“It’s what friends do; they just mess ‘round in the house.” Rooney told Sky Sports in his post-match interview, with all the conviction of a schoolboy who’d been in trouble before but wasn’t having it this time. He’s right, though—friends do just mess around in the house. In fact, it’s just the sort of silly thing me, my brother and mates had been up to in our Old Trafford flat the night before. It’s the sort of thing you could find us doing most weekends, actually.

I suppose the obvious difference is none of us were the captain of both one of the world’s most scrutinised businesses AND a country so at odds with its own identity that it was on the verge of voting itself out of the European Union. But in a naive pre-Brexit UK, the England football captain getting sparked out on his kitchen floor was perfect tabloid and Twitter fodder. It was “OUTRAGE!”. Many United fans latched on to this righteous indignation, too. They always did with Wazza.

But even when he was as hungover as us in the stands, playing as a deep-lying quarterback in post-Ferguson midfields, he was usually our best player. Or when he was trying to leave us for 30 pieces and David Silva a few miles down Mancunian Way, at a Manchester City who were no longer a shooting star, but a solar eclipse. Even then, I found it hard to be angry at him; he was just so good.

Despite relentlessly being one of the world’s best players for ten years, soon becoming his club and country’s all-time top goal scorer, Rooney was often a punching bag for fans. The flirtation with City was unforgivable for some, but in hindsight, he had a point. And despite that, I think some Mancunians were just never going to fall in love with him.

He’s a working-class lad from Liverpool who was somehow still having to prove himself to not only his doubters but the people who were supposed to love him. He didn’t have to fight for Sir Bobby’s approval, though, because he always seemed to “get” Rooney. Charlton was also a working-class lad who’d reached the zenith of his profession, but he’d never seen the sort of scrutiny or scorn that Wayne did. But Bobby knew ball and was always one of Rooney’s biggest advocates, beaming with pride as the scouser smashed his goalscoring records in far fewer games. 

That day, the 15-minute walk from ours to the stadium, the video of him splayed out on Phil Bardsley’s kitchen floor was the palpable topic of conversation amongst fans. From the Trafford pub all the way down Sir Matt Busby Way and into the stands, Wayne was on everyone’s lips.

Most of us assumed he’d be dropped, but let’s not forget Manchester United’s manager at the time was Louis van Gaal—a serious footballing man who also happened to value the timing of a good, well-told joke. And that’s exactly what Rooney’s self-deprecating, scandal-kiboshing celebration was. A perfectly timed, expertly executed piece of physical comedy that got laughs most stand-up comedians could only dream of. It killed the story and any festering tension in the stadium that day. 

Rooney insisted the Dutch manager found the celebration “hilarious”, and when pressed by journalists post-match, Van Gaal said: “What is this world, twisted? In what world do we live that we are talking about such a thing?”. In other words, go on and live your sesh life, King. As long as you show up and do only things that Wayne Rooney can do on a Saturday, we’re good. 

The knockout celebration is rightly what this match is remembered for, but the goal itself was a perfect microcosm of Wayne Rooney, the player and person. It harked back to the 19-year-old manchild who’d stolen the hearts of a nation during Euro 2004. By the sheer force of his genius, personality and humanity, he reminded everyone, even his doubters, why he’d been a national obsession for over a decade. 

The fashionable older woman who me and my brother had christened ‘Our Fair Lady’ (unbeknownst to her), turned to me and said “he’s still got it”. We’d barely got a word out of her all season, but on that sunny, hungover Saturday afternoon, we wore identical, childlike smiles. 

No footballer has provided me with more joy, magic or madness than Wayne Rooney at Manchester United. I’ve been a regular at Old Trafford in different guises since 1998; David Beckham and David de Gea are the only players who come close to him in terms of consistent moments of casual greatness. But to be honest, Golden Balls and Spanish Dave aren’t fit to lace Wayne’s Total 90s.

The sad thing is, we didn’t really know how good we had it at the time. At 29, Sir Bobby, Van Gaal, me, my brother and Our Fair Lady all lazily assumed we’d have another five years of this sort of Wayne Rooney. But the all-consuming nature of his game, and perhaps too many kitchen-boxing afters, meant that he’d run out of steam far sooner than a lot of his peers.

We became complacent, underappreciating the greatness we had. Like the ones who got away or heatwave summers, you cannot know how beautiful every moment is while you’re living it, but maybe it wouldn’t be so wonderful if you did. The bad days then would make the best days now; that’s how good we had it with Rooney.

Because he was around our age, he felt familiar with the look of an older cousin’s solid mate from the estate. Rooney’s very human in that whether he was Manchester United and (formerly) England’s all-time-top goal scorer or not, you know he’d have been playing football somewhere else that day, watching it down the pub, or in the terraces with us. That’s why I love him. That's why he made me smile like no other footballer has before or since. 

That’s why sometimes pantomime is better than theatre.

“I think Wayne Rooney was always a hot topic of debate amongst England fans. For qualifiers and friendlies, I’d say our memories are very positive. But the tournaments he played in, we didn’t do particularly well as a team, did we? We never got past the quarterfinals, so you remember South Africa in 2010, France in 2012… and his last tournament game was against Iceland in 2016. When you're scoring from the age of 16, you just expect them to get better and better and better, and in line with that, we’d have expected England's tournament results to get better and better, and they obviously didn't.”

“But there were great moments, and that Uruguay game in Brazil does stand out…

“Me and a couple of other guys booked five weeks out in Brazil, and it felt like a World Cup in Brazil was the pinnacle. To be early twenties and go out there, the timing was unbelievable. We went to Manaus in the rainforest for the Italy game, and I think there were 2,000 England fans and what felt like 40 Italy fans watching us lose, but then the next day, swimming with pink dolphins and bumping into Amazonian tribes who were absolutely not used to tourists was special. 

“Losing in the rainforest meant we had to beat, or at least draw, against Uruguay to go into the third game against Costa Rica with some hope. Everyone was nervous, and we were heavily outnumbered by the South American fans, so it very much felt like an away game.  

“It meant so much to get a result, because one, we wouldn’t have a World Cup to play in, and two, we've all saved up thousands, travelled so far, and everything you've done for this four year period is down to this one game.

“Of course, we went 1–0 down from a Luis Suárez goal just before half-time, and that just gave the horrible feeling in your stomach. You know, we’d watched him score so many goals in England the years previous and knew that he sort of learned a lot playing against these players in our league. It felt like a real insult to injury, somehow. The time, the effort, the money that you save for four years for these tournaments all coming to an end after just five days.

“But then Rooney scores with 15 minutes left, and if you watch the footage back, the limbs behind the goal are something else. The whole away end is just… there are bodies everywhere. It’s fans not just celebrating the goal but the potential extension of their holidays and, of course, Rooney's first ever World Cup goal. Obviously, it wasn’t meant to be, and Suárez goes up the other end and scores again, but you just watch that video back and you can see how much it meant.

“We’d been knocked out by the time the third game against Costa Rica came around, and there was more of a party atmosphere in Belo Horizonte that day… even if we did only manage a 0–0. None of the players got any grief, and they all came out 40 minutes after the final whistle, and we were still singing for them. I remember we headed to Argentina and saw Brazil lose 7–1 to Germany in a bar on the border, and then headed to Paraguay to break the rest of the trip up. Every cloud has a silver lining.

“I think that in that sort of time, you had Joe Hart and Rooney, who both had an immense amount of passion and almost couldn’t channel it properly. Joe would come out, and you could see him beating his chest; he was so psyched and pumped. The other players must have thought, ’blimey, he could come and murder us at some point’. Looking back, him and Rooney were cut from the same sort of cloth, whereas now Southgate’s team are all a lot calmer and in control of their emotions. 

“But ask England fans who go to watch the games what their favourite Rooney goal is, and a lot of them will say that one to equalise against Uruguay in São Paulo.”