story So Far was typed up by Rooney’s genial moustachioed ghostwriter, Hunter Davies, who knows a thing or two about very silly first names. Cynics might add that those first five words alone probably cost the publisher, HarperSport, around £500 and that’s the best bit of the whole book, but that would be unfair. Adrian Rooney would have been a cursèd name for the headline writers. Adrian sounds like somebody who lives in Guildford, wears slippers and lives with his mum. Adrian would never have been sent off in a World Cup, although he might have made a cup of cocoa for the linesman.

‘Wayne’ is working-class, rough, tough and can be turned into the tabloid-friendly ‘Wazza’, which rhymes with Gazza and carries with it the instant suggestion of an unguided missile, ‘rogue genius’ quality that Fleet Street’s in-house self-taught shrinks believe is shared by England’s two most charismatic soccer heroes. Apart from the name of some Roman bloke who built a wall in Northumberland, nothing rhymes with Adrian.

It was Big Wayne who fancied calling his son Adrian, after an Everton player of yesteryear, Adrian Heath. Mum Jeanette, who talks loudly and carries a big stick, won the argument and the baby was named after his dad.

The huge plus for the newspapers is that you can manufacture an awful lot of puns out of ‘Wayne Rooney’ – ‘Wayne’s World’ just for starters. You can even cut the whole thing down to three letters – ROO – which is always useful on a newspaper front page, and then build it up again: so we’ve got Roomania, Roonaldo – better, more British than Ronaldo – Rooling the Roost, Kanga-Roo, Roo-ful, blah blah blah. If you’re a football supporter, you can chant the two syllables beautifully: ‘Roo-ney, Roo-ney’.

‘Wayne Rooney’ is the perfect name for a street footballer. It’s almost as if Baby Rooney was a made-to-order construct by the tabloids at the moment his parents signed his birth certificate. The rest was just kicking a ball around.

The Big Wayne/Little Wayne thing has its comic side. Little Wayne, now at five ten, stands some four inches taller than Big Wayne, his dad, who is two inches smaller than his wife. But you wouldn’t want to mess with Big Wayne. He was a ferocious lightweight boxer in his day, representing first Liverpool, then the north-west counties. He fought and won against the navy and even went to Finland for a European competition, where he won silver and gold. Big Wayne could have been a contender, but somehow he never made it to the big time. His brothers Ritchie, John, Eugene and Alan all won in the ring, but Wayne says in the autobiography that his dad was the best of them all. There is a photograph from 1981 of young Big Wayne, with a towel around his shoulders, holding a boxing cup in one big glove while patting an opponent’s glove with the other: when you study the photo, you think, ‘He looks very much like his son’ and ‘I wouldn’t like to mess with him’.

One of Rooney Senior’s opponents in the ring was the young John Hyland, now a colourful Liverpool boxing promoter who re-entered the Rooney saga in 2003, when, attended by two cage fighters, he scared the living daylights out of Little Wayne’s dodgy agent, Paul Stretford. It all ended messily in a blackmail case, but we are letting the narrative get ahead of itself.

The Rooneys were of poor Liverpool Irish stock, Roman Catholic enough to put ‘RC’ down on official documents and have a fight about the infallibility of His Holiness the Pope if any Protestant daft enough wanted one. Young Rooney was never going to be an altar boy. There has only ever been one famous Rooney before, Mickey Rooney, the pint-sized American actor with eight marriages to his name. He and Wayne are, sadly, not related.

Wayne Senior is one of eight children, five brothers and three sisters, most of whom still knock around the Croxteth area. He left school at sixteen, got a job as a butcher’s boy for two years, and then the shop shut, so he became a labourer, ready to turn his hand to anything manual. He worked off and on throughout Little Wayne’s childhood. The family never had much money and he never learnt a trade. Jeanette Morrey appears, to outsiders at least, to be the one who wears the trousers in the relationship. She seems to be sharper, more outgoing than her husband, to have more drive. The family name is French, according to Roo’s official autobiography, but Scottish if you look it up on one genealogical website. Jeanette was one of nine children, and also Catholic. Her mother’s dad, William Morrey, had been a professional footballer for Southport and two of her brothers – young Wayne’s uncles – had also played the beautiful game. Uncle Billie had appeared for Marine, a non-league club from Crosby, Liverpool, before he emigrated to Australia where he turned out for Green Gully, and Uncle Vinnie got one schoolboy under-15 cap for England. The Morrey side of the family claim another sporting relative up their sleeve: Bob ‘Gentleman Ruby’ Fitzsimmons, crowned Heavyweight Champion of the World in 1897.

Big Wayne and Jeanette decided to get married when Roo was seventeen months old. They had a local register office ceremony and, because they were living off Big Wayne’s £120-a-week pay as a labourer, there was no honeymoon. The couple had two more children, both boys, Graeme and John. As soon as she was able, Jeanette went back to work, holding down two jobs: a dinner lady at the all-boys Catholic comprehensive De La Salle – where Little Wayne ended up going – in the day, and a cleaner in the evenings at the all-girls Catholic St John Bosco’s, which was Coleen’s secondary school.

The relative that young Wayne seemed to cherish the most was Granny Mavis, his dad’s mum. ‘GRAN WAS MY ROCK … I’M SO SO SAD SHE DIDN’T LIVE TO SEE ME PLAYING FOR ENGLAND’ was the headline to the World Exclusive for the paper that got Rooney’s story first. The young player went on to describe how he learnt his football in his granny’s backyard: ‘I’d play with my cousins in the garden but we’d kick the ball against the wall and the pebbledash would drop off. She used to go mad with me and give me a clip around the ear. But I was very close to my nan.’

Stop. Stop. Stop. World Exclusive?