MONEY MAKER

🚨 Wayne Rooney on people calling Cristiano Ronaldo’s 2008 season overrated: “I’ve seen people questioning Cristiano’s 2008 season again, and I genuinely wonder how many of them watched us play that year. I was there. I played alongside him. I saw what defenders were doing to try to stop him, and I saw what happened when they couldn’t. I remember one game where Cristiano had two players following him almost everywhere. At one point, I said to him, ‘You’ve got two of them worried about you now.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Good. That means somebody else is free.’ And that was the thing people sometimes forget about him. Everyone remembers the goals, the tricks and the celebrations. But when teams started organising their entire defence around stopping one player, the rest of us benefited. There were matches when you’d look up and see Cristiano making another run, even though he’d already made five or six without receiving the ball. I’d tell him, ‘You know you don’t have to chase every goal?’ He’d say, ‘Wayne, if I stop running, how am I going to score?’ You couldn’t argue with him. But Moscow is what I remember most. He’d scored our goal against Chelsea. People forget that sometimes because of what happened in the shootout. When he missed his penalty, I knew exactly what he’d be thinking. He’d scored 42 goals that season, helped us win the Premier League, and suddenly he was standing there believing he might have cost us the biggest trophy of the year. When Edwin saved Anelka’s penalty, everybody went crazy. We were European champions. But Cristiano was crying. I remember looking at him and thinking how strange football can be. A player can have the season of his life, score in the Champions League final, and still spend those last few minutes believing he’s let everyone down. That’s how much it meant to him. And that’s why I find some of the criticism ridiculous. People sit there nearly 20 years later, looking at clips and statistics, trying to explain why it wasn’t that special. We were playing against some of the best defenders in Europe. They knew what he wanted to do. They’d spend the entire week preparing for him. Then Saturday would come, and he’d do it anyway. I’m not saying we didn’t have a brilliant team. Of course we did. We had players who could win games all over the pitch. But even in that dressing room, we knew Cristiano was doing something extraordinary. The funniest thing is that people now use the fact that he played in such a good team against him. Well, I was one of the players in that team. And I can tell you that having Cristiano alongside us made our jobs easier, not his. If you want to argue about which individual season was the greatest, that’s fine. Football is full of opinions. But don’t tell people who were there that what we watched every week wasn’t special. I saw Cristiano win his first Ballon d’Or. I’ve also seen him win four more. And I still think there’s something about that first one that people will never fully understand unless they remember the player he was before he became the Cristiano Ronaldo everybody knows today.”