Where all of it went mistaken for Wayne Rooney at Plymouth: Bad outcomes, bachelor dwelling at pub karaoke – and now HE might be subsequent on I’m A Celeb

The message ‘Make Waves’ is emblazoned across one of the bridges which Wayne Rooney drove under each week on the high-speed route west into Plymouth.

That is what he saw himself doing in the golden days of August when Plymouth Argyle, the most remote league club in Britain, offered him the prospect of rehabilitation after 83 grim days at Birmingham City had appeared to finish him as a manager.

The only waves in Plymouth in recent weeks were those thumping against the dock wall at the historic Royal William Yard, where Rooney rents an apartment, as a brutal rainstorm doused the city and wind howled through the place.

He was contemplating his worst week in management — a 4-0 hammering at Bristol City on the back of a 6-1 loss at Norwich. It left the club one place and two points above the Championship relegation zone, and Plymouth’s owner, Simon Hallett, telling a fans’ forum in Cornwall that there have been ‘no conversations’ about sacking him.

But the dreaded vote of confidence only lasted so long, and on Tuesday he was sacked as Plymouth boss after just 25 matches. It carries a particular enormity for Rooney. Failure here, after that disaster at Birmingham, seems to offer little prospect of a road back into management.

Perhaps this beat having insects crawling in an ear and requiring medical intervention to have one of them flushed out — his wife Coleen’s experience in the I’m a Celebrity jungle. But the lesser of the two evils was a hard one to call.

When Rooney sat down to talk to Mail Sport earlier in December, the overwhelming impression was how tired and worn he seems. He is still only 39, yet none of this looks terribly good for his health.

In the four years or so since his British managerial career began, at Derby, it has been a non-stop struggle for Championship survival at each of three clubs, with a brief intermission in Washington DC, where the outcome was not so good. From the outside looking in, this seems like purgatory. Doesn’t this whole experience wear him down?

His reply was firm, yet flat; no lift in the cadence of his voice and not the faintest of smiles. ‘No, I love it. I love my job,’ he tells Mail Sport, the Croxteth boy in him still unmistakable, 300 miles from home. ‘I’ve said this many times — I love playing football, and football… if it was perfect and easy every week, then everyone would do it.’

It was a Freudian slip. He was not playing football, of course. Merely watching and hoping a little of the instinctive genius he showed as a player will rub off on those he sent out each week.

Was it more bearable to be a mere bystander now, left to place hopes and plans in others? ‘I haven’t felt like I wanted to be in that position since the day I retired, to be honest,’ Rooney replied. ‘I did it for so many years and I’m very happy and grateful for the career I had and I’m no longer a player and haven’t been for a number of years now. That’s not an issue at all.’

This is an individual who was in such a different stratosphere to most around him that, as he related in a brilliant Toffee TV interview two years ago, he would train as a 16-year-old with Everton’s first team and think some of his team-mates were ‘s***’.

So it is easy to imagine what was playing on his mind during the weekly defeats, watching players who do not see the same pictures he saw, taking longer than he expected to pick up what he is asking them to do.

His wife seems to sense that so much is out of his hands now. She has related in the jungle that she finds it ‘more nerve-racking’ with Rooney as a manager. ‘I feel more pressure,’ she added.

There was evidence of his players hanging on his every word, finding the most casual observation or suggestion can transform the way they play.

Scottish forward Ryan Hardie told Mail Sport how Rooney suggested he might ‘guide the ball from crosses instead of hitting them hard’. He has also offered Hardie suggestions about the ‘two-yard movements’ to get away from defenders. ‘You can see the movement that got him the success. Those suggestions have massively improved my finishing this year,’ Hardie says.

It has been a very different story for the defence. No side have shipped as many goals in the Championship as Plymouth (51), and their goal difference is already an eye-watering -29.

But for all the residual gloom, it really did not yet feel like a crisis when Mail Sport went to visit. Home Park’s legendary Green Army seemed steadfastly behind Rooney, whose name had been resounding around the stadium they call the Theatre of Greens. There was no animus directed towards him as he walked towards them after that 4-0 defeat at Bristol City.

It was hard to find fans who subscribed to the idea Rooney was the wrong man for the club and some of that seems to stem from the way he threw himself into Plymouth life. By contrast with predecessor Ian Foster, a former England youth coach whose three months here brought one win in 12, Rooney encouraged fans to approach him for selfies if they saw him out and about in the city. And he was out there a lot.

The apartment block at the grand, stone-built Royal William Yard which he shares with assistant coach Pete Shuttleworth who’s been his No2 since stepping up from an analyst’s role at Derby, is Plymouth’s equivalent of Liverpool’s Albert Dock and there are ample leisure options.

Rooney has stepped around the corner to the Monday quiz night in the Seco Lounge cafe-bar and has also been seen belting out Ed Sheeran hits at the Cider Press pub’s karaoke night in the Barbican. A video of him posted on social media went viral. ‘Make some f***ing noise, baby!’ Rooney implores those gathered there.

Jarrod Styles, assistant manager of the Cider Press bar, said: ‘He was definitely a better footballer than he is a singer.

‘He was an ideal customer, he was just chatting to people then he got up and sang Shape of You. He was working the crowd telling everybody to join in.’

The nearby Rakuda Bar also shared photos of two different visits from Rooney on Facebook, describing him as ‘Rakuda’s new regular’.

This week, more noise, as he was pictured with two women in a bar, and released a statement clarifying a video circulating on social media which speculated that he had brought a mystery woman back to his apartment – insisting it was ‘simply not true’ that she had entered alone, and that his son was there at the time.

Those who know Rooney best are only too aware that this kind of bachelor life is, to put it mildly, not always good for him. His wife’s absences have regularly coincided with chaos over the years and, though her time in the Australian jungle was the longest period the two of them have gone without speaking since childhood, management made him an itinerant soul, so often away from home.

Coleen and their four sons remain in Cheshire, with Rooney making the trip once a week, typically on a Saturday evening, returning Monday afternoon. He travelled by car, rather than flying, and though he sometimes made use of a driver, it is a five-hour haul each way — sometimes via the Midlands to drop off or pick up one of his coaching team.

The locals saw a positive in the fact he was a regular presence. ‘We’re missing big players and remember — just staying in this division was always the target,’ said Ted Davies, a veteran fan and one of the few souls braving the unremitting rain at the Christmas markets in Plymouth’s faded city centre. ‘I’d have taken a place outside the relegation zone at Christmas,’ he says.

‘He’s not too big for this town,’ added Fiona Phelps, at the Seco, on the ground floor of Rooney’s apartment block, where he could face the day by gazing across the Plymouth Sound to the rolling hills around Mount Edgcumbe.

‘We see something of ourselves in him. Liverpool and Plymouth are seafaring places. We live life fully. He’s like one of us.’ The two Q&A sessions Rooney held at Home Park sold out. And few cities cherish their heroes quite like this one.

On the wall beside the path leading away from Plymouth Hoe, where that old fish market stood, there are plaques to the many individuals who set sail from Plymouth, never to return. ‘Lost at Sea. Never Forgotten.’

Up at the stadium, a 10-minute drive away, the images of players who ran out in Plymouth green, from Sammy Black to Kevin Hodges, John Hore to Mickey Evans, adorn every pole and tunnel. Tommy Tynan, the club’s most famous Liverpudlian, who helped Argyle reach the semi- finals of the FA Cup in 1984, takes pride of place on a Portaloo door.

But you must earn that kind of recognition here. While Derby and Birmingham sang Rooney’s celebrity from the rooftops, you would find no images of him across the city and not so much as a souvenir photograph in the Plymouth club shop.

It is a far cry from Merseyside, where they are promoting a play called The Legend of Rooney’s Ring, a mythical tale featuring actors playing Rooney and Coleen, which runs at Liverpool’s Royal Court from next year.

Plymouth’s approach comes from the top. ‘I’m not interested in celebrity, so his playing career wasn’t a positive,’ Hallett, the club’s owner, said this summer. ‘He got the job despite his name, not because of it.’ That feels wise. Even though things did not work out for Rooney, he cannot complain about the environment at this intelligently run club.

In Hallett, Plymouth have a shrewd owner — a child when his family left Plymouth for the USA, whose methods of wealth creation as chief investment officer at New Jersey global equities company, Harding Loevner, is being applied to his old local team.

The club’s financial results will reveal a cash-flow deficit of only £1million, similar to last year’s, showing Argyle to be one of the few self-sustaining clubs in the Championship, which has generally been a Wild West of spending.

Hallett has found a co-investor — identity undisclosed while EFL approval is sought — to help take Argyle from being among the lowest two or three spenders in the Championship to wielding mid-table spending power. He has also just invested £14m to build a new academy.

It is a very different place from the one Peter Reid found when he arrived to manage Argyle in 2010. The club were so broke that Reid had to pay the heating bill and sold his Everton runners-up medal from the 1986 FA Cup final for £4,000 at auction to put money into the players’ pot. The club went into administration and Reid was let go.

Rooney, the ‘head coach’, was seen as a cog in the structure of the club’s data-driven operation, where player acquisition is overseen by Neil Dewsnip, the former Everton academy head who coached him as a teenager. But Rooney, of course, carries full responsibility after just five wins in his 25 games.

There were some ‘home truths’ dispensed at some ‘hard meetings’ at Home Park this week, Rooney related, and Hardie told Mail Sport that ‘harsh words were exchanged from the manager’s side and the players’ side as well’ in those discussions.

‘There were things that needed ironing out.’ What, Rooney was asked, did he pick up from his players that suggested they wanted something different from him? ‘Not too much,’ he said, after a long pause.

The bigger unanswered question is whether he has the tactical and strategic intelligence that management now demands. His assistant at Derby, Liam Rosenior, did much of the day-to-day coaching and found his reputation so enhanced that he was hired by Hull City.

Derby — and Rooney — acutely felt the loss. Rooney needs a Rosenior figure at whichever club he next steps into. Someone who can do more than remind players, as he has this week, that the losing performances have not been good enough.

The motivational element comes naturally to him. That much is clear when Mail Sport asked if the relentless struggle ever leads him to think that this just might not be for him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s a privilege, to be honest, to be involved in football and I give everything I can to win. I’m a fighter.

‘And, of course, we are in a difficult moment but that doesn’t mean to say you quit or you’re finding it tough so you down tools. This is when you roll your sleeves up and be an example for your players. I’ve explained to the players, “I’m right here with you. I’m right here in front of you. I’m going to lead you”. And I will get them out of this.’

So much is on the line for him because football is his life and, essentially, all he has.

The consequences of this blowing up will include the likely scrapping of a lucrative behind-the-scenes documentary charting this story being made by the producers of Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story. But that is a minor consideration.

Rooney has so little hinterland that life will seem bleak and small outside the game. As Rio Ferdinand observed last year, he is still the same ‘street footballer’ he always was.

Rooney let slip in an appearance on a recent I’m a Celebrity show that he and Coleen had discussed either of them appearing on the show and was asked if he might be a future jungle contestant. ‘Maybe, if I’m not working,’ he grinned. ‘At the moment, that’s obviously not possible.’

It is hard to see it. The razzle-dazzle has never been for Rooney in the way it has for his wife. A wet Tuesday night in Plymouth, facing Swansea in the Championship, was far more up his street.

There was a blue sky eventually early one morning on our visit, and streaks of pink as the sun came up. But the Western News was predicting 70mph winds and a danger-to-life warning was issued for parts of Devon.

By the afternoon, the Oxford game — which Rooney had hoped would represent a way of putting his problems in the past — had been postponed. More frustration. Another three days kicking his heels. He could only wait, reflect and pray that the winds of change in his life will start blowing him in the right direction.