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22nd February 2024
03:56pm GMT
Wayne Rooney has called out the Man United players who were dancing after the team were hammered by Liverpool during his time at Old Trafford.
Rooney is the first to admit that he wasn't always the ultimate professional in terms of his preparations off the field. Yet, no one ever questioned his commitment or effort on the pitch, as the Englishman would give 100 per cent every single time.
The Old Trafford hero was brought to the club as a young man under Alex Ferguson where he helped them win every trophy possible. Towards the latter stages of his career, however, things at the club began to change.
Ferguson retired in 2013 and David Moyes was brought in around the same time that a lot of the senior stars were on the way out, meaning that a transitional period was imminent, and unfortunately for United, the youth coming through wasn't as disciplined as the layers who were leaving.
Speaking on the latest episode of the Stick to Football podcast, Rooney explains the challenges that Moyes had to deal with, and how the new generation were not up to scratch.
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"The players never gave David Moyes a chance at Manchester United. I think it was always going to be tough for him. I know David from when he was at Everton, and he was never the same person at Manchester United.
“Obviously, it was a massive change for him, so I don’t think he did as well as he would’ve liked, but I also think there was a lack of respect from the senior players towards him, and they weren’t having him which was tough for him.
"Then you’ve got the likes of Jesse Lingard, Danny Welbeck and Tom Cleverley coming through, who had good careers, but they weren’t the same as the core group we had. Football was changing, the behaviour of players and everything around football was changing and that was a big time.
"I remember after the Liverpool game when we got beat at Old Trafford in 2014 under David Moyes, the players were dancing around the changing room the next day at the training ground, playing hip hop music. I tried taking the speaker out the room and you can try to control as much as possible, but you can’t really."
Gary Neville interjected at this point to ask if this incident was the time that Lingard had posted a clip of himself and Pogba dancing in the changing rooms on social media, only for Rooney to laugh in disbelief and reveal that that was another time, underlining just how common this behaviour was.
This prompted Jill Scott to ask the former striker if he found it difficult adjusting from being in a dressing room with born winners, to a whole new generation of players.
"I always remember my first training session at United, you went in and you have got Roy Keane, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes - all of these players that I grew up watching, and I remember going in as a scouser thinking 'I need to impress these ones.'.
"Not even the manager, I was thinking I need to impress the players and I always remember my first session, how intense it was, the difference to how it was at Everton, the tackling and stuff - then when I go back to, towards the end, and that generation, the training change, the society change, and the difference in the sessions.
"You were getting told to stop training now because you have run this much, and you were just like - but that's the way that the game went, so it was completely different."
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