With Euro 2012 coming up, football fever is everywhere. Will it carry on in the same vein as the Jubilee, and unite us all in our love for the beautiful game? Or, will all of those long, long, LONG held dreams of England winning something come crashing down? According to the Euro Club Index we have a 5.3% chance of winning, which I would have thought was, well, not very good, but it’s better than France’s 2.2%, so that’s a start.
Whatever happens, you can’t go wrong with a wonderfully written, tarts-and-all biography of England’s most famous sportsman, which also happens to be available at the special price of £6.99! John Sweeney’s Wayne Rooney: Boots of Gold is the story of a boy from the mean streets of broken Britain – and there are few streets meaner than those of Croxteth, in Liverpool – lifted out of poverty by his footballing genius to play for Manchester United and England. Wayne Rooney can be bad-tempered and he can use bad language, but there's no doubting his passion for the beautiful game, and a basic, street-level sense of fair play. Rough, working class, surrounded by an unlikely crew, including a controversial agent, a crooked lawyer, tarts and gangsters, Boots of Gold looks at the characters who have been attracted to the fabulous money Rooney gets for kicking a pig's bladder around a field. Some of them have tainted his gold. However, in the wake of a disastrous World Cup 2010, further tabloid revelations of his paying prostitutes for sex, and the comically unedifying spectacle of his grotesque contract negotiations with Manchester United in October 2010, showed that Rooney is perfectly capable of tarnishing his own gold.