FA asks for clarity as Rooney admits intentionally injuring player in the past

The Football Association has asked for some explanation from former Manchester United player Wayne Rooney when he said that he intentionally wanted to injure a Chelsea football club player in the game in the year 2006.

In an interview Rooney said that he changed his studs to “long mental ones” ahead of the match at Stamford Bridge with the intention to “hurt someone”.

Rooney recalled the game and said “For that game, I changed them to big, long metal ones – the maximum length you could have because I wanted to try and hurt someone, try and injure someone.

“I knew they were going to win that game. You could feel they were a better team at the time so I changed my studs.

“The studs were legal but thinking if there’s a challenge there I knew I’d want to go in for it properly, basically. I did actually.

“John Terry left the stadium on crutches. I left a hole in his foot and then I signed my shirt to him after the game.

“A few weeks later I sent it to him and asked for my stud back.

“If you look back when they were celebrating, JT’s got his crutches from that tackle.”

On Monday, when Terry got to know about Rooney’s admission of his injury, he laughed it off and even posted on Twitter saying “Is this when you left your stud in my foot?”

The FA fined Roy Keane £150,000 and gave him a five-match ban in 2002 after he admitted in his autobiography to intentionally hurting then-Manchester City midfielder, Alf-Inge Haaland. It will be interesting to see what the FA thinks of Rooney’s case now.

In the same interview, Rooney opened up on his battle with binge drinking during his playing career and also revealed how he self-motivated himself to be determined and prove his haters wrong by learning from his own mistakes.

Ahead of the release of the Amazon Prime Video documentary ‘Rooney’, the 36-year-old recalled the battles he went through after breaking into the Premier League as a raw 16-year-old talent at Goodison Park and later securing a big-money move to Manchester United.

“I had made a lot of mistakes when I was younger, some in the press and some not in the press, whether that’s fighting or whatever,” he said.

“For me to deal with that, deal with stuff that was in the newspapers, deal with the manager at the time, deal with family at the time, was very difficult.

“In my early years at Manchester United, probably until we had my first son, Kai, I locked myself away really. I never went out.

“There were times you’d get a couple of days off from football and I would actually lock myself away and just drink, to try to take all that away from my mind.

“Locking myself away made me forget some of the issues I was dealing with. It was like a binge.”