Wayne Rooney in the mood to enjoy himself as he sets sights on Italy

It was, as Rooney now recounts, a frank conversation full of home truths, and one of them cut to the bone. "Do you think you're a top player?" Moyes asked. Rooney replied that he did. Then Moyes hit him with the killer line. "Then why have Chelsea offered only £25m for you?" One of the good things about Rooney is that he can respond well to the short-sharp-shock treatment sometimes. At United, he went for extra training, including spells in the boxing gym with his old mates back in Liverpool. Until Christmas, he was the best player at Old Trafford. "Different players have different mentalities," he says now. "I've always responded well if I'm not doing well. If someone is shouting at me, I have no problem with that. You see some players and it really affects them. It's not something I get concerned about." He makes the point as a way of showing that he can handle the kind of criticism and scrutiny that has come his way recently. Rooney, for the most part, can brush it off. At other times, it hits a nerve. "I always remember someone commenting that I hadn't scored for six games," he cites as an example. "What they didn't say was that I was playing as a deep-lying midfielder for those six games," The Guardian reports. More hurtful was the recent critique of Paul Scholes, essentially describing him as a player in decline. Scholes's one-liners can be every bit as brutal as his infamous tackles and this one alleged Rooney, at 28, had peaked two years ago. Scholes went on to question whether Roy Hodgson would have the nerve to drop Rooney if he did not play well, and it is from there that everything has reached the point that Phil Neville, another former Manchester United team-mate, now talks of a "witch-hunt" against the striker. What can be said with certainty is that Rooney and Scholes are not close. "He was a great player at Man United, but I've never had his phone number and he's never had mine," Rooney says. "I'm sure he's upset a lot of people at Man United because they see me as worthy of signing a new [five-year] deal at the club, so they obviously have a different opinion to Paul. But you'll have to ask him. I don't agree with what he's said. Whether they are valid comments or not, you'll have to ask him." Scholes, he has noted, was rarely this forthright in interviews as a player. "It's very strange, very strange, but I'm sure he has his reasons for it. He's probably the best player I've ever played with, so I'm not going to knock him as a player, but I don't agree with his point. I do find it strange." The peculiar thing here is that Rooney is smiling. A few years ago, he might have gone further with his response, but there is something different about him going into this tournament. Details also at