Wayne's Enterprises

This is a real photo.

It is a sad truth that if Wayne Rooney had broken his leg at 23, like Paul Gascoigne before him, he would be more loved by the English public than he is now; on the verge of becoming our record goal scorer. It is a dark irony that if one cannot live up to the expectation the fans demand, and the perfection they themselves undermine, castigation will follow. Being very good but not achieving greatness is worse than being unexpectedly good when mediocrity beckoned. Because, as Harvey Dent tells us in The Dark Knight, “you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain”. Wayne Rooney is our flawed protector, a man destined for perfection who didn’t quite achieve it, but who still toils to save England again and again and hold us back from the abyss. On Saturday, earning his 100th cap, he dragged us back into the game against Slovenia. People laughed because he scored a penalty. He consistently drives us to tournaments we have no right of reaching. For this he is derided as a player who fails to perform at the very highest level. While Rooney, like Batman, is not perfect, he is the best we have. Yet our brute Wayne, like Bruce Wayne before him, will never be recognised as the hero he is. This is not his fault. It is ours.

I should clarify that I have no love for the man, given that he has twice held my club to ransom despite kissing its badge almost weekly (neatly Christian Bale seems like a bit of a twat too). On a footballing level, however, it seems laughable that Rooney should need defending at all. His career should surely speak for itself. He has won 5 Premier League titles, and reached 3 Champions League finals. He has the third most goals in Premier League history, despite rarely playing as a pure forward. Incidentally, when tasked with being a striker and nothing else he fired 34 goals in 44 games, before it became apparent, to some at least, that his greatest value to the team lay further back. He even, and it may seem hard to believe now, was considered the third greatest player in the World during his purple patch in 2009/10; a dynamo who combined the power of Ronaldo and the flair of Messi without quite coming close to their unheard-of majesty. He has, quite simply, been the most important and consistent English player of the last decade; a man who has driven Manchester United to titles and England to tournaments despite the mediocrity he is often surrounded by. He is our best player, and only in this country does that mean he is castigated for not being the best player of them all. And yet his ‘failure’ to become the player we dreamt he might is borne not of an absence of effort, but rather a lack of imagination; tellingly, our own.

As Bane prepares to shatter Batman’s spine and deal him an apparently final blow, he notes our hero’s apparent shortcoming. Bane was born into darkness, molded by it – whereas Bruce Wayne merely adopted it, forged into a dark knight by tragedy and his sense of absolute justice. Rooney is the same, although perhaps a cast-iron morality is a bit of a push. Yet he was undeniably bathed initially in light; the single most exciting English prospect of the modern era, the scorer of impossible goals who could glide past defences as if they didn’t exist and find the pass which made those watching gasp in disbelief. The White Pele, he was soon laughably labelled, the saviour of the English game. A decade later Rooney is a shadow of the player he might have become; good but seldom great, talent sacrificed at the altar of toil.

He has become a most hideously English creation; the logical conclusion of a culture that long has despised mercurial creativity and failed to understand the value of virtuosity. Where those touched by genius, chief amongst them Paul Scholes and Joe Cole, are castigated for their defensive shortcomings or, far worse, overlooked in favour of lesser men. Men like Gerrard and Milner, workhorses who run around a lot and kick the ball very hard but are devoid of brilliance. Rooney was the greatest talent we have produced since Gascoigne, yet successive managers and journalists, and here Ferguson is most to blame, have molded him into darkness; created the World’s greatest defensive forward at the cost of his pure, primal artistry. Gone is his first touch and eye for goal, replaced by unending stamina and the bulldog spirit which we so prize, but so holds us back. And we still have the gall to rebuke him for what he has begun, the perfect English Frankenstein, the epitome of everything that has been wrong with our footballing culture since the halcyon days of the late 70s and early 80s. We have created not a White Pele, as we might have, but the darkest of Dark Knights.

Batman is all that stands between Gotham and oblivion, and Rooney for too long has served that role for England. The king of qualifying goals, the man who shoulders the team and carries them to tournament after tournament. Yet both are denigrated for their efforts; scapegoats for shortcomings rather than heroes for helping avoid the abyss. How easy it is for us to criticise Rooney. To blame him for England’s failings, to suggest that his falling short of true greatness is what holds us back. He, like Batman, has become a stooge; the mediocrity of our system, our culture, our players focussed on the one who showed at least a glimpse of changing it all. Why chastise our tactical inflexibility when we can just blame Rooney, why look for the corrupt core of our culture when we can hate the Batman? And that is where the final, and greatest parallel falls. Rooney has become useful not simply as a player, but as a conduit for our dissatisfaction, a distraction from the greater and darker truth of our own inadequacy. The closing scene of The Dark Knight could well be a discussion between a father and son in Wembley’s hallowed stands as Rooney leaves to boos after yet another unconvincing qualifying victory:

Son: Rooney! Rooney! Why’s he running Dad?
Father: Because we have to chase him.
Son: He didn’t do anything wrong!
Father: Because he’s the hero England deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A Dark Knight.

Wayne Rooney. Truly the hero England deserves.