On The Ball

I got very frustrated with the news yesterday. First of all, I was surprised by a headline on Ceefax telling me that Wayne Rooney was to travel with the rest of the England squad to Switzerland for this week's international match. Why is that news? I asked myself - as far as I knew he wasn't injured. Upon reading the story, it simply reiterated that he would be travelling, adding that this was in spite of 'newspaper stories about his private life', without elaborating further. For God's sake, you can't bloody tease like that! If you are going to lead with a headline like that, at least have the bloody courtesy to tell us what these allegations are! I should add here that I very rarely read the Sunday papers and I was away from my broadband connection yesterday. In desperation I turned first to the BBC News Channel, then Sky News, in a desperate attempt to find out exactly what heinous crime Rooney was being accused of by the tabloids. However, both proved to be as coy as the original Ceefax story, cock-teasing me in their summary of upcoming stories, implying that they would elaborate on these 'allegations', then failing to do so. The bastards!

Consequently, I was left having to speculate on the nature of Rooney's misdemeanours. Bearing in mind that England were playing Switzerland next, I thought that maybe he had done something to offend the Swiss. Perhaps he had been photographed by the paparazzi drunkenly shagging a piece of underage Swiss cheese, I thought. Although, on the whole, that just didn't seem quite horrendous enough to jeopardise his place in the England line-up. Indeed, the FA could easily have explained such an incident away as being part of Capello's strategy for psychologically undermining the Swiss prior to the match. More likely, I mused, he's done something to upset the footballing hierarchy. Then it came to me - obviously, during a BBC interview he'd whacked off into a bag of Walker's Crisps, then shaken them up, before offering them to England football legend, top BBC pundit and Walker's Crisps salesman Gary Lineker. If that didn't upset Gary 'Mr Nice' Lineker, nothing would, I reasoned. An outside possibility, I reckoned, was that a tabloid had named Rooney as William Hague's 'bit of rough' on the side. Anyway, when I finally got home last night, I eagerly switched on my laptop and looked up 'Rooney scandal' on the web. To my disappointment, it turned out that all he was accused of doing was cheating on his wife with a prostitute. I mean, that's hardly news, is it? Now, if it turns out the prostitute he was shagging was under the age of sixty, that might just be a story...