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Anyway, as portsiders in the press go (When you like us, we're the press; when you hate us, we're the media---William Safire, God rest his soul in peace) Rooney wasn't even close to the worst of the lot. I mean, what's the worst he could do---inspire someone to throw a protest stink bomb into a soap factory and threaten more to come until they invented ways to stop soap from melting?
He lost a lot of the snap off his curve ball in recent years, but when he was at peak power he was at minimum tolerable and at maximum a kind of guilty pleasure laugh.
I mean, I once had as many stray keys that seemed to belong to nowhere or nothing in particular as he bitched about having. And I'd bet that mine, too, came from places that went out of business long before either he or I realised we still had the damn things . . .