Wayne Rooney first came to the notice of Manchester United coaches when as a nine-year old he scored SIX goals against them!

“We hadn’t played any games before, the boys had just been training together,” Paul McGuinness, now manager of United’s U18s, told manutd.com. “We didn’t even have a goalkeeper, so Peter Schmeichel’s son Kasper played for us. He was the only kid we knew who played in goal!

“The Everton boys had been playing together for at least a year in a league beforehand, so they were used to playing games. You could tell, because they absolutely hammered us.”

It wasn’t just the scoreline (12-2) which stuck in the memory. All the talk was of a stunning goal from Rooney.

“He scored a few (six to be exact), but there was one goal that stood out. It was basically the classic overhead kick, the perfect bicycle kick, which for a kid of eight or nine years old was really something special.

“We were all wondering who this kid was,” recalls McGuinness. “It transpired that he was from a tough, boxing background, a sporting family and also he was a diehard Everton fan.

“At that time you didn’t really get any kids crossing over to Manchester from Liverpool. We looked at it behind the scenes, but he was too fixated on Everton to contemplate behind the scenes, but he was too fixated on Everton to contemplate leaving them.”