This has been a week when the names of Wayne Rooney and Bobby Charlton have been juxtaposed a million times, making comparisons between these authors of a combined 99 England goals inevitable.
I was quite surprised by how badly the present England captain appeared to come off in these comparisons. When I Googled “Rooney better than Charlton” in the wake of the European Championship qualifier against Switzerland when he notched his 50th international goal, three of the first five headlines read: “Charlton superior to Rooney”; “Rooney does not match up to Charlton or Lineker”; and “Sir Bobby Charlton was Roger Federer to Wayne Rooney’s Stan Wawrinka”.
Comparisons between eras are treacherous, however. The two Manchester United stalwarts are, one can say, the best attack-minded English players of their respective footballing generations. Charlton won a World Cup – but can you judge Rooney for the calibre of his team-mates? Rooney has been much further removed from the traditional English ideal of gentlemanly behaviour – but should that be strictly relevant?
To me, both are products of their times, poles apart temperamentally, but otherwise less divergent than you might think.
Both, for one thing, are escapees – Charlton from the grim, dangerous work-life of the Northumberland coal-fields; Rooney from Croxteth, a Liverpool suburb that Der Spiegel once wrote, “won’t win any prizes for urban beauty”.
But whereas Rooney was born at the height of Thatcherism and Britain’s transformation into a harsher, less forgiving free market society, Charlton came of age in a post-war atmosphere of deference, sullen acceptance and national service. A time when the downtrodden classes were more inclined to, as the saying goes, know their place.
In terms of material deprivation, I would think Charlton experienced worse than Rooney. As he wrote in his autobiography, My Manchester United Years, “One of the abiding memories is of the hunger, but then I thought it was natural to have that feeling.” When the cat had kittens, he was told it would be too expensive to keep them. “Usually Tanner would kill them. Once, he showed me how to do it. It involved two buckets, one filled with water, and then the other would go in on top, but I could barely look and there was no question that I would ever do it.”
But above all, Charlton’s footballing skills enabled him to escape his destiny – going down the pit. In the fracturing social networks of working class Merseyside in the final decades of the 20th century, few could have known what their destiny was.
Rooney’s more aggressive, spiky, frenetic style of forward play seems to me reflective of an age, not just when football managers expect their front-men to tackle back, but when people have learnt to cope with insecurity, to scavenge for what they can get out of life, in the absence of jobs-for-life and, increasingly, the welfare state. An age when, if you happened to get on the right side of the market – like homeowners, shareholders in the newly-privatised utilities and, most of all, elite football players – the prevailing attitude was, ‘Good luck to you’.
Rooney, of course, earns in moments the £35 a week Charlton was put up to in 1962, when the £20 maximum wage-limit was finally abolished. But, though he was no militant, Charlton, who has also had to live with the complex, harrowing, emotions of surviving the Munich air crash, is no apologist for the old ways. “It was only later,” he writes, “that I too began to ask…where is all the money going – and where did it go in those incredible boom years after the war?” Now, he continues, “I see that my attitude to such a basic matter as my wage packet was maybe a little too passive.”
Like others of his time, Charlton was, it seems, prepared to tolerate his lot in part because of his fixed vision of what the game was sparing him from and consequent sense of the social function he and his fellow players were serving: “to bring a little light to those who worked in the soot and the clanging noise”.
Such sentiments must seem anachronistic to Rooney and his contemporaries, who are playing for the barflies of Hong Kong and taxi drivers of Lagos as well as the Old Trafford faithful.
Charlton and Rooney were born 48 years (and two weeks) apart, but the world of football has changed utterly in the interval separating their respective playing careers. Better to appreciate each for what he is and was than to set too much store by the comparisons spawned understandably by this week’s events.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.