I'm Ellis James, and this is Colin Murray sitting alongside me, and we're dropping into your feed to tell you about our new podcast, Everything to Play For.

I think the key was that you told him I was sitting down. Your attention to detail is a mac. You're not up a tree? Not standing, not doing a head stand. No, no, no. Each season and everything to play for, we're looking at the greatest sporting stories of all time, juiciest rivalies, bravest underdogs, the biggest comebacks. But telling that story while going off on the most enormous tangents, just to tell stories that make us giggle.

We get to really stretch our legs. We don't have our wings clipped on this podcast, Colin. We're sports nerds, and we are allowed to indulge ourselves in a way that, in my opinion, is very entertaining.

You're going to go home feeling great after listening to everything to play for. Anyway, we're going to play you a clip from our first episode. This is where we discuss Wayne Rooney and his England career. So have a little listen to this. If you do like it, please do follow everything to play for on the WNDY app or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Alice. Episode one, when I say Euro 2004, which a reminder was 20 years ago. 20 years ago. What does it make you think of?

On a personal level, a constant sick feeling because we have come so close to qualifying and failed. But also Euro 2004, summer 2004, I was 23. I was at my most viral. That was significant, and I was at my most handsome. That's my main personal recollection of it. The big story, obviously, was Greece winning it. Yes. And Denmark had won it in 1992. Greece won it in 2004. So that's two unfuncie teams in 12 years. I love the Euros for that. I just think it's such a great tournament. But certainly from an England perspective, Wayne Rooney just seemed to be the missing piece the jigsaw.

Which brings us perfectly on to Wayne Rooney bursting onto the scene. Wayne Rooney becomes the youngest player ever to score at the European Championship Finals. All of Europe will remember the name now. So we move on to world football there, finding out about Wayne Rooney. But if you look to your right, you'll see a hologram called Al, who's appeared beside you with his little- With Ziggy. Palm pilot Ziggy. And that's because we... Oh, boy, we're going to go even further back in time. That's how we roll on everything to play for. So let's come all the way back to Rooney's childhood. He grows up in Crokstead in Liverpool. Like We all grew up, the vast majority of us grew up playing football in the street, getting moved on from street to street, getting chased by neighbors when an over enthusiastic shot broke a flower pot or cracked a window. We were just moving around. We were street urchins. That's what we were. And he was exactly the same type of city kid, except for, he was that, you would have had one where you grew up. And I had one where I grew up. He ended up playing for Liverpool Reserves.

Then he got a lot of goals for Linfield in the Irish League. Davy Larmer was in our estate. He was three or four years younger than me. And you just knew that one player in your estate that was better than everyone else. And Wayne Rooney was that Crokstead kid.

Yes. I played against Simon Davis, the Tottenham Everton and Welsh international, and he was on a different planet to me.

As Pat Nevin said to me when I said, What's the difference between us and you? And he said, You kick a football, I kick a patch in a football. Oh, wow. And I thought, What a great way to sum it up. And Rooney was the kid who was kicking a patch. Yes.

He scored 80 goals in one season for Koppelhaus Under-11s in the '95 '96 season, in 29 games, so I'm just allowing you to do the maths on this, where Everton of 10s and 11s, he scored 114 goals. That's too many.

It's just slightly under four goals a game because you know I love me maths.

I just love the idea of a young kid playing in an Under-11s team finding football that easy. And a former teammate of his from the Liverpool School Boys Under 11 said he kicked like a man. People say he was a kid in a man's body. It sounds funny now, but he used to say he didn't want to be a footballer when he grew up. He wanted to be a boxer.

Did you not have the kid in your class who came out of the womb fully formed and ready to work in a factory? Yes. I'm not going to name names because you grew up with people, but one kid in our class.

I'm thinking of him.

I can picture his face. I don't want to say names. I don't want to say names. But we're in a kid. But he looked like all of our uncle. It was our age. Do you know what? It's like Rodney Trotter. I thought he was a teacher.

Yeah. Parents' Evening.

You remember when Rodney Trotter, when Delboy entered him into the Marble Arch at Dawn picture into the painting competition, and he won it, but it was the Under-15 category. And he had to return to be 15. That's Wayne Rooney. If he had entered that competition, he wouldn't have believed he was Under-15 when he was.

But I think one of the things that made him so loved by Everton fans was that he was this tantalizing combination of extreme youth, artistry and power. And he was so young, but he was a street footballer. He was a street footballer on the pitch. And I think I think in particular in the English game, there's a huge amount of affection reserved for those players, more so than I think in other footballing cultures.

Yeah, I think so. He's quite shy away from the pitch. So he's strong on the pitch. He didn't take any BS. So he probably, by his own admission, he said, I wasn't a bully, but there was times that he crossed the line. So he was a street fighting kid, and he was way ahead years-wise. So even Even when he then had to move to that higher level, he's 15, playing for Everton's Under-19. So not a surprise, Ellis, that that's where the Wayne Rooney Street story finishes. Like, literally, as he's just about old enough to smoke a cigarette, that's when the Wayne Rooney Street footballer is no more because he was such a phenomenal talent. He was fast-tracked straight into not just the limelight here in the UK, but because of the Premier League worldwide.

So, Colin, the game that I must admit, until I started researching this episode, I had mistakenly remembered as his debut. It's not quite his debut. It was in October 2002, and he'd made his debut for Everton in the August. But even the most casual football fan will know what I'm talking about. Everton against Arsenal at Goodison Park. It's nil-nil. It's coming towards the end of the game. And Moyes decides to send on this 16-year-old kid who Everton fans are already really excited about. They knew his records for the youth team. They were aware that they had this enormous talent on their hands. I think, to be honest, the world of football is a small world, and people in the knowing football knew that there was something special happening at Goodison Park. So Moyes sends him on, and Rooney, since then, has said, I was just desperate to score. I wanted to score as a 16-year-old because it was his last game as a 16-year-old. So he said, If I get a chance, I'm going to have a shot. Follow everything to play for now wherever you get your podcasts or binge seasons early, and add free by joining Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts.

He said that, standing up.