Sir Alex Ferguson has made his peace with Wayne Rooney ahead of the Manchester United striker’s testimonial at Old Trafford on Wednesday night.
The pair were barely on speaking terms when Ferguson retired three years ago as Rooney’s future at the club hung in the balance for a second time.
Although Rooney buried the hatchet when he paid tribute to Ferguson in an interview to mark a decade at United two years ago, Gary Lineker revealed in October that the Scot pulled out of a BBC documentary he was making about the player.
However, in the match programme for Rooney’s testimonial against his old club Everton on Wednesday, Ferguson praised the 30-year-old for breathing new life into United when he arrived from Goodison Park in a £30million deal in 2004, having failed to sign him four years earlier at the age of 14.
‘He was an exciting signing,’ said Ferguson. ‘It was fairly shortly after I’d got rid of the idea of retiring and changed my mind, and I had to rethink about how we were going to take the club forward.
‘When you make the decision to retire, you stop thinking, but once I decided to stay I started thinking again and it was really centred around bringing energy back into the team by looking at young players.
‘Of course there was Cristiano Ronaldo, then there was Rooney, and it was a fantastic period. The two of them were unbelievable.
‘Wayne came in as a first-team player right away, even though he was only 18, and he’s gone on to play for Manchester United for 12 years, which is very difficult in the present day.
‘I always think that great players can play in any era. Bobby Charlton would have been a great player today and Wayne Rooney would have been a great player back then.’
New manager Jose Mourinho described Rooney’s success at United as ‘simply incredible’, while his predecessor Louis van Gaal added: ‘I quickly decided he would be my captain because I saw also the attitude of his fellow players towards him … there is no question that he’s very important at United.’
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