WHY SAY ANYTHING?

(Wazza can’t quite reach the nasty ankle to check for injury!)

Apparently Wayne Rooney has a nasty ankle. I don’t know which ankle, but one of them is not too nice an ankle.

Having scoured the newspapers I cannot discern which it is because the great British press don’t deem it important that we have this knowledge. Suffice to say that one of the ankles belonging to Wayne Rooney is nasty.

This is the headline that says it all: “Manchester United captain Wayne Rooney will miss West Ham and Wolfsburg with a ‘nasty ankle injury’ confirms van Gaal”. Not, you will notice, a nasty injury to his ankle. There is a world of difference!

Maybe we should be glad that the injury is to his nasty ankle, rather than his nice ankle, assuming that his other ankle actually IS nice.

Anyway, enough speculation. Whichever ankle it is and however nasty it is, the injury has arrived at a very opportune moment for Louis van Gaal.

Could it be that he is actually ‘resting’ Rooney? He says the injury is worse than originally thought. What a perfect excuse to tell Rooney to have a couple of games off and tell the waiting world that he is injured. It saves Rooney the embarrassment of being dropped which, in fairness at the moment, would be a lot better than the embarrassment of being on the pitch. It saves van Gaal actually having to agree with anyone that Rooney has been abysmal since the start of the season, in fact, since he has been made captain. Now he can just say that ‘Rooney has an injury to his nasty ankle’ and all bases are covered.

Louis van Gaal can now get on with it and see just how much better the team can perform without their ‘leader’, for a couple of games at least. My guess is that if they do well, which they probably will, Rooney’s nasty ankle will remain nasty for a while longer. There will be complications and it will be even worse than they thought it was when they thought it was even worse than they thought it was.

The hole that van Gaal dug for himself when naming Rooney captain is now becoming deeper and deeper with every game he plays. As I have said in a previous post, (which you may read here, if you haven’t already), Rooney is not captaincy material. Yes, when he is not sulking he can lead by example, whereby he will run around a lot and put in lots of physical effort, as if to say ‘there, I can do it, now so should the rest of you!’ Very occasionally he will have a moan at the defence for not defending well. Last season, the defence didn’t defend particularly well, fortunately David De Gea did, but I don’t recall Rooney, captain or not, having a go very often.

He is not a vocal captain and, in my book, that means he isn’t a captain.

When arriving at the captaincy decision, van Gaal obviously expected an in- form Rooney to lead the team to greater things. He should have known better. With all of his experience, I would expect a better choice of captain from van Gaal. Now, obviously, Schweinsteiger would be the natural choice but he wasn’t around when the original decision was made.

Louis van Gaal now needs to strip Wayne Rooney of the captaincy for his own good. It might make him a better player. Maybe it was the added responsibility that caused such a drastic loss of form, who knows? Give him a couple of games as a normal player and see how he does then, if he hasn’t improved, he has to go. I am sorry for all the United fans who still think he is wonderful, but he isn’t. He is currently a passenger who hasn’t paid his fare and, if he stays as he is, he needs to get off the bus at the next stop.

The problem then is that, if it isn’t his stop, he will have to hobble home on his nasty ankle, you know, the one with the injury.