Champions of the world

Easy like a Sunday morning, Manchester United were crowned champions of the world in Yokohama yesterday

This has been Rooney’s tournament and that much was confirmed when he was given the Golden Ball award for best player, for which he was presented with a car, although not one he would be seen dead driving. Not that Rooney is in need of modern transportation anyway, his best work, as ever, being done on Shanks’s pony and running more smoothly than any limousine. It was not just that he scored again, his third goal in the tournament despite featuring for only 108 minutes, or the sublime manner in which he did so. No, the most impressive element of Rooney’s display was the work he put in to ensure that United went global with their domination of the sport in the year 2008.

Rooney is a big-game player and while Ronaldo mugged for the cameras with his Silver Ball, awarded to the second-best player in the competition, he knows that on this occasion he was outshone. “After I’d had a shower, I looked at my phone and there was a text from a friend saying, ‘Congratulations, you’re a world champion’ and it hit me,” Rooney said. “We came to win it, and we did it.” He made it seem so simple; probably because it was."