JOHANNESBURG – Cursing is not clever but many footballers do it, which is why the pre-World Cup fuss about Wayne Rooney’s foul mouth has gone too far.
The striker, who carries England’s World Cup hopes on his pasty-white shoulders, chewed out a South African referee in a training match this week.
His use of ugly language – as common as trouble on the tough streets of Liverpool where Rooney grew up – was, of course, naughty and disrespectful.
It earned the 24-year-old the wrong type of headlines about his hot temper and whether he could be a liability for England’s campaign to rule the football world again for the first time since 1966.
Perhaps he could. But it seems unlikely.
Rooney is almost a Zen master of cool compared to the raging bull he used to be.
He has matured, if not mellowed, under manager Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, learning that it is better to sweat out some of his natural aggression on the training pitch than in the heat of a match. Becoming a dad seems to have taken a bit of the boxer’s edge off him, too.
Needle him as they might, the United States players who will try, perhaps in vain, tomorrow, to stop him from scoring should not expect Rooney to make the petulant mistake of being sent off for stomping on a player’s groin – which is what happened in his last World Cup match in 2006.
Really, however, Rooney’s temperament shouldn’t be the issue going into tomorrow’s game. Nor would it have been were it not for Jeff Selogilwe, the South African who seems to have an unusually thin skin for a referee and to have been far too eager to tell the world that Rooney verbally abused him.
Selogilwe said Rooney directed the F-word at him during England’s 3-0 win in a training match against club side Platinum Stars on Monday.
“I said, ‘No, Rooney, you don’t use that word again.’ He was so aggressive,” Selogilwe told The AP in a phone interview.
“I was very much disappointed because Wayne Rooney is my role-model player.” (AP)
