🚨 Wayne Rooney on claims Lionel Messi wouldn’t survive in the Premier League: “I saw somebody asking whether Messi could have handled the Premier League. I thought it was a joke at first. People were genuinely discussing whether he’d be able to cope with the defenders, the physicality, the lack of space. I said to my mate, ‘Are we talking about the same Messi?’ He said, ‘They reckon he’d struggle because nobody gives you time on the ball here.’ I said, ‘Right. Someone should have told us that in 2011.’ I played against him in two Champions League finals. We lost both. I scored in the second one, at Wembley, and for a few minutes you think, okay, we’re back in it. We’ve got a chance. Then Messi scores, Barcelona take control again, and you’re chasing a game you can barely get hold of. Afterwards, in the dressing room, nobody was saying, ‘Well, he’d never manage that against an English team.’ We were an English team. Manchester United. We had players who’d won Premier Leagues, Champions Leagues, everything. We weren’t some lads he’d found in the park. And he made it look easy. The thing people don’t understand about Messi is that taking away his space doesn’t automatically take away his football. Sometimes that’s exactly what he wants you to do. You go close, he turns. You back off, he runs at you. Two of you go to him, he finds the free man. And when you’ve finally decided what to do, he’s already done something else. Now look at Cherki against Liverpool. Brilliant goal. He sends Frimpong one way, takes the ball the other, and finishes. Everybody’s saying what a special player he is. And they’re right. It was fantastic. But then some of the same people turn around and tell me Messi couldn’t dribble in this league because defenders don’t allow that sort of thing. Well, apparently they allowed it on Sunday. I’m not saying Cherki is Messi. That’s not fair on either player. I’m saying that when a footballer is clever enough and technically good enough, he can make a defender look ordinary in any competition. Messi did it against us. He did it against Arsenal, Chelsea, City. He did it for Argentina at a World Cup, when every country was trying to stop him. You can argue about whether he’d have scored the same number of goals in England. That’s a proper football discussion. Different league, different teammates, different demands. But ‘would he survive’? Come on. I remember a young player once asking me what was so difficult about defending Messi. I told him, ‘You know when you think you’ve got somebody trapped near the touchline?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘With Messi, that’s usually when you find out you’re the one who’s trapped.’ I wish he’d played in England. I genuinely do. Our fans would have loved watching him every week, even the ones who’d have spent 90 minutes hoping he had a bad game. And maybe then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Because the strange thing isn’t that Messi never proved he could play in the Premier League. It’s that people watched what he did to the Premier League’s best teams for years and somehow decided they still needed more evidence.”