Wayne Rooney's forearm tattoo reflects his friendship with the Stereophonics but also displays his playfulness. Just Enough Education to Perform was the band's third album but it reads like Rooney's two-fingered salute to an industry that wants to turn him into someone else.
England's best player has had a few minor scrapes this week in the celebrosphere. Last Friday, in a post-golf photo, he appeared to be turning his feet out at an angle that would convey a message scrawled on his shoes. There was also a brief kerfuffle over shots of him relieving himself against some rocks during a round at Sun City on Sunday.
This followed the great Rooney swearing debate after he had used "vulgar" language (the referee's description) to him in the practice match with Platinum Stars. After his unconvincing start against the USA last Saturday it became fashionable to wonder whether he is pawing the ground in frustration at some mysterious irritation or his own loss of goal scoring form.
The only sensible conclusion from his appearance before the world's media today is that Fabio Capello's best weapon is still reassuringly himself and a long way from needing psychological assistance.
One of the assets that marked him out from other talented youngsters of his generation is his strong sense of self, of his own identity, if that is not straying too far into amateur character assessment.
Boredom, though, has eaten away at him here. He talks of "sitting round, really. Lying in bed at two in the afternoon, that's quite boring. Thankfully the games are on now and I watch them. That takes a bit of the boredom away. Sometimes it's a long day. But it's worth it. It's brilliant to be training and playing but we need to watch our legs."
We ask him to describe a typical day and he says: "Breakfast, train, lunch, bed, dinner, bed."
After the USA match England's players were given two DVDs: one of the game and a movie of their own performance. Rooney stayed up late watching his.
"If I don't play well and don't do as well as I can do, I don't worry about it," he says. "I watched the game that night. I saw where I could do better, where I should have been. It was quite interesting to watch."
Some here feel he has been trying to force himself back to the heights he was at in a stellar season with Manchester United; that he is fighting his body to make it peak twice in one campaign. He is not dismissive of that theory: "When I was playing well and scoring this season, in training I was sharp and hungry. That's how I feel at the minute. In Austria [at England's training camp] I had a few niggles and in training I held myself back. But since we've come over here I've felt sharp and been flat out in training. That's important for me to do that to get my form back in the game."
Rooney has not scored since the first leg of United's Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich in Germany in March and his admission that he "had a few niggles" before this tournament confirms that his body is pleading to be rested.
Filing from radio to television to newspaper interview rooms (all the England players take a turn, usually with all the relish of captured paratroopers), Rooney even endorsed a mid-season rest in England. "Yes, it would be nice to have a winter break just after Christmas, at the start of January," he said. "I don't think it would do any harm."
Scrutiny is intense. The other day Rooney's golf group had to chase away a cameraman who stood on the course in front of the ball's path as they were preparing to tee off. At Manchester United he has settled into a routine of relative privacy but here his time outside the camp is treated as a public event.
From the age of 16, when he made his Everton debut, he was subjected to intense social pressure to conduct himself like Gary Lineker or Michael Owen. Rooney's evident preference was to mature at his own rate, and in his own way, rather than be dictated to by a corporation or a hypocritical and judgmental media.
Some of the concessions he may have made are to assist in the pursuit of commercial spin-offs ("Every day I think of money" is a track on the Stereophonics album) and some reflect the simple reality that people are not the same at 16 as they are at 24, especially when they have become one of the world's best footballers in the interim.
Wazza knows it would have been much easier not to waz on the golf club rocks but he did so anyway because there is only so far he will go to appease polite society. The golf shoe stunt also suggested a preference for mischief over conformity and most England fans would support him in that leaning.
The most popular footballers tend to be those with a maverick or defiant streak. Rooney has that quality to go with his pedigree as street footballer: a gifted lad who blasted out of a non-privileged upbringing without feeling the need to adopt airs and graces.
In a deeply unequal and still class-riddled society, many of Rooney's rougher edges become a welcome restatement of character in the face of condescension. © Guardian News and Media 2010
