The real obscenity is the way we indulge football’s Neanderthal Wayne Rooney

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The scene was the opulent, marbled concourse at Dubai International Airport, but at that moment we might have been in a dark back alley in a Liverpool ghetto.

One moment, Wayne Rooney was lazing indolently on a seat at the departure gate, his wife Coleen resting her neatly coiffed head on his meaty shoulder; the next they were advancing menacingly towards me.

With his Desperate Dan jaw, impossibly thick neck and veins bulging from his prematurely high forehead, Rooney might have been a boxer striding towards the ring.

Though it was only 6am, Coleen clattered along in glittery high heels, and was wearing thickly painted-on eyebrows. For a moment, they looked quite comical — but I knew better than to laugh.

You see, this was last October, at the height of Rooney’s battle for an exorbitant pay rise from Manchester United, and I had just written a distinctly unflattering article about their self-indulgent, chav-like behaviour while holidaying at a seven-star hotel.