Wayne Rooney has detailed how he left John Terry on crutches after setting out to hurt a rival player while struggling with the pressure placed upon him.
Ahead of the release of a new documentary focused on the former Manchester United and England star, Rooney has opened up on the difficulty he had coping with expectation during his career.
Rooney, 36, now admits that the anxiety often led to him resorting to alcohol, while also leading him to anger - as Chelsea defender Terry once discovered.
“We knew if Chelsea won then they had won the league that day,” he told PA News Agency of the April 2006 trip to Stamford Bridge, where United would go onto lose 3-0. “Until my last game for Derby, I always wore the old plastic studs with the metal tip.
“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... and 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.”
In the end, the rage-fuelled decision to change boots at Stamford Bridge proved costly. During a late challenge with Paulo Ferreira, Rooney's front studs got caught in the turf and he broke three metatarsal bones just weeks before the 2006 World Cup.
“Looking back, I should never have gone to that World Cup,” said Rooney, who blames himself for the injury.
“It was my first World Cup I would have been going to. Obviously I broke my foot not long before it and still to this day I feel terrible for Jermain Defoe. He went out, [did] all the training camp and then literally I come in, he left.
“And that was hard as well to take because I literally took his spot at the World Cup and took his dream away of going to the World Cup. But I wasn't ready, I was never fit to play in that tournament and I think that showed in performances."
Rooney's tournament would eventually end with his anger flaring up again, receiving a red card in the eventual quarter-final defeat to Portugal.
That World Cup exit still appears to weigh heavy on Rooney now, which perhaps should not surprise given his self-belief brought internal pressure.
“The pressure [weighed heavy], yeah,” he said. “I'd go into tournaments thinking if England are to win this tournament it's because I've won them it. I always went into the tournament like that.
🤣🤣 @WayneRooney is this when you left your stud in my foot? 🤣 https://t.co/sSJH7AwCTK
— John Terry (@JohnTerry26) February 7, 2022
“If I perform well, we win the tournament. I always had that belief. But on the flip side I used to think if I don't, we won't win it. England need me to perform well for us to win the tournament.
“That was a lot of pressure for me to deal with. I tried to hide it a lot throughout the years and tried to take that pressure off my teammates almost to not show that but deep down that's what was always in my head.
“I was always thinking, so I think a lot of the times you see mistakes on the pitch or like a red card, whatever, bad performance, that's probably from me just holding everything in and trying to do too much at times.”
