Wayne Rooney desperate to complete personal hat-trick

Manchester United will clinch a Double if they beat Chelsea to win the Champions League tonight - but Wayne Rooney is desperate to lift the trophy to complete his own personal Treble.

Having already won the Premier League and with his wedding to fiancee Coleen McLoughlin weeks away, beating Chelsea to be crowned champions of Europe would be the perfect hat-trick for Rooney.

"It would be a great year for me personally and for the team if we could win the Champions League," said Rooney. "If we can bring the trophy back to Manchester, I'm sure it would make my wedding feel a lot better.

"My life off the pitch is probably the best it's ever been. I'm eating the right foods, doing the right things and not going out as much as I used to. That's helped me a lot." The off-field stability Rooney now claims to embrace could not have happened, he feels, had he stayed at boyhood club Everton, where lurid and boisterous teenage exploits threatened to stunt his precocious talent before it had been given the chance to blossom.

Moving to United, under the guidance of Sir Alex Ferguson, has seen Rooney mature.

He admits he has learned crucial lessons from his wayward early years growing up on a tough Croxteth council estate on the outskirts of Liverpool.

"As a young lad, you go out and these things happen to most young lads," said Rooney. "You learn from those things and thankfully there's been nothing bad in the last few years."

Matches like tonight's are why Rooney decided to turn his back on Everton where, by his own admission, the extent of his ambition stretched to possible success in the FA Cup, League Cup and the occasional foray into Europe.

Back-to-back Premier League titles justified Rooney's decision to join United, and victory in Moscow would provide further vindication - even though Everton fans have still not forgiven him for leaving Goodison Park. "You join a club like United to win things," he said.

"I've managed to do that. To play in the biggest club tournament in the world and then reach the Champions League Final is a great achievement.

"So I'm sure a lot of Everton fans, if they didn't understand before, will understand a bit more now why I made the move."

Yet Rooney is no mug. He knows he will always be Public Enemy No.1 for opposing fans, who relish every chance to taunt him in an effort to put him off his game. But like all great players subjected to personal abuse, Rooney takes it as a compliment.

"Everywhere we go I always seem to get booed, getting off the coach, running on to the pitch, but there's no problem with that," he said.

"I'm not really too interested if the opposing fans like me or not - so long as my own fans like me. That's all I care about.

"I think it's probably the way I play. I like to put tackles in and if you put in a tackle that's not quite right, opposing fans don't seem to like it and they boo.

"You don't want to be known as a cheat or anything like that. I sometimes give away free kicks and argue with referees, but that's just my desire and my attitude towards the game. I don't like to lose.

"What I've tried to do over the last couple of years in Europe is not go into certain types of tackles, the sort you can do in the Premier League but not in the Champions League, and that's worked." Rooney's infamous short fuse has landed him in hot water on numerous occasions, but he knows tonight of all nights he cannot afford to lose the plot and perhaps cost United their chance of club football's ultimate prize.

His disciplinary record has improved, the catalyst coming at Villarreal three years ago.

Sent off for sarcastically applauding the ref, he recalled: "In the dressing room after that red card, I was thinking 'why have I just done that?'.

"These are things you learn from. You don't want to do that again when it's an important game, you don't want to be sat in the dressing-room while the lads are playing, and I think that was a big turning point for me."

Now Rooney wants payback against Chelsea after suffering a series of setbacks whenever he has come up against them. He broke his foot against the Blues before the last World Cup, lost last season's FA Cup Final to them at Wembley and suffered a recurrence of a hip injury at Stamford Bridge last month which initially made him a major doubt for tonight.

He has also fared equally badly against his nemesis, Chelsea defender Ricardo Carvalho - the player at the centre of Rooney's controversial 2006 World Cup dismissal when England played Portugal in the quarter-finals.

"I hope it's payback time against Chelsea," said Rooney. "It's the same thing with Portugal. I've had a few ups and a few downs against both of them in recent years.

"I broke my foot at Chelsea, we lost to them in the FA Cup Final, then I hurt my hip last time we played them, so I've got some bad memories there. But, hopefully, this experience will turn out to be a good one. Our games against Chelsea are always close - but we have to go into this one confident and ready to try and deal with whatever they throw at us." Rooney is aware of Fergie's famous half-time team talk in the 1999 Champions League Final in Barcelona, where he warned his players the worst feeling in the world would be walking past the trophy at the final whistle and not being able to touch it.

As such, Rooney, 22, has no desire to leave the Luzhniki Stadium tonight clutching a loser's medal, his head filled with thoughts of what might have been.

"We said when we got to the final how good it would be to beat an English team, but also how much it would hurt if we lost," he said.

"To get so close and if we didn't manage to win it, particularly to an English team like Chelsea, would be a nightmare.

"We're meeting up with the Chelsea players a couple of days later with England, so defeat would be pretty difficult to take.

"Opportunities like this don't come around very often, so you have to do everything you can to make the most of them. And that's what we intend to do."