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A Different Opinion - Wayne Rooney - Room for improvement from United’s best (“luxury”) player
After an amazing proclamation on Sunday night on this site by one of our staff that Wayne Rooney is a luxury player, this writer decided to take the subject further and truly ask…is he?
Not in the sense you have perhaps first read that, no. A luxury player can best be described as one whose contribution in games is detrimental to the team, so by the very definition of the term, Rooney cannot be called a traditional luxury player.
However….looking into the matter in more detail, there could be some method to our writer’s mad claims in Sunday’s piece entitled Fans’ patience bubbling under with Berbatov as Owen is welcomed to Manchester that perhaps Rooney isn’t offering his best to Manchester United. The boy’s a genius, he offers running, dedication, an unpredictable element and from this season again, goals. Rooney is the type of player to set others up, to create, to be the focal point. But what if his role to the team isn’t all it is cracked up to be, and that perhaps there is space for development to a better player? His contribution to Manchester United is by no means detrimental like that of a luxury player, but if his current style of play is restricting his advancement to a more complete striker then that is technically detrimental both to the player and the team relying on him so much right now.
Rooney’s potential as a world-class player is incomparable - he genuinely has the talent to take his game further than most before him, but Rooney the current footballer is yet to reach the footballing elite - the fact he doesn’t figure at the end-of-year European and World Player of the Year awards is testament to that. His current contribution to Manchester United in 2009 is both overrated and over-relied upon in creating and scoring goals, given what he is still capable of producing.
He isn’t holding back as a player, and no-one can criticise what he offers United, directly. However, perhaps this player is enjoying too much creative freedom at United and it is that which is proving disadvantageous to both his game and that of his teammates. Watching Manchester United minus Cristiano Ronaldo is one of solid, robustness. Rooney is one of a reduced number of creative outlets in the team, and focus is very much on him to produce goals and assists like never before. How does he take things to the next level then to meet these demands? Positional definition is one method this writer would suggest.
Not a classic No 9 striker by any stretch, Rooney’s position could best be described as a continental No 10, hovering off a target-man or strike partner to capitalise on knock-downs and to bring his teammates into play. This is more the case for England than at club level due to the differing approaches Fabio Capello and Sir Alex Ferguson have. Capello has shown a way of playing with Rooney as the central creative element for England, something United look to him to be, but yet do not see. The striker plays for his country off the back of Emile Heskey with great aplomb. He chases down opponents as before, but his game is very much restricted to the final third - rarely in Capello’s England do you see Rooney dropping 60-yards from the opponent’s goal to pick up the ball from the defence. Capello has defined the 23-year-old’s position for him and extracted a higher level of technical and tactical efficiency from the player as a result. Top-scorer in the European section of World Cup qualifying is a fact hard to argue with. Indeed, the player has notched 11 of his 25 goals for England in a little over a year under Capello’s stewardship, the previous 14 coming over a period of four years.
At Manchester United, Rooney’s role is far more expressive. His role is again central and deep-laying, but he goes where his instinct and desire takes him, and that can be all over the pitch. It is hard to play with players who you do not always know what is coming next from. Of course it is brilliant when things click and the unpredictable becomes the fantasia we dream of seeing in the Premier League, but those moments are few and far between - even from Rooney. With the £80m-man gone, Rooney needs to realise his greater potential, but that won’t happen if it is left down to the player. He remains thought of as a footballer capable of doing anything, and that is indeed the case, but as Capello sees things, Rooney actually doing everything does not benefit the team. It is a fantastic luxury to have a player who can play on the wing, up front, off the back of a teammate, drop off into midfield or run and charge opponents, but it doesn’t benefit the player nor his teammates as much as a focused, more efficient individual perhaps could. Rooney could benefit at United just as he has done for England from a more confined position at the front end of the pitch to avoid becoming a jack-of-all-trades, and that guidance comes from Sir Alex Ferguson. United don’t have a target man like Heskey to pump balls up to, but trying Rooney up-front in a more restrained role could pay dividends.
 His second-half performance against Tottenham Hotspur is a great example of a man possessed leading the line for the Red Devils, almost single-handedly. Down to 10 men, Rooney was forced to conserve his energy and remain the outlet in attack for his teammates. As a result he ran his markers ragged and scored one superb individual goal and could have had another. With 11 on the pitch, Rooney leaves the role of main striker to Michael Owen or Dimitar Berbatov. The player’s greatest weakness is his heart. He puts his everything into each game, and although he is an intelligent player - one of the most intelligent in the league - his heart (and energy levels giving him the capacity) sees him do more than just play with his head.
Rooney offers United a great deal, but he doesn’t always seem to know what to do to bring his teammates into the game each and every time (when we know that he is capable of it). Stuck in a corner, he’ll go to play it off a defender, in midfield areas he’ll try a pass he knows isn’t possible because he has the licence to do so - his game still has errors strewn across it because he is attempting different things every game - he is capable of 45-yard passes across the pitch, but do United need their striker bombing back down the pitch to pick the ball up to do that when Paul Scholes, Michael Carrick and even Rio Ferdinand are just as capable of such delivery? His performances for United over the years have been very different to his recent ones for his country as we have seen marked differences in his position.
The player can finish like very few before him, but his roaming all over the pitch to be the heart and soul of the United team does himself and his colleagues no favours when it comes to getting goals. They have been asked of him, but if he chooses to run around the pitch and play each game against five or six opponents positionally - as opposed just one or two defenders in a striker role - then by all means he can and will, but the contribution he is capable of could be so different.
 Back to the question then - Is Wayne Rooney a luxury player? As stated, we cannot call him a luxury player in the sense that his efforts are destructive to the team when compared with what he offers it, indeed the question isn’t quite correct, so instead we could ask, does Wayne Rooney have more to offer Manchester United, and the answer is yes. Given his style of play could be taken to another level, his desire to be involved all over the pitch could indeed be construed as detrimental both to his personal game and that of
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