Where, you have to wonder, would the News of the World be without sport? Nine of the first 11 pages of yesterday's paper were taken up with allegations concerning the private life of Wayne Rooney and a second instalment of the investigation into cricket's bribery scandal. A further eight-page pull-out section on the cricket affair could be found inside. And that was before the readers reached the sports pages.
In terms of tabloid journalism, here was the good and bad, side by side. The cricket story is a genuinely important one, and the paper can take great credit for using its resources and ingenuity to uncover a disease attacking the core of the game. Rooney is another matter.
A matter, one would have thought, for Mr and Mrs Rooney alone and one that has once again raised the issue of the extent to which a player's private life should affect his standing as a player.
Rooney is not a priest accused of paedophilia, or a politician discovered accepting brown envelopes full of cash for asking questions in the House of Commons. He is a footballer, a young man from a rough background who, by the age of 16, was already discovering his gifts were enough to offer the promise of extraordinary wealth.
From the mean streets of Croxteth he was catapulted into a world of Ferraris, £50,000 watches, gated residential compounds, lush nightclubs and legions of attractive girls who would do anything to get close to a star of the Premier League. If he were to have acquired any semblance of a moral compass in these circumstances, it would be something of a miracle.
Two Scottish managers, David Moyes and Sir Alex Ferguson, have handled his development over the past eight years. Both are noted for their strictness – in Ferguson's case, to the point of visiting young players' houses and shutting down parties during his early years at Manchester United – but neither has been able to exert absolute control over Rooney's behaviour, which must have given them a few sleepless nights.
They love the intuitive nature of his talent, a quality so rare among English players of any era, and particularly this one. Sven-Goran Eriksson, who gave him his first senior international cap at 17, and Steve McClaren, the Swede's successor, loved it too. They were not disciplinarians, believing that players should be able to control their own behaviour.
Fabio Capello gives the impression of imposing rules and regulations, although his bark may be worse than his bite – particularly when it comes to dealing with a foreign culture in whose language he is not comfortable. But you have to say that if Ferguson and Capello cannot ensure that a player stays out of trouble, what hope is there?
The Italian is certainly being made to work for the fortune he is being paid by the Football Association. After conducting the team through an unusually smooth World Cup qualification campaign with nine victories in 10 matches, the manager has endured one problem after another. Some, starting with the Capello Index and continuing with the bungled attempt to persuade Paul Scholes out of retirement, the decision to sequester the squad in a monastic environment and with the continued selection of Shaun Wright-Phillips, were self-inflicted. Others, however, were no fault of his.
Ashley Cole, John Terry and Peter Crouch made fools of themselves in the way Rooney has now done. Super-injunctions may have protected other players from similar exposure. Injuries cost him the services of Owen Hargreaves, Rio Ferdinand, Theo Walcott, Joe Cole, Aaron Lennon, David Beckham and Dean Ashton for long periods. And the flood of problems does not seem to have abated.
It is hard, however, to feel that these allegations should affect Rooney's position in the England team, as long as they do not exert a negative influence on his form (which showed welcome signs of a revival against Bulgaria on Friday), not least because the events described in the story appear to have taken place a year ago. There is no statute of limitations in these matters, but we are not to know what has happened in the meantime between Mr and Mrs Rooney, and whether the subsequent birth of their first child has modified his attitude to marriage.
When the News of the World decided to bring Terry down, the paper had a significantly better excuse. Terry, the England captain and a married man, was said to have had an affair with the ex-partner of his close friend and former club-mate Wayne Bridge. As a result, Bridge withdrew from the England squad and made himself unavailable for this summer's World Cup finals. Terry's behaviour could therefore be said to have had a directly damaging effect on the team of which he was supposed to be the leader.
The worst an outsider can say of Rooney is that, in addition to his income from football, he and his wife have worked hard to profit from sponsorships and endorsements directly related to a carefully burnished image of domestic harmony. The same could be said of Tiger Woods, who has already suffered the financial consequences, along with the destruction of his marriage. Given that there appear to be no qualms about Woods's continued appearances in major tournaments, or his inclusion in the US Ryder Cup team, it is hard to see why Rooney should be treated more harshly.
