The fall out from Rooney’s departure could be worse than expected

Now it has been confirmed that Wayne Rooney wants to leave the club we can deal with the fallout and attempt to prepare for life without him but realistically how will we?

I stress there is no man bigger than Manchester United but losing Rooney will be a massive blow and largely due to the timing of this revelation, maybe worse than any of us could have expected.

Looking at our team now it isn’t the strongest it has ever been. Bearing in mind we lost Carlos Tevez and Cristiano Ronaldo last summer to only finish one point off the boil was pretty good as not many clubs could lose two massive players like that and still compete as well as we did.

Largely our strong-ish showing last season was down to Wayne Rooney stepping up to the plate and picking up the slack scoring 34 goals so to hear he wants to leave is disappointing as to lose a player capable of such things will hurt any side. But it gets worse.

Realistically we have to face up to the prospect that Rooney may not be the only departure this term as eldermen like Paul Scholes, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs and Edwin van der Sar may also call time on their United careers in the near future too. I had touched on how damaging it could be too lose Neville, Giggs and Scholes at once but at the time I didn’t factor in Edwin or Rooney. just typing and reading it to myself sounds terrible s imagine how it pans out on field?

The timing of this couldn’t have been worse and if United replace Rooney the way we ‘replaced’ Ronaldo and Tevez then I forsee problems. In Rooney’s absence this term (even when he is playing it’s like he’s not there) we have done OK with both Berbatov and now Hernandez chipping in but that is only in the short term can we rely on our current strike force despite it’s size to maintain a strong enough threat to carry us to titles and through Europe?

Just some food for thought.

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