YOU would have thought that with a Champions League final against Barcelona coming up that Wayne Rooney would have better things to do than get involved in a stupid Twitter row.
The Manchester United and England striker replied to an abusive tweet by saying: “I’ll put u asleep within 10 second
The player, who has a following of over 570,000, went on to suggest a meeting at the training ground with his ‘opponent’, saying: “hope u turn up if u don’t gonna tell everyone ur scared u little nit. I’ll be waiting.”
Rooney later tried to tone everything down by tweeting: “Haha bit of banter”.
And a spokesman for the player issued a statement: “As is made clear in the tweets, this whole exchange is banter. There is no suggestion, nor is there any intention of a suggestion, of a real fight.”
Rooney is one of the best players in Europe, if not the world, a very rich young man and at 25 still has a fabulous football future ahead of him.
However he’s already generated enough controversy to last him a lifetime. Does he really need to bother with this sort of rubbish?
Maybe he ought to listen to some wise words from his manager Sir Alex Ferguson who said: “I don’t understand it, to be honest with you. I don’t know why anybody can be bothered with that kind of stuff. How do you find the time to do that?
“There are a million things you can do in your life without that. Get yourself down to the library and read a book. Seriously. It is a waste of time.”
You couldn’t use the word wise to describe the latest rubbish to come out of the mouth of FA chairman David Bernstein.
He is to hold talks with the Premier League about games being staged on the same day as the FA Cup final.
Last Saturday’s Wembley showpiece kicked off less than an hour after a round of Premier League matches and Bernstein told BBC Radio 5 live: “I think the Premier League was diminished somewhat by the Cup final, not the other way round,”
Apparently one of the reasons the final was staged early was because the Champions League final is being held at this Wembley on Saturday.
Bernstein said: “We’ve done a review of the FA Cup because there have been certain pressures on it.”
He went on: “We’ve done a lot of surveying about what fans would like and what TV would like and for once they coincide in that 5.15pm is a very good time in terms of people being at home. It breaks up the day in a different sort of way.”
What about the poor fans who have to travel home from Wembley, what happens if those fans are not from Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham (heaven forbid that some heathens from the north such as Newcastle or Sunderland should make it to final), what about their long trips home after a 5.15pm kick-off?
“We will do everything we can to get one day to ourselves and try to get back to the last day of the season but times have changed and there is a lot of pressure on the calendar,” he said.
Absolute tripe Mr Bernstein, stop messing with our game! The Cup Final should not be on the same as league matches.
The football establishment ought to take heed, supporters are hitting back.
A report in the Daily Star newspaper revealed that one in seven fans will not renew their season tickets because of an 18 per cent rise in prices.
A survey by Virgin Money said that 15 per cent of Premier League season ticket-holders will not renew next season while 31 per cent of regulars will cut down on going to games.
Championship season tickets are down 11 per cent, League One will drop 10 per cent and League Two will fall by 14 per cent.
Grant Bather, of Virgin Money, said: “Premier League attendances remain high but there are signs of empty spaces at many games and average attendances across all clubs are now around 90 per cent.”
Malcolm Clarke, of the Football Supporters’ Federation, added: “The football industry still has huge sums of money coming into it at the top of the game, but too much of it is used on ridiculously high player wages rather than on helping its loyal customers through these difficult times.”
Is the gravy train running out of steam?
The final day of the Premier League season saw the media wetting itself with excitement over which two of five teams were going to be relegated to the Championship.
It was painted as “oblivion” for whoever went down but one prominent football commentator found the tone of newspaper coverage distasteful.
Rod Liddle, writing in the prestigious Sunday Times, who follows Millwall, said: “Oblivion? It’s an odd word to use about the Championship, a league that enjoys greater support than say, Serie A. A league within which whoever are regulated today will stand a decent chance of winning something next year, instead of an endless war of attrition against the bejewelled, debt-ridden whores of the higher reaches of the Premier League, teams against whom they cannot possible hope to compete. And a league where matches are in the main played on a Saturday at three o’clock, the participants still part of a palpably real world rather than separated from it as a consequence of unimaginable salaries and superinjunctions.”
Couldn’t have put it better and what a fitting way to end the season.