Now, I'm no expert on football. I pretty much go by the mustard and ketchup analogy they used in Bend it Like Beckham when it comes to the offside rule, and I didn't REALLY get it then. I am not interested in football. I do find that it has hidden comedy value if you’re not a football lover (I don’t think it’s supposed to be funny when the players miss a header but, in my mind, it is). HOWEVER. I am interested in the characters in it. And if there’s one thing football does well, it’s characters. There are some footballers so present in the national consciousness that, even if you don’t know anything about their footballing career, you know about them as people. I know, for example, that it can’t have been an easy decision for Gary Lineker to sing about a ‘groovy kind of love’ to publicise Walker’s crisps. I know that Wayne Rooney’s cousins were on Snog, Marry, Avoid. I know that Bianca Gascoigne is the former stepdaughter of Paul Gascoigne. I know that Terry Venables did that really, really awful song ‘England Crazy’. I could go on.
Now I’m going to say something you’re not really supposed to say here. England losing last night at Euro 2012 doesn’t REALLY matter. In fact, I’m going to say it’s a positive thing. Firstly because it is, in fact, a game (YEAH I SAID IT) but also because English football is what it is because we don’t win anything. If England won something we’d have to focus on that, and why, may I ask, would you want to detract from how Coleen Rooney’s shoes DIDN’T bring the team luck, or the average age of her husband’s conquests? Why would you want to deny newspapers the chance for some stellar puns? (‘England cr-Ash out’ was a classic from Metro this morning). Why would I want Alan Hansen to be cheerful when his sheer disgust is SO AMUSING TO LISTEN TO?
Yeah. I’m much more interested in that, and nowhere have I found a better account of one of the greatest characters in English football than in John Sweeney’s Wayne Rooney: Boots of Gold. Irreverent, hilarious and surprising, Boots of Gold is a tarts-and-all biography of England's most famous sportsman and the iniquities of some of those who have sought their pound of flesh. This 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, the disastrous World Cup of 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. Yep. This is what football's all about.
p.s. if this expert analysis isn't quite enough and you'd like some from an author who was shortlisted for the William Hill Sport's Book of the Year for We Ate All The Pies, I'd suggest John Nicholson's column over at Football365. 'We need end to big-name addiction'.