Harper Sport £17.99 pp312

For Winston Churchill to tell the entire history of the English-speaking peoples required four volumes. The life of Wayne Rooney will apparently fill five volumes. At least. And when the England footballer signed what was said to be a £5m deal, he promised: “There will be a few surprises in there.”

Let’s begin then by listing the surprises he springs in volume one. First, Wayne likes a bit of noise to get to sleep. He says this began with his mother doing the Hoovering, but now a hairdryer or the rattle of air conditioning will do the trick. Second, he has six fillings in his teeth. He took his girlfriend, Coleen, to see The Spy Who Shagged Me on their first date, he knows all the songs in Oliver! the musical, and reveals that Alex Ferguson is taller than you might think.

In fact, the only real surprise of any substance is that he fell out with David Moyes, the manager of Everton. Wayne had been an Everton supporter virtually from conception. His dad took him to Goodison Park when the boy was only six months old. At the age of nine, Wayne was spotted by an Everton scout and taken on by the club’s centre of excellence. At 16, he made his first-team debut. Yet if you read this book in the hope of discovering what went wrong at Everton, you will be disappointed. “It’s hard to explain why my relationship with David Moyes began to go wrong,” he says.

One suggestion by Wayne is that Moyes might have been jealous of his success, and this is not the first touch of arrogance in the book. The picture that emerges is one of two Rooneys. The first is clearly a nice, down-to-earth sort of a lad. He comes from a solid family background, generally behaved himself at school, and from an early age spent all his spare time playing football. He is generous, and so unassuming that after making his Everton debut — with the fans roaring his name — he went back home for a kickabout with his mates.

Yet there is another Rooney, who is lippy and arrogant, and who can’t seem to keep a lid on his temper. It’s this Wayne who has been sent off in both of his last two high-profile games, for England and Manchester United, the club he joined in 2004. Naturally he says this is not his fault. “I do think refs get carried away by their own self- importance and tend to forget they are just refs, not superstars or TV personalities,” he complains. Odd how refs failed to get carried away at the sight of former England captain Gary Lineker, who was never booked in his entire career let alone sent off.

All through the book there are glimpses of this more unpleasant Wayne. He says he once kicked a hole in a classroom wall, as if this is were just part of the hurly-burly of school life, and insists he doesn’t regret telling England captain David Beckham to “f**k off” during an international. In a game at Everton, Duncan Ferguson tossed the captain’s armband to the young player after getting himself sent off. Instead of handing it to Alan Stubbs, the vice-captain, Wayne slipped it over his own arm and wore it until half time when Moyes told him to “Get that f***ing thing off”.

The donkey work of this book was done by ghostwriter Hunter Davies, whose previous subjects have included Paul Gascoigne and the Beatles. Davies has spoken highly of Wayne. He says the player did his best to help, and was never difficult. But it’s obvious that getting material out of him was harder than watching an Englishman take a penalty. The time Wayne ran up a £50,000 gambling debt is there, Wayne’s youthful trip to a massage parlour gets a mention, but at one point we’re reduced to reading a list of what Wayne found in his World Cup hotel suite: a bedroom, a bathroom, a television and a minibar.

I suspect the problem is that Wayne doesn’t really have much to say. He has no life outside football, and no interest outside football. This is a young man who lists his hobbies as football and sleeping. And he’s not really one to spend much time analysing the game. There is only one brief passage in which he tries to explain his talent. Before he gets the ball, he apparently looks up quickly to see where everybody is. “I’ll then pass immediately, almost instinctively, reckoning on where people will now be.”

And it doesn’t look as if a career as a pundit beckons when he finally hangs up his boots. On Manchester United’s draw with lowly Sunderland, Wayne’s verdict is: “We were shite and I was shite.” Ah, the beautiful game in all its glory.

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