Wayne Rooney has described an “honest conversation” with Jos\u00e9 Mourinho that, he says, set the terms for his eventual departure from Manchester United in the summer of 2017. Rooney had first asked to leave six months earlier when he wanted to play more regularly.<\/p>\n
Rooney recalled that by the time he turned 30 in October 2015 his level was slipping after having started regularly for club and country since the age of 17. When Mourinho arrived in 2016 and signed Zlatan Ibrahimovi\u0107, Rooney recognised the changing pecking order.<\/p>\n
“I started the season with Zlatan and I knew Jos\u00e9 only plays one up front,” he said. “In the first three or four games, he played the two of us and I knew as soon as I had a bad game that I wasn\u2019t going to play and Zlatan was going to be the forward.” Rooney began the campaign in a supporting role behind Ibrahimovi\u0107 against Bournemouth, Southampton, Hull City, Manchester City and Watford.<\/p>\n
Competition from Juan Mata for the No. 10 role, combined with Ibrahimovi\u0107 scoring freely as the No. 9, saw Rooney move to the bench and to an in-and-out role until Ibrahimovi\u0107 was injured in April. When Rooney asked Mourinho if he could go out on loan in January to get more game time, he said the manager refused but agreed he could leave in the summer.<\/p>\n
“I went in and had an honest conversation with Jos\u00e9 and asked him if I could go on loan in January because I wanted to play and he said no. He said he needed me more so for the Europa League but I could leave in the summer,” Rooney said. “I stood up, shook his hand, didn\u2019t complain about it again, sat on the bench and came on and played a few games from then until the end of the season. But that was an honest conversation and two men shaking hands and agreeing on something which I think is probably the right thing to do.”<\/p>\n
Rooney shared the memory in response to Mohamed Salah\u2019s recent comments about feeling Liverpool had thrown him under the bus following a benching. Rooney has criticised Salah this season after noting a drop in the Egyptian’s performances that led to Arne Slot benching him.<\/p>\n
“Time catches up with all of us when you are playing and this season he hasn’t looked at his best, at his sharpest,” Rooney said. “I have been quite vocal about that over the last couple of months and clearly Arne Slot has seen that and put him on the bench.”<\/p>\n
He added: “What you would like to think is, he is one of the main players\u2014if not the main player\u2014for Liverpool over the last few years and you want to see him roll his sleeves up and say, \u2018Okay then, I\u2019ll show you.\u2019”<\/p>\n
On accountability, Rooney concluded: “What is hard is when you get to that age, and your performances drop, you look for reasons why and the last person you look at is yourself. And I think that\u2019s what\u2019s happening with him.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rooney says an ‘honest conversation’ with Jos\u00e9 Mourinho convinced him to leave United in 2017. true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4971,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,179],"tags":[1305,1304,1215],"class_list":["post-4972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-manchester-united","tag-bench-selection","tag-benching","tag-controversy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}