For a man who has built a career on an ability to stand out from his English footballing contemporaries by displaying not just a puff-chested, thick-necked grunt work-rate but also a consistent predilection for oft-competent touch and technique, the Wayne Rooney we’ve been forced to endure over the past few months (the Bulgaria game apart) has been, at times, bordering on torturous.

Two season’s worth of spurting domestic form elevated Rooney to the vaunted level of great white hope during the run-in to the World Cup in South Africa but, in Layman’s terms, he turned out to be [expletives removed] a considerable disappointment.

Four predominantly stumbling, club-footed performances left all but the most visually impaired of onlookers with the same glutenous globule of semi-rhetoric on their respective lips, ‘what is wrong with Wayne Rooney…’ which was usually quickly followed up with ‘… because he’s playing like a Downs Syndrome-riddled pit pony’.

Of course, now we know what was wrong with him – or at least we’ve got a fairly good idea – but many post-tournament explanations were of a distinctly footballing nature – naive as that now sounds.

A dejected Wayne Rooney during the World Cup

A torrent of possible factors were offered up for perusal in a vain attempt to get to grips with Rooney’s doleful, knock-kneed displays.

Was it the crushing expectation the aftermath of the injury he sustained in the Champions League a month prior his failure to adapt to Fabio Capello‘s mind-blowingly revolutionary 4-4-2 system a reaction to the overbearingly militant atmosphere at the England training camp

No, no, no and no.

It turns out that our nation’s saviour, the married man on which all our hopes were pinned, played like a drunken toddler because he was allegedly (and you know that’s only a disclaimer) rodding a 21-year-old, £200-a-whirl hooker on the sly and therefore deeply mired in trying to prevent said revelations being made public…again.

The first time ‘our Wayne’ was exposed to the collective media’s wrath was when he first broke his brothel-creeping duck back in 2004. Rooney was found to have paid a 50-odd-year-old Toxteth prostitute the princely sum of £45 for her Cod Liver Oil-assisted services.

Two years later, a second scandal revealed a hike-up in quality and fare as he reportedly parted with £140 for a night with a middle-aged tart, and the fact that he is alleged to have parted with nearly £1200 for multiple romps with ‘Juici Jeni’ during this third and most recent escapade shows that at least our erstwhile protagonist is showing tangible signs of a refining taste – so that’s a positive to bear in mind amidst all the swirling hostility.

Rooney boards the plane for Switzerland

And so on to a much more pressing question. Why in the world should we care what (or who) this professional footballer does in his private life I, for one, don’t – but it would seem, at least as far as the gutter press is concerned, that I am in the minority.

For example, today’s Daily Mirror is fit to burst with yet more turds of Rooney-related sensationalism.

‘Rooney in wild Yellow Pages stripper orgy’ and ‘Wayne told Colleen to shut up and deal with it’ headlines sit alongside a faux report that a second girl is threatening to expose a ‘wild three-way’ she had with the England star in a Manchester hotel – in short, they’re milking it for all it’s worth.

It would appear that the only actual concern doing the rounds is the concern for ‘good copy’.

Personally, I couldn’t give two whistles if Rooney had chosen to spend his entire post-nuptial life frequenting the kind of Berlin basements that specialise in wiring your gonads to the mains whilst heavy-set German men defecate on your chest as you pay handsomely for the privilege – that’s his prerogative, not the nations’.

If I didn’t think it was such a futile endeavour, I’d plead with the press to just let the man play football – he’s all we’ve got – but I’m afraid it’s a universal truth that nothing sells like sex – even if it between a man that shares more chromosone characteristics with sea-dwelling mammals and a rubber-clad council estate pensioner/hooker.

Editor’s Note: Speaking of milking it, here’s what really happened between Wayne and Colleen.