‘Only ever seen him on FIFA’: Calvert-Lewin says he was truly starstruck by one man at Everton

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Speaking on the Super Six Podcast, Dominic Calvert-Lewin has opened up on how he felt when he was first playing with Wayne Rooney at Everton.

Rooney of course came back to Everton for the 2017/18 season, and it’s fair to say that Calvert-Lewin was a little bit starstruck.

It doesn’t seem like long ago that Rooney himself was breaking through at Euro 2004, but Calvert-Lewin was only a child when the England legend was making his name in the game, so he found it a bit of a surreal experience to train alongside him.

“That was surreal, it was surreal seeing Wazza for the first time. I’d only ever seen him on FIFA. It was like the young childhood football fan was coming out of me and I was like ‘that’s Wayne Rooney’,” Calvert-Lewin said.

“All my family and all your friends were asking ‘what’s Wayne Rooney like?’ And you’re like ‘he’s just a normal guy’, just a normal humble guy, and once I got to know him and once he was around the building for a couple of weeks he just turned into Wazza.”

It must’ve been a bit strange to turn up to training one day and begin playing alongside one of the most famous footballers in the world.

Calvert-Lewin wasn’t the bona fide England international he is now back in 2017, so it must have been a bit of a culture shock for him to be stood toe to toe with England’s greatest ever goalscorer.

Nowadays, Everton have a star-studded roster with the likes of James Rodriguez and Carlo Ancelotti at the club, so the idea of superstars at Goodison Park has become a little more normalised.

However, names in this game don’t come much bigger than Wayne Rooney, and we can understand why Calvert-Lewin was starstruck by the former England captain.