FRIENDS. The people who you are meant to be able to trust, to confide in, to give you support when you most need it.

Not if you’re a Premier League footballer, it seems. Then you’re their route to a press payoff for a leaked story.

That’s the situation Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney found himself in when he woke up Sunday morning to the image of him sprawled on his kitchen floor.

Not because of a wild night drinking. Not because of swallowing a handful of sleeping pills.

But because of taking a punch square to the chin when messing around with friend and former teammate Phil Bardsley. Our paper’s boxing commentator John Wight would have been proud of Bardsley’s footwork and technique. It was a thing of beauty.

I feel sorry for the England captain. If you watch the video you can tell it’s a private setting and not something to be made public. The argument that because he earns £300,000 a week means we are entitled to know the most intimate details of his life is rubbish.

Whether someone is paid that inordinate sum or £57.35 jobseeker’s allowance, they should be able to enjoy themselves in their own front room without worrying about ending up on the front page of the paper.

It’s not illegal. Why does anyone care?

Rooney might have died if he hit his head on the kitchen counter — which he fortunately missed by a couple of inches — but had that happened then it would make sense to release the video.

But he didn’t. And this wouldn’t come up for discussion were it not for the “friend” who flogged the footage.

“That’s the world we live in today I think. It was a few mates in a private house which has somehow managed to go front page of a national newspaper.

“It’s private, in my own home, although it’s got out. It’s what friends do, they mess around in the house.”
Time to pick better friends, Rooney.