Rooney and Gerrard open Manchester city centre bar

It’s a remarkable transformation.

The bar and nightclub, Fridays, at the lower end of Oldham Street has become the latest outpost of glamorous Wags.

And it’s called Wags too. Or rather, to give its rather grandiose title, Wags to Riches. This is the first of two to be rolled out to local fans in Manchester, Liverpool, Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore and Mars.

The name is of course completely appropriate.

Ever since Manchester United star Wayne Rooney and Liverpool star Steven Gerrard decided to go into business together, they’ve made it clear they wanted to open a bar. The latter, in particularly, has loads of very recent bar experience. Behind bars experience too.

We were pleasantly surprised on our visit.

I went with Victoria Beckham, my good friend and fellow stamp-collector, thinking that she would give me real insight into the venue’s potential for success.

We found the decor was the right side of obtrusiveness mixed with the downright annoying to produce a true premiership result. First up there were lots of tasteful mirrors everywhere, including on the tops of the tables for guests to make sure their make-up is overstated. Then there are the twenty flat screen TVs with replays of famous footballers having communal showers and scoring - sometimes even on the football pitch.

The toilets, both male and female, offer a range of beauty products including make-up, emollients, ointments, lubricants and potted plants. Victoria was particularly taken with the St Tropez spray tan and came back from the loos looking a vision of stupidity.

The menu – entitled Wags and Friends - is fairly simple, composed of various ‘matinee’ salads for the afternoon and ‘soir’ salads for the evening. And some salads for breakfast. There are a number of bigger dishes available including salad. Sides are salad.

There was only one hot dish, the Alex Curran hotpot (£17,000). This was beautifully presented but turned out to be completely empty. Victoria ordered the Supermodel Salad (£47) without the lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber or food.

For dessert we shared a Cheryl Cole charity jelly (£13.50) which comes in the shape of Mount Kilmanjaro. We found the whole thing a little sweet and rather disturbingly it kept breaking into uncontrollable sobs and telling people it loved them.

The Colleen (£1.50 at Asda George) comes in the shape of a oven with a bun inside.

Only sparkling water is available and is called Cristal Champagne. There are a number of classic and sophisticated cocktails on offer such as Sex on a Beach and Slippery Nipple. The boys have created a couple of signature drinks. Rooney’s is the How Long? which has nineteen indifferent years (surely flavours, ED?) and dies away in another fruitless burst of blame. Gerrard has mixed a One Four, which is one part Victory Gin and four parts Angostura bitters.

Victoria and I spent some quality time naked in the Games Room. This contains a Rooney Punch Bag - a corner flag. Sir Alex Ferguson was in there as well leading a gum chewing competition with Sam Alladyce.

There are one or two surprises. The main one is that Cristiano Ronaldo has been refused admission. “We wouldn’t want the place to turn into a big dive,” Rooney told us.

All in all we had a great time at Wags, but decided to finish off the night in Mother Macs pub just down the road in Back Piccadilly. Victoria wanted to talk about James Prescott Joule’s First Law of Thermodynamics, clever girl, but I just wanted to talk about the beauty of life.

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Venues are rated against the best examples of their kind: fine dining against the best fine dining, cafes against the best cafes. Following on from this the scores represent: 1-5 saw your leg off and eat it, 6-9 get a DVD, 10-11 if you must, 12-13 if you’re passing,14-15 worth a trip,16-17 very good, 17-18 exceptional, 19 pure quality, 20 perfect. More than 20: Gordo gets carried away