Now, first off I'm definitely no Bluenose.
However I will admit to being a patriotic Scouser.
Against France we had to put up with Clive Tyldesley comentating nonsense of "Manchester United passes to Manchester United to Manchester United to ex-Manchester United" bullsh*t.
No hero worship of the Scousers who won the game yesterday though. If the goals were scored by players 30 miles down the East Lancs road the headline would undoubtedly have read "Manchester 3 Switzerland 0".
Anyway, enough of that. The chip on my shoulder is getting too heavy to bear in this heat.
It has to be said though, that even I was unprepared for the outrageously unflattering headline on the front page of today's Times, comparing Wayne Rooney to an elephant! 
I must be getting soft in my old age, but I just thought it was an incredibly insensitive headline for an 18-year-old boy who has just become the youngest ever scorer in the European Championships and fulfilled the dreams of the nation and his obviously proud parents.
We all know how sports journalists love to eulogise and philosophise to prove how clever they are, but Simon Barnes must surely regret this shocker of a headline.
Baby elephant brings the house down
From Simon Barnes, Chief Sports Writer The Times, 18 June 2004.
WAYNE ROONEY, England’s burly, strapping, gum-chewing teenager, rescued his side from disaster in the European championship last night as England beat Switzerland 3-0. In a display of flailing muscularity and joyful impetuousness, he scored two goals and put England back on track in this competition. England struggled in precisely the sort of match they always find difficult, but Rooney was the difference between the sides.
It was his voracious appetite for footballing combat that took England through: something sorely needed after the defeat by France last Sunday. England now need a similarly hefty performance against Croatia next week and they can take their place in the quarter-finals as if the French disaster had never happened.
Rooney seems to have modelled his style of play on the baby elephant that ran amok in the Blue Peter studio. There is the same impossible size, and there is the same impossibly young age — Rooney is still only 18. There is the same air of not being quite in control, as if he hadn’t yet got around to counting his limbs.
Then there is the same altogether unexpected speed, and equally unexpected manoeuvrability. But more than anything else, there is the same talent for destruction. Nor is it a predictable kind of destructiveness. You can get out of the way of a big truck; there’s not much you can do about a baby elephant that’s got your name on it. Nor is there much that a frightened defender can do about a rampaging Rooney.
Rooney put the wind up the Swiss last night in the hitherto quiet university town of Coimbra. It seems that Sven-Göran Eriksson, the England head coach, picks him with the same logic that the Duke of Wellington picked his army: I don’t know what he does to the enemy but he certainly puts the fear of God into me.
He was booked for clattering the keeper in a hefty challenge for the ball. He had just given away possession and then immediately given away another foul. He looked on the very edge of personal control. And that, of course, is when this bullocking sweating man-calf generally shows us his best.
He gave England the lead after 23 minutes, a period in which the Swiss had all the better of the play. A scything ball from the grounded Steven Gerrard, a little dink from Michael Owen and Rooney headed the ball emphatically into the net. He then performed a cartwheel in celebration.
A naive person, some one altogether unschooled in the art of watching English football teams, might have expected England to build on the advantage Rooney had given them: to score a second right away, make the game safe and make the rest of the afternoon comfortable for English people all over the world. But England don’t do comfortable. “Perhaps we like to make you suffer,” David Beckham suggested.
England always believe in giving their opponents a chance. It seemed that the referee had decided to make things even more difficult for them by sending off Bernt Haas. Yes, a Switzerland player: England are notoriously vulnerable when playing with a clear advantage. England can frequently play good football: they seldom play an authoritative match, especially over lower-ranked opposition: a mystery that no doubt has its answer deep in the English national psyche.
With England’s eleven now playing ten, they continued to make heavy weather. With twenty minutes to go, England — the team and the nation both — were begging for a nerve-settler.
At last, with just 15 minutes to go, it was the man-calf that supplied it. Darius Vassell set him up, and Rooney, with the sort of edge-of-control charge he does best, smacked the ball into the post. It didn’t quite shatter the woodwork, but it rebounded into the goalkeeper and back into the net. At last England were in command and Gerrard celebrated the fact by scoring England’s third. England are still in this competition.
What is more, Rooney’s elephantine effort has given them momentum.
