Wotsitmeen? With Paul Hayward

The Rooney sex "scandal" story has made things quite interesting for Guardian columnists. While the other smelly right-wing rags can go at this thing with all gusto, as moral hypocrisy seems to be an unfathomable concept for papers featuring large colour shots of half/or all naked women, the arbiter of informed left-leaning opinion in Britain can't not acknowledge the story, but neither can they really preach on it. Some are left struggling to find a way to mention it all without cries of "exploiters!" and "mind your own, cast the first stone!" etcetera from the reading Londonista public.

So we are left to piece together just what the hell Paul Hayward is talking about this morning. Ostensibly, it's about the possibility of Wayne Rooney leaving Manchester United because, unlike his older, Busby-babe esque forebears at the club—Scholesy, Giggsy, Nevilley—Rooney-ey was not brought up under the tutelage of Sir Ferguson. Fair enough, although a bit of a stretch for a full op-ed sized column. So we are treated to paragraphs of this nature:

Rooney's marriage and its potential for withstanding the acid drip of salacious headlines need not detain the football pages, except where personal calamity might tempt him to embrace the old hypothesis that an Englishman travels to mend a broken heart. Unlikely. Poetic self-dramatisation is not his natural state. The noise United fear most is the cranking and grinding of corporate motivation.

This is how it works. Advisers get ideas. Advisers think ahead. A notion that starts in a sleepless night becomes a possibility and then a desired objective. Already we see that Rooney is not on the Scholes longevity chart. He smokes and drinks and blunders across the minefield of our front pages. When precocity collides with hedonism, agents tend to calculate that their star ought to make one big move before deterioration sets in. That way the whole camp can shake the money tree.

The money tree? What the hell is he on about? Take out the over wrought prose, and we are basically left with "Rooney's indiscipline sets him apart from Ferguson's proteges, and therefore he might be more inclined to leave the club for more money," which is itself a roundabout way of saying Rooney might want to leave England entirely to escape English moralizing about extra-marital affairs. This is an argument one could make over a few sentences, and is entirely based in speculation. But Hayward sure likes to make Hay. Ward.