“Wayne is still a very young man in a position which has a lot of strain and stress on him. It’s not surprised us.”Fergie has always been more interested in football management than anger management. Given his sensitivity over the issue, he may not take kindly to Friday’s unexpected contribution from James, who has used a sports psychologist for several years. Some might say that the manner of his becoming an ex-England goalkeeper, by not preparing properly for a scheduled substitute’s appearance against Denmark, is hardly a recommendation; but he remains one of the Premiership’s more thoughtful practitioners, and has abundant experience of Rooney at close quarters, most recently in last weekend’s drawn Manchester derby.”I’m not going to criticise Wayne because I genuinely do love the guy, but when you talk about the building bricks of a top-of-the-League athlete, psychology is a part of it,” James insisted.

“Everyone can talk their tongues off about him, but I’m not interested in what the so-called experts say They did it with Beckham They did it with Gascoigne They did it with Best We expected it with Rooney. Having a week earlier lambasted “you f****** people, you press… jumping on anything because it’s Wayne Rooney”, he turned his verbal flame-thrower on the “so-called experts”. He wasn’t the quickest, was not the best in the air, was not the strongest, but he had a very strong mentality. Rooney? I can only say he’s a very good player and has all the ingredients of being a great player.”Thirty-odd miles away, Ferguson was being just as true to himself in making attack the best form of defence. His preferred stance is: “I don’t talk normally about other teams’ players or managers.” Even when invited to break the habit in the case of Rooney, he was more inclined to generalise: “It’s normal when you have a player of this quality who is this young, he has a strong character, because you can’t play at this level at 16 or 17 if you don’t I had Raul at Real Madrid at 17 playing in the first team.

Throw in the tantrums of the past fortnight in Belfast and Villarreal, and for today’s high-noon shoot-out there will be a much wider audience scrutinising every gesture as well as every touch of the ball. Sky Sports will not need to look far in choosing who should be the subject of the all-seeing player-cam that homes in on one individual and broadcasts every scratch of the groin and expulsion of phlegm.

In the North-west on Friday, conversation moved easily from Everton’s humiliation in Bucharest the previous night to the former hero without whom they achieved so much last season. There was Liverpool’s Rafael Benitez defending Rooney and other young players who live on the edge; at the other end of the East Lancs Road, Sir Alex Ferguson, report-edly “livid” with his prot? in private, was publicly standing by his man; and Manchester City’s David James, once an England colleague, was offering advice from his own experience of controlling personal demons.A manager of fewer scruples than Benitez would doubtless have been pressuring today’s referee in advance, urging his players to fan the flames of Rooney’s fiery temper and generally indulging in what he now knows to be the English expression “mind games”. Wayne Rooney, a Blue turned Manc, has become a hate figure with knobs on at Anfield, status hardly diminished by having scored the only goal of last season’s fixture there. Once it was George Best, then Eric Cantona, and later David Beckham and Gary Neville who were the focus of attention – and abuse – when Manchester United visited Liverpool At least none of them was an Evertonian. It is a splendid record, both in what he has achieved at this club, and a measure of his steadfastness, but you just wonder how much longer he is prepared to accept his current lack of scope as a manager.The thought passed through your mind more than once yesterday: will he be here when this fixture is next played? Or will he have been summoned to a higher calling?.