Not complaining, more philosophical, Wayne Rooney says people still don’t know the real him. After all these years, all the coverage. He laughs ruefully.

It is a chance to ask about something that has long been intriguing. The tattoo. The inscription on the inside of his right forearm which reads “Just Enough Education To Perform”.

Those words are the title of an album by a favourite band, Stereophonics, but they are also a joke aimed at his denigrators, right? “Ha ha, no, it’s not a joke,” he says. “I love that album. It was something I was going to get and then . . . It’s my character, it fits me as a person, really. I’ve no GCSEs but the education I’ve got is the