Wayne Rooney has revealed the police once took his ball from him for playing in the street.

The footballer, who grew up in Croxteth, Liverpool, was being interviewed by the Radio Times about Wayne Rooney’s Street Striker, a three-part Sky1 series in which 50 hopefuls are whittled down to one, who wins a place at a summer football camp in Brazil.

Asked where he used to play when he was growing up, the 23-year-old said: “I was fortunate because at the back of my mum’s house there was a five-a-side tarmac pitch.

“There was a youth club next door so I’d just climb over the back fence. I used to love it.

“Then I went out on the streets and played there as well. When I was about 16, I got my ball taken off me by the police for playing in the street - which is pathetic really.”

He continued: “When I was younger, we used to play across a main road.

“There was a sign on the other side and you’d get five goes to see how many times you could hit it.

“Then there was another one where we’d have just one goal and there’d be about 10 of us.

“If you scored you were through to the next round, and last one to score was out.”

Asked how often he was last one out, Rooney replied: “Not very often!”

Also in the latest issue of Radio Times, film critic Barry Norman described Bruce Willis as a “total clown” for being annoyed after critics laughed at Armageddon.

He also said Pearl Harbor was the film he would make someone watch if he wanted them to suffer, saying it was “all fur coat and no knickers” with a “lousy script, bad performances, badly directed, just a B-movie and not a very good one”.

Norman was interviewed to celebrate 20 years of his film column in the magazine.

And best-selling author Henning Mankell confirmed to the magazine that he was working on another novel about Swedish detective Kurt Wallander.

The character is played in a BBC1 series by Kenneth Branagh, who said that, for actors, “a lot of risk-taking can only be done on television”.

Mankell said: “The secret is out and now I must write it.”