Manchester, England
A point was salvaged for United but the moment carried a far greater significance. It was Rooney’s 250th goal for United — a record breaker.
Rooney’s long wait to overhaul Bobby Charlton as the club’s all-time leading scorer ended in front of the 79-year-old former United great on Saturday at Stoke.
“It’s a proud moment for me and a huge honor to get that record, just a bit dampened by the result,” said the 31-year-old Rooney, whose side remained sixth in the Premier League after the 1-1 draw. “It’s about a career and I still feel there’s a lot more to come, but overall it’s a really proud moment for me.”
Inevitably the moment was tinged with disappointment for Charlton, but not for long. Soon after the game, Charlton clambered down from his seat at Stoke into the United dressing room to congratulate Rooney.
Rooney took 546 games to reach the milestone, while Charlton netted 249 goals over 758 matches across the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
Elsewhere, after uncharacteristic blunders by goalkeeper Hugo Lloris gifted Manchester City two goals at the start of the second half, Tottenham rediscovered the attacking threat missing in the first period in a 2-2 draw.
Swansea climbed off the bottom and out of the relegation zone with a thrilling first Premier League win at Anfield over Liverpool, 3-2.
Sam Allardyce is still waiting for his first win since replacing Alan Pardew as Crystal Palace manager last month, suffering a 1-0 loss to Everton at home.
Andy Carroll made it five goals in 10 league games with a double in West Ham’s 3-1 win at Middlesbrough.
Hackers Claim AFCON Website Shutdown
Libreville, Gabon
A person sent an email to The Associated Press claiming the group New World Hackers had “taken down” the Confederation of African Football’s official website, the website of Africa’s top soccer body and the site for the continent’s main soccer tournament. The site CAFonline.com was not working.
African soccer officials couldn’t immediately confirm if their website had been hacked. CAF spokesman Junior Binyam said he couldn’t say if there were unconnected technical problems with the website or if it had been taken down, but CAF had been working on the problem for nearly two hours without success when Binyam spoke with the AP.
The purported hackers, whose claims could not be verified by the AP, said they attacked the website because the central African nation of Gabon was a “dictatorship” under Bongo and should not be hosting the tournament.
“We did this in protest against Gabon,” the person claiming to be one of the hackers wrote in an email. “They are running the Africa Cup in a country where the dictator Ali Bongo is killing innocent people!”
The person said three hackers who live in Russia and go by the names Kapustkiy, Cyric and Maxie were responsible for taking the website out of action.
Bongo, who took over from his father as president of oil-rich Gabon in 2009, won re-election by a razor-thin margin in a vote last August. Opposition leader Jean Ping denounced the elections as fraudulent and clashes and deaths on the streets followed.
The buildup to the African Cup was undermined by fears that political protests would break out again during the tournament, but the first week of the cup has passed peacefully, although there have been reports that a small number of people were arrested for protesting against Bongo. The president was at the soccer stadium in the capital Libreville on Saturday to pay a visit to the Gabonese team, which plays a crucial match against Cameroon on Sunday.
Gabon is hosting the African soccer championship for the second time in five years, having co-hosted with neighboring Equatorial Guinea in 2012. It was chosen in April 2015 as a replacement for war-torn Libya.
New World Hackers have claimed responsibility for previous hacks, including one in the United States last year that affected access to Twitter, Netflix and PayPal.