Wayne and Coleen Rooney have been busy tweeting each other since the Manchester United forward's debut on Twitter. Photograph: Mark Campbell/Rex FeaturesThere was a sporting stir in our household over the bank holiday weekend. Not because Queens Park Rangers' hopes of promotion were put on hold after a scintillating 2-2 draw with Cardiff City, nor because Arsenal messed up yet again, but because the real Wayne Rooney had finally joined Twitter. What a relief. Personally I had been beginning to lose hope.
Later it was reported that it took @Wazzaroon08 a few attempts to get the hang of the 140-character tweets, which is understandable as he is already so eloquent with just the four, but once he found his comfort zone there was no stopping him. He and wife Coleen even managed to tweet each other! Once baby Kai is inducted into the twitterverse none of the Rooneys need ever speak to one another again, #hello21stcenturyfunctionalfamily!
The good news did not stop there. Joining Wazza was Asamoah Gyan, while Darron Gibson popped in for a quick bite before hastily retreating faster than a cat backs out of a litter tray. Ooh, stinky.
Apparently both Wazza and Gibbo's appearances (and disappearance) were big news, although in this instance Sky Sports News decided not to give it the breaking news treatment. Not that SSN is averse to breaking news about Twitter. Who could forget the excitement when @rioferdy5 exclusively tweeted that he was unable to reveal anything about @Wazzaroon08 (in tweet-utero as he then was) purportedly leaving Manchester United?
At which point I may as well confess that I'm a Twitter-hater, along the Ice T principles (don't hate the tweeter, hate the game). I have recently been advised that this is akin to hating telephones, cars and Google, or, as a friend put it, "insisting on listening to the wireless". At the ripe old age of 32 I'm being written off as a fuddy-duddy. True, I did watch Countryfile at the weekend (fly fishing on the river Usk, hell yeah!) but I fail to see anything fogey about refusing to join a virtual reality cult. Sorry, but if you're self-identifying as a "follower" you may as well go the whole hog and sign up with the Cruises.
I'm not ruling out Twitter altogether, I do concede it has its uses. Take, for example, the well-traversed extract from an impressive canon of work by Darren Bent, this one circa 2009. "Do I wanna go Hull City NO. Do I wanna go stoke NO do I wanna go sunderland YES so stop fucking around, [Daniel] levy." Genius. Like reading a script from The Wire, the unparalleled beauty, authenticity of language and certain rawness of his words. If every tweet was elevated to that level of expression the twitterverse would be an exciting place. Sadly, as it stands, tweetheads, it ain't.
Another pro-Twitter line of argument is that the public can finally access what multimillionaire sports stars actually think about. That in a world of spin where if you say "Kate Middleton is a commoner" enough times in an ITV documentary the nation will believe it, we are finally able to cut through the propaganda and touch the truth.
Well, sort of. I've heard of at least one footballer offered £20,000 to promote certain fizzy drinks companies in his tweets, while another told me that the main reason his colleagues go on Twitter is to flog their own brand.
Having learned absolutely nothing of note from Wazza since his debut (I do not count a photograph of him standing outside a tanning salon as news) I'm afraid I'm sticking to my typewriter-like stance on the subject.
As if I needed further persuasion, however, it came on Sunday evening settling down to watch United, the BBC's dramatisation of the Munich air disaster. From the sofa I was gripped as the plane crashed in the snow. Tears pricking my eyes, a lump formed in my throat as I watched a young Bobby Charlton stagger around, dazed, while his team-mate Harry Gregg pulled bodies from the wreckage of the plane.
Palms sweating, I silently willed Bobby to tear his hands away from his eyes and tend to Sir Matt.
All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision. My husband was reaching into his pocket to pull out his mobile phone. I watched, aghast, as he casually scrolled down the screen.
"What are you doing?" I hissed. "Just having a look on Twitter," came the reply. "Why?" I hissed back. "Just to see what everyone's saying about the film."
I could barely believe my ears. "But it's not even finished yet!" I yelled. My husband shrugged as I turned my head back to face the TV screen, desperate not to miss another millisecond of how the Busby survivors might be coping.
Then, in a sudden moment of clarity, I finally understood what I had to do. Reaching for my phone I quickly tapped out the message: "Do u wanna miss the end. NO. R u gonna waste the rest of ur life floppin on Twitter YES. So stop fucking around and watch the telly."
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