What now Wayne?

Adam Bate wonders where the high-profile omission of Wayne Rooney leaves the Manchester United forward.

The parallels with David Beckham were too delicious to ignore. The Times spoke of "eerie similarities" while for the Independent it was a "poignant" comparison. It was all there. The high-profile axing against the same opposition in the very same competition. Even the celebrity wife was right on cue to risk Sir Alex Ferguson's ire. "Can't believe Wayne Rooney isn't starting tonight!" came the tweet from Coleen. It's fair to assume the healthy ego of the self-styled 'Big Man' will have been pricked. This was a game some were billing as the biggest at Old Trafford for five years. And the one-time talisman of the team was excluded from the starting line-up. The conclusion is a tempting one - Rooney's time at Old Trafford, like Beckham's back in 2003, is almost up. As former United skipper Roy Keane put it: "Wayne might be quite selfish about it and look at it and say the writing's on the wall for him." That United lost the game in front of their own fans would ordinarily have sparked furious debate about the team selection with Ferguson being questioned from all sides. But his counterpart at Real Madrid swiftly attempted to quash such talk. "Sir Alex has won the right for every decision to be correct and never have a question mark against them," said Jose Mourinho. "He is the best. He is the top. You are nobody to put a question like that. I am nobody. He did a great job."

Beneficiaries

In truth, it wasn't just the game-changing sending off of Nani that left the question redundant. It was the fact that the home side's stand-out performers were Danny Welbeck and Ryan Giggs - arguably the two chief beneficiaries of Rooney's omission. Giggs belied his years to produce a tireless display, foraging down the right far more impressively than Rooney had done in the Bernabeu three weeks earlier. The 39-year-old showed remarkable pace and enthusiasm in tracking back with Fabio Coentrao, Real's marauding left-back. The fact that Giggs even overstepped the mark with two early challenges suggested that Ferguson had stressed the importance of stopping the supply from the left. The contrast with Rooney's efforts was stark. It was billed as a thankless task at the time and that proved to be the case in a literal sense. It seems Ferguson was unimpressed with the way his star's positional play contributed to many of Real's best opportunities that night. For his part, perhaps Rooney would have been eyeing a central role given home advantage this time around but it was Welbeck who took his favoured No.10 role. And the youngster shone. There are those who retain lingering doubts regarding the leggy 22-year-old forward. His finishing lacks conviction and the passing can appear less than crisp at times. But coaches tend not to dwell on such matters when a player combines pace, physique and