Opposite Ends Of The Spectrum
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On the cover of the pilot issue of football magazine When Saturday Comes in 1986, editor Mike Ticher wrote that Pat Nevin and Ken Bates summed up “everything that’s right and everything that’s wrong with British Football today.”
Today, those titles belong to Wayne Rooney and
Like Chelsea, I’ll get Kenyon out of the way, as I’ve written about the superannuated office clerk before.
The Sun headline “Kenyon, I made Chelsea great” wasn’t as misleading as you’d hope. He claimed to have “grown the business and doubled turnover”, as if Roman Abramovich and his money had played no part in proceedings.
Meanwhile, his reported £2m pay-off was the final nail in the coffin of his much-vaunted, and ridiculed, claim that Chelsea would break even by 2010.
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Not even Wayne Rooney has “made Manchester United great.” But on current form, he will make himself a Manchester United great before very long at all, maybe even by 2010.
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Everything about Rooney’s game contributes to football in a way that Kenyon never will.
On some of my days at White Hart Lane, I would watch Glenn Hoddle, not Spurs. The rest of the current Manchester United team are too good for Rooney to be that overwhelming a character. But Rooney has got…well…everything.
He reminds me of the talented kid in the school playground, always on the ball or wanting to be on it. All over the pitch, brimming with enthusiasm, best at everything (although admittedly, some darker aspects of Rooney’s game come from a different aspect of the school playground).
‘Best’, of course, is the player by whom Rooney’s greatness will be measured. And Rooney isn’t there yet.
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The photo of Best which sticks in my mind is him outjumping Frank McClintock to power in a header from some distance out. Best had everything, and was better at everything than Rooney is.
But who’s to say that Rooney won’t get there if he plays even half as long as one of the previous ‘new George Bests’, Ryan Giggs.
Mind you, if author Tom Bower is to be believed (and recent libel trials strongly suggest he is), Kenyon did achieve something.
In his book Broken Dreams Bower writes: “’Oh Peter, why don’t you p**s off out of the Premier League,’ Bates memorably cursed.”
That surely makes Kenyon the only person ever to unite the whole of football around a Ken Bates opinion.
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Tags: Peter Kenyon, Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs, Premier League
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