Wazza Rooney

‘THE papers are undecided about one thing today.

‘Boo-hoo! Someone’s stolen my comedy breasts’

The dilemma is not where to put those Wayne Rooney exclusives and opinions – they are just plastered everywhere – but whether the England footballer is more Paul Gascoigne or David Beckham.

‘So what can Rooney learn from Gazza?’ asks the Mail, which has taken a look at the peroxide-headed wife beater and the new wonder kid and noticed the physical similarities.

‘Both look fairly pugilistic,’ says the Mail’s Hunter Davies, ‘5ft 10in, 11-stone, thick-set bodies, and neither is an oil painting, although Gazza has always had his adoring female fans.’ And we’re sure Gazza always will.

But what can the young Rooney learn from the old master? How to belch? How to be daft as a brush? How to deliver the appropriate slap to his other half?

‘Is there some hidden vice, some secret in Rooney’s psyche which is yet to emerge?’ asks Davies. ‘Drink, drugs, wife-beating?’ Kebabs? A friendship with Chris Evans?

If there is a secret or nascent psychosis in Rooney’s locker, the papers have set out to find it.

The Mirror even digs out the teens who played with an 11-year-old Rooney for Our Lady and St Swithen’s Catholic Primary in Croxteth, Liverpool.

But nothing doing – all we get is to hear how great young Rooney was. There’s not even a story of a borrowed pencil never returned, a young Rooney in detention or how he once ‘did a Gazza’ with a pint of Malibu.

We do learn in the Express that he’s gong to be ‘richer than Becks’, and via the Sun how England fans are clamouring to buy the £3m home being built alongside the Rooney mansion.

But will any of this make him the new Beckham or Gascoigne?

Perhaps the Sun is right to move away from the lad himself and see how his fiancée, Colleen McLoughlin, measures up to famedom.

There she is on the paper’s cover (‘Roo Booty – Wayne’s Wonder Woman’), sprawled across the front page in England shirt and shorts.

And there she is again, splashed over the paper’s centre pages in a piece entitled ‘SCHOOLGIRL TO COVERGIRL’.

She looks nice enough does Colleen, a girl with ‘the world at her feet’. But is she more Vicky Becks or Sheryl Gazza?

It’s a real puzzle. But a lot will decided by what her man does next.

Will he get sent off in a big England match like Beckham or cry like Gazza? Will he cultivate a friendship with a fat Geordie or sidle up to a plump Elton John?

Will he fill pages and pages of the newspaper with his antics, dye his hair, move to the continent (where his reputation becomes tarnished) and advertise junk food?

Or will he, er, fill pages and pages of the newspaper with his antics, dye his hair, move to the continent (where his reputation becomes tarnished) and advertise junk food?’

Posted: 23rd, June 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink