The message ‘Make Waves’ is emblazoned across one of the bridges which Wayne Rooney drives under each week on the high-speed route west into Plymouth.
That is what he saw himself doing in the golden days of August when Plymouth Argyle, the most remote league club in Britain, offered him the prospect of rehabilitation after 83 grim days at Birmingham City had appeared to finish him as a manager.
The only waves in Plymouth on Wednesday night were those thumping against the dock wall at the historic Royal William Yard, where Rooney rents an apartment, as a brutal rainstorm doused the city and wind howled through the place.
He was contemplating his worst week in management — a 4-0 hammering at Bristol City on the back of a 6-1 loss at Norwich. It left the club one place and two points above the Championship relegation zone, and Plymouth’s owner, Simon Hallett, telling a fans’ forum in Cornwall that there have been ‘no conversations’ about sacking him.
The dreaded vote of confidence carries a particular enormity for Rooney. Failure here, after that disaster at Birmingham, would seem to offer little prospect of a road back into management.
Perhaps this beat having insects crawling in an ear and requiring medical intervention to have one of them flushed out — his wife Coleen’s experience in the I’m a Celebrity jungle this week. But the lesser of the two evils was a hard one to call.
Man United icon Wayne Rooney is fighting to save his managerial career with Plymouth Argyle
Plymouth are currently one place and two points above the Championship relegation zone
Rooney’s wife Coleen is currently taking part in ITV show I’m a Celebrity in Australia
When Rooney sits down to talk on Thursday, the overwhelming impression is how tired and worn he seems. He is still only 39, yet none of this looks terribly good for his health.
In the four years or so since his British managerial career began, at Derby, it has been a non-stop struggle for Championship survival at each of three clubs, with a brief intermission in Washington DC, where the outcome was not so good. From the outside looking in, this seems like purgatory. Doesn’t this whole experience wear him down?
His reply is firm, yet flat; no lift in the cadence of his voice and not the faintest of smiles. ‘No, I love it. I love my job,’ he tells Mail Sport, the Croxteth boy in him still unmistakable, 300 miles from home. ‘I’ve said this many times — I love playing football, and football… if it was perfect and easy every week, then everyone would do it.’
It was a Freudian slip. He is not playing football, of course. Merely watching and hoping a little of the instinctive genius he showed as a player will rub off on those he sends out against Swansea on Tuesday night. Today’s home clash with Oxford is off.
Does it become more bearable to be a mere bystander now, left to place hopes and plans in others? ‘I haven’t felt like I wanted to be in that position since the day I retired, to be honest,’ Rooney replies. ‘I did it for so many years and I’m very happy and grateful for the career I had and I’m no longer a player and haven’t been for a number of years now. That’s not an issue at all.’
This is an individual who was in such a different stratosphere to most around him that, as he related in a brilliant Toffee TV interview two years ago, he would train as a 16-year-old with Everton’s first team and think some of his team-mates were ‘s***’.
So it is easy to imagine what was playing on his mind during those games last week, watching players who do not see the same pictures he saw, taking longer than he expected to pick up what he is asking them to do.
His wife seems to sense that so much is out of his hands now. She has related in the jungle that she finds it ‘more nerve-racking’ now Rooney is a manager. ‘I feel more pressure,’ she added.
Rooney is coming off the back of a bruising week where his side suffered two heavy defeats
He seems tired and worn down, but the 39-year-old insists he is loving being in management
Rooney has proven to be popular among Plymouth’s fans who are steadfastly behind him
Already, there is evidence of his players here hanging on his every word, finding the most casual observation or suggestion can transform the way they play.
Scottish forward Ryan Hardie tells Mail Sport how Rooney suggested he might ‘guide the ball from crosses instead of hitting them hard’. He has also offered Hardie suggestions about the ‘two-yard movements’ to get away from defenders. ‘You can see the movement that got him the success. Those suggestions have massively improved my finishing this year,’ Hardie says.
It has been a very different story for the defence. No side have shipped as many goals in the Championship as Plymouth, whose goal difference of -20 is the worst in the top five divisions this season, bar Ebbsfleet United, a basket case at the bottom of the National League.
But for all the residual gloom, this really does not yet feel like a crisis. Home Park’s legendary Green Army seem steadfastly behind Rooney, whose name will resound around the stadium they call the Theatre of Greens if the side can maintain their respectable home record on Tuesday. There was no animus directed towards him as he walked towards them after the 4-0 defeat at Ashton Gate.
It is hard to find fans who subscribe to the idea Rooney is the wrong man for the club and some of that seems to stem from the way he has thrown himself into Plymouth life. By contrast with predecessor Ian Foster, a former England youth coach whose three months here brought one win in 12, Rooney has encouraged fans to approach him for selfies if they see him out and about in the city. And he is out there a lot.
The apartment block at the grand, stone-built Royal William Yard which he shares with assistant coach Pete Shuttleworth who’s been his No2 since stepping up from an analyst’s role at Derby, is Plymouth’s equivalent of Liverpool’s Albert Dock and there are ample leisure options.
Rooney has stepped around the corner to the Monday quiz night in the Seco Lounge cafe-bar and has also been seen belting out Ed Sheeran hits at the Cider Press pub’s karaoke night in the Barbican. A video of him posted on social media went viral. ‘Make some f***ing noise, baby!’ Rooney implores those gathered there.
Those who know Rooney best are only too aware that this kind of bachelor life is, to put it mildly, not always good for him. His wife’s absences have regularly coincided with chaos over the years and, though her time in the Australian jungle is the longest period the two of them have gone without speaking since childhood, management has made him an itinerant soul, so often away from home.
Plymouth striker Ryan Hardie told Mail Sport about the impact Rooney has had on his game
Rooney further endeared himself to supporters by singing Ed Sheeran on karaoke in a local pub
He is living in the city, a five hour drive away from Coleen and their four sons in Cheshire
Coleen and their four sons remain in Cheshire, with Rooney making the trip once a week, typically on a Saturday evening, returning Monday afternoon. He travels by car, rather than flying, and though he sometimes makes use of a driver, it is a five-hour haul each way — sometimes via the Midlands to drop off or pick up one of his coaching team.
The locals see a positive in the fact he is a regular presence. ‘We’re missing big players and remember — just staying in this division was always the target,’ says Ted Davies, a veteran fan and one of the few souls braving the unremitting rain at the Christmas markets in Plymouth’s faded city centre. ‘I’d have taken a place outside the relegation zone at Christmas,’ he says.
‘He’s not too big for this town,’ adds Fiona Phelps, at the Seco, on the ground floor of Rooney’s apartment block, where he can face the day by gazing across the Plymouth Sound to the rolling hills around Mount Edgcumbe.
‘We see something of ourselves in him. Liverpool and Plymouth are seafaring places. We live life fully. He’s like one of us.’ The two Q&A sessions Rooney held at Home Park sold out. And few cities cherish their heroes quite like this one.
On the wall beside the path leading away from Plymouth Hoe, where that old fish market stood, there are plaques to the many individuals who set sail from Plymouth, never to return. ‘Lost at Sea. Never Forgotten.’
Up at the stadium, a 10-minute drive away, the images of players who ran out in Plymouth green, from Sammy Black to Kevin Hodges, John Hore to Mickey Evans, adorn every pole and tunnel. Tommy Tynan, the club’s most famous Liverpudlian, who helped Argyle reach the semi- finals of the FA Cup in 1984, takes pride of place on a Portaloo door.
But you must earn that kind of recognition here. While Derby and Birmingham sang Rooney’s celebrity from the rooftops, you will find no images of him across the city and not so much as a souvenir photograph in the Plymouth club shop.
It is a far cry from Merseyside, where they are promoting a play called The Legend of Rooney’s Ring, a mythical tale featuring actors playing Rooney and Coleen, which runs at Liverpool’s Royal Court from next year.
Rooney is popular, although he must earn his stripes rather than rely on his name and stature
The locals see a positive in the fact he is a regular presence around the city and is approachable
Plymouth’s approach comes from the top. ‘I’m not interested in celebrity, so his playing career wasn’t a positive,’ Hallett, the club’s owner, said this summer. ‘He got the job despite his name, not because of it.’ That feels wise. If things do not work out for Rooney, he cannot complain about the environment at this intelligently-run club.
In Hallett, Plymouth have a shrewd owner — a child when his family left Plymouth for the USA, whose methods of wealth creation as chief investment officer at New Jersey global equities company, Harding Loevner, is being applied to his old local team.
The club’s financial results, about to be published, will reveal a cash-flow deficit of only £1million, similar to last year’s, showing Argyle to be one of the few self-sustaining clubs in the Championship, which has generally been a Wild West of spending.
Hallett has found a co-investor — identity undisclosed while EFL approval is sought — to help take Argyle from being among the lowest two or three spenders in the Championship to wielding mid-table spending power. He has also just invested £14m to build a new academy.
It is a very different place from the one Peter Reid found when he arrived to manage Argyle in 2010. The club were so broke that Reid had to pay the heating bill and sold his Everton runners-up medal from the 1986 FA Cup final for £4,000 at auction to put money into the players’ pot. The club went into administration and Reid was let go.
Rooney, the ‘head coach’, is seen as a cog in the structure of the club’s data-driven operation, where player acquisition is overseen by Neil Dewsnip, the former Everton academy head who coached him as a teenager. But Rooney, of course, will carry full responsibility if the eventual return from injury of several key players — including captain Joe Edwards and forwards Ibrahim Cissoko, Morgan Whittaker and Muhamed Tijani — does not coincide with a pick-up after a run of one win in nine games.
There have been some ‘home truths’ dispensed at some ‘hard meetings’ at Home Park this week, Rooney relates, and Hardie tells Mail Sport that ‘harsh words were exchanged from the manager’s side and the players’ side as well’ in those discussions.
‘There were things that needed ironing out.’ What, Rooney was asked, did he pick up from his players that suggested they wanted something different from him? ‘Not too much,’ he said, after a long pause.
Rooney is working under Simon Hallett, who is an extremely shrewd owner and chairman
Plymouth are in a much better shape than they have been in the past and have big plans
The bigger unanswered question is whether he has the tactical and strategic intelligence that management now demands. His assistant at Derby, Liam Rosenior, did much of the day-to-day coaching and found his reputation so enhanced that he was hired by Hull City.
Derby — and Rooney — acutely felt the loss. Rooney needs a Rosenior figure now. Someone who can do more than remind players, as he has this week, that the losing performances have not been good enough.
The motivational element comes naturally to him. That much is clear when Mail Sport asks if the relentless struggle ever leads him to think that this just might not be for him.
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s a privilege, to be honest, to be involved in football and I give everything I can to win. I’m a fighter.
‘And, of course, we are in a difficult moment but that doesn’t mean to say you quit or you’re finding it tough so you down tools. This is when you roll your sleeves up and be an example for your players. I’ve explained to the players, “I’m right here with you. I’m right here in front of you. I’m going to lead you”. And I will get them out of this.’
So much is on the line here because football is his life and, essentially, all he has.
The consequences of this blowing up would include the likely scrapping of a lucrative behind-the-scenes documentary charting this story being made by the producers of Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story. But that is a minor consideration.
Rooney has so little hinterland that life will seem bleak and small outside the game. As Rio Ferdinand observed last year, he is still the same ‘street footballer’ he always was.
But some have queried if Rooney is missing a figure like his former Derby No 2 Liam Rosenior
Rooney is facing a challenge at Plymouth, but he is desperate to succeed as a manager
Rooney let slip in an appearance on a recent I’m a Celebrity show that he and Coleen had discussed either of them appearing on the show and was asked if he might be a future jungle contestant. ‘Maybe, if I’m not working,’ he grinned. ‘At the moment, that’s obviously not possible.’
It is hard to see it. The razzle-dazzle has never been for Rooney in the way it has for his wife. A wet Tuesday night in Plymouth, facing Swansea in the Championship, looks far more up his street.
There was a blue sky here early yesterday, and streaks of pink as the sun came up. But the Western News was predicting 70mph winds and a danger-to-life warning was issued for parts of Devon.
By the afternoon, the Oxford game — which Rooney had hoped would represent a way of putting his problems in the past — had been postponed. More frustration. Another three days kicking his heels. He can only wait, reflect and pray that the winds of change in his life will start blowing him in the right direction.
