Wayne Rooney reveals Cristiano Ronaldo "was not his favourite strike partner" at Manchester United
- Anweshan Ghosh
- Nov 5
- 2 min read
Manchester United and English football legend Wayne Rooney has revealed that Cristiano Ronaldo was not his favourite strike partner at Manchester United.
To everyone's surprise the former Red Devil claimed that Argentine forward Carlos Teves was his favourite partner up front and revealed that the duo shared a “special connection” during their two seasons together at Old Trafford.
Rooney had played with some of the world's best forwards during his time at Manchester United, including Cristiano Ronaldo, Dimitar Berbatov, Robin van Persie, Louis Saha and Javier Hernandez. However, the Englishman favoured the Argentine striker for his understanding of the game, passion and relentless work rate.
Tevez joined Man Utd back in 2007 from West Ham, forming one of the deadliest attacking trios with Rooney and Ronaldo spearheading Sir Alex Ferguson’s team. The English-Argentine duo combined for 47 goals during their two-year spell together, delivering two Premier League titles and the Champions League triumph in 2008, defying all odds.
Rooney claimed that their pairing was built on mutual understanding instead of tactical boards or statistics, which helped them bag so many goals together. He highlighted that the ability to interchange positions from the no. 9 and no. 10 positions kept defenders clueless, while CR7 added individual brilliance to this duo, making Manchester United one of the teams to beat back then.
As both were not traditional box strikers, it helped them complement each other as they dropped deep in build-up, creating space for each other behind the opposition defence to score goals.
Speaking on BBC Sport’s The Wayne Rooney Show, the United legend said, “Tevez, I really enjoyed playing with Carlos, and I enjoyed playing with all of them, but with Carlos, there was a big thing in the papers when we were signing him saying that the two of us were too similar and we couldn’t play together.” (sic)
He further added, “And yeah, I think for the both of us, that really, like, you know, we were like, ‘Okay, we’ll show you and stuff,’ and we were aggressive and we worked hard and tackled as well, but then bounced off each other.” (sic)
“One of us plays the [No] 9, the other is a [No] 10, and we change it up, and yeah, so he was definitely the favourite one to play with.” (sic)
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