The same applied to Paul McGuinness, the coach of a United side whose Under-10s were playing their first-ever game together. So short stocked were his ranks that Peter Schmeichel’s son, Kasper, was roped into playing because they had no goalkeeper. Having watched Rooney score half of Everton’s dozen, McGuinness provided Alex Ferguson with mixed news after the match.
“I remember coming back and saying that we’d been beaten by 10 goals,” he recalled. “You don’t generally want to advertise that fact to the manager - but I did mention that we’d seen a kid who had done very well.”
United’s interest was under way, although early enquiries revealed that Rooney was a devout Evertonian playing for the club of his dreams and would not countenance leaving Merseyside. Undeterred, the player was very much on the club’s watch list. According to Ferguson, United tried to sign Rooney twice before eventually getting him. The first attempt, when the striker was 14, stemmed from a youth meeting between the Under-15 Reds and Blues at Altrincham’s Moss Lane, an encounter which gave United coach Jim Ryan his first look at young Rooney.
“It was a good game which I think we won 5-1 or 5-2, but despite the fact they’d been beaten by quite a few goals and been under the cosh, you could see this lad just would not surrender,” recalls the Scot. “Even in the last five or 10 minutes he was zooming in from the left wing and firing in shots at goal. If he didn’t score the goal, he was punching the air in frustration, and that’s quite an unusual thing to find in a 14 or 15-year-old.
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