Rooney/Brucie (Good game., Good Game)

[dom9]

UEFA didn't ban him. He banned himself.

[RichC]

he's should get a pounding in the press for letting the England side down (yet again!)

[ChesterDave]

Rooney was a complete mong as ever, deserved the red and there was always a chance it was going to be extended I suppose.

It would have been more surprising, to myself at least, had the ban not been increased - it was always going to be a question of 2 or 3.

I suppose 3 is a little more surprising as international bans tend to be a little more lenient

[Vermilion]

He shot himself in the foot with that begging letter he sent imo, and the fact it was made public he'd done it, he tied uefa's hands in effect, had they showed leniency and given him a one game ban, then other players in a similar predicament in future would write their own letters to uefa expecting similar leniency, uefa don't want any perception forming that writing to them gets you a lesser ban, even if that perception is wrong.

[McDermotX]

Nice........will be dropped to 2 on appeal though.

[Craig_H]

UEFA didn't ban him. He banned himself.

[PTP]

Well I'd accpet england to appeal - they've got nothing to lose - if it gets it reduced to two games then take him - if it stays at 3 he shouldn't go...

England need to accept he's not going.....and start looking to set up/find a system without rooney and move on from it. They have a few friendlies to get it sorted and rooney should not be involved in them.

It may turn out to be a blessing in disguise

----------------------hart--------------------

johnson---------terry-------ferdinand---------cole

------------------parker--------wiltshere--------

????-----------------Gerrard--------------young

---------------------carroll/bent----------------


wouldn't be too bad

[Exiled_red]

There's no way England won't take Rooney to the Euros, they will believe that they can win the tournement (unrealistic IMO but still) which would be 6 games in total and Rooney would be available for 3 for them. As Rooney is seen as their key player (rightly or wrongly) and one of the few match winners, if they didn't take him however far they get when they get knocked out everyone would go nuts saying if he'd been in the squad they'd have gone further. If they don't get through the group stage whether he goes or not they have underperformed and the press will claim they can't manage without him. The only way Rooney can lose from this situation is if he goes and plays really badly (or gets sent off again ), because by the time England get knocked out people will have forgotten his act of stupidity and will have found themselves another scapegoat.

[Neil Young]

It would be stupid not to take him. Also sending him to Ukraine/Poland for a few weeks would make this country a marginally better place.

[Exiled_red]

It would be stupid not to take him. Also sending him to Ukraine/Poland for a few weeks would make this country a marginally better place.

[MrMichael]

Rooney deserves his three-match ban.. and we're to blame for indulging him

By Brian Reade, The Mirror

I heard the earth-shattering news about Wayne Rooney's three-game ban on TalkSport.

"Clearly someone doesn't want us to do well in the European championships," said a furious Adrian Durham. Within minutes the Twittersphere was filled with gems like this from Phil Neville: "If it was a Dutch, Spanish or Italian player they wouldn't even get one game. Fact."

Soon a national newspaper was penning the following editorial: "For the crime of being English he has been penalised beyond all proportion."

Oh dear. It's at times like these I'd rather admit to being Texan than English because the jingoistic tsunami of paranoid victimhood is as embarrassing as it is misguided. Fact.

Imagine being arrested for assaulting someone on a street with your brief telling you the going rate for conviction is three years. To try and reduce it, to a year, you and your employer write to the bench, saying how sorry you are and how vital you are to the company.

If you had previous convictions you'd be pretty surprised if the bench rolled over and agreed a year, wouldn't you? So why the outrage over Rooney getting a three-stretch when he was up before UEFA a few years ago for trampling on Ricardo Carvalho's testicles, and had just served a one-game ban in these Euro qualifiers?

There are six categories of sending-offs, the most serious being violent conduct when it's not part of open play. That's how the disciplinary panel viewed Rooney's retaliatory, off-the-ball kick: As a cold, unprovoked, violent assault. Which carries a three-game ban. Just as it does here in England.

Nothing in the rules states that if those three games fall in a tournament and he is a country's best hope of winning it, you should be lenient. When a UEFA panel believes a serious offence has been committed it hands down the agreed punishment. It's why, in recent years, Franck Ribery was prevented from playing three games, Gennaro Gattuso four, and Didier Drogba was initially banned for six. None of them English.

Yet we believe Rooney's sentence is part of some global conspiracy to stop England. Doing what precisely? Getting knocked out in the quarter-finals? The nine-man disciplinary panel came from Austria, Luxembourg. Northern Ireland, Switzerland, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Spain and Germany.

Why don't we work out the five who are the most anti-English (we can use the Eurovision votes as a guide) and send them death-threats? Because someone's got to pay for England going to Poland without Rooney and it's sure as hell not us.

Even though it's our fault.

Due to the dearth of top-class talent in this country we have wildly over-indulged Rooney, excusing his tantrums as the downside of genius. But there are too many excuses being made for a man whose contempt last season, for his club and his wife, hints that he sees himself as a force only answerable to himself.

Apologists say we should cut him some slack because he was distracted last Friday due to his father's troubles. But it was nothing to do with the father. It was the child, acting like a spoiled brat because he wasn't getting his own way. And he acted like a spoiled brat because that is what English football has allowed him to become.

The immediate response, sending excuses to UEFA saying how he walked from the pitch without protest, summed up our cowardly refusal to confront the truth that was written large on Rooney's face.

His calm expression as he left that pitch hinted that he didn't really care about the consequences of his actions, which had now become someone else's problem to clean up.

It's as though he were thinking : "That's how it is. Take me or leave me."

If Capello has balls as big as we're told, he'll leave him.

[Exiled_red]

Good article spot on. England and Rooney can have nothing to complain about. As for it being a case of everyone having it in for England don't make me laugh

The truth is the other top sides in Europe wouldn't make as big a fuss about it because they don't just rely on one or two players to carry them.

[dom9]

I can't believe some of those comments. This country is a tad embarassing at times.

[Lee]

I can't believe some of those comments. This country is a tad embarassing at times.

Neville is clearly a **** if he really believes what he's Twittered. But I would take anything that Durham says with a bucket of salt - he's such a WUM.

[Neil Young]

I can't believe some of those comments. This country is a tad embarassing at times.

I think the moralising about his private life is a bit OTT though. I don't condone what he did (partly because I can't remember it ) but linking the two so directly is stretching it. It just ratchets up the outrage level, much the same offence he's accusing others of.

I don't know why everything seems to be cast in such extreme terms.

Three games seems fair to me, especially given his one game ban for two yellow cards earlier in the qualifiers.