Daniel Taylor 

Wayne Rooney may be burning out but deserves more acclaim for records

He can become England’s leading goalscorer in San Marino and conceivably beat Bobby Charlton’s Manchester United mark this season, but his achievements are insufficiently heralded
  
  

Wayne Rooney
Wayne Rooney celebrates completing his hat-trick for Manchester United against Club Brugge, which leaves him 16 short of Bobby Charlton’s club record 249. Photograph: VI-Images/VI-Images via Getty Images

In the next week, it is not a wild leap of logic to imagine Wayne Rooney will move alongside Sir Bobby Charlton as England’s highest scorer, or maybe even make the honour exclusively his own. Rooney needs one to pull level with Charlton and two to go ahead with a half-century of goals, and San Marino are obliging opponents for a man with a record to chase. Charlton has already been interviewed for the Football Association’s eulogies. His tribute is ready to go and the button will be pressed as soon as, presumably, Rooney helps himself against a team featuring the manager of a fitness centre, an olive oil maker and a left‑sided midfielder who earns his living selling lampshades.

After that, Rooney has a couple of other personal targets that are within reach. That was some calling card he left in Bruges in midweek to move to 233 goals for Manchester United. Denis Law’s total of 237 will be next and if Rooney is to have the kind of season that Louis van Gaal envisages, and desperately needs, it could conceivably end with the striker overtaking Charlton’s 249-goal mark. Add that to his haul of achievement – five Premier League titles, the Champions League, two League Cups and enough individual awards to fill a fleet of pantechnicons – and whatever you may think about his declining powers, or however much he intermittently disappoints us, the day will surely come when the majority of people have to accept that this constitutes authentic greatness.

Not everyone, plainly. Rooney polarises opinion like few others and already it is easy to imagine the disdain that will accompany the fact the record is likely to come at a stadium where the last European Championship qualifier attracted a crowd of 759 and there are several rows of trees, rather than stands, behind both goals, with nothing to stop people from standing among the forestry for a free view.

San Marino’s leap from bottom place, 207th, in Fifa’s world rankings to 192nd on the back of a 0-0 draw against Estonia last November, is the equivalent of a golden age for a team whose real place within the sport was probably best described by Ian Archer’s commentary when Scotland were playing there in 1993. “We’ve been playing an hour,” Archer told BBC Radio Scotland’s listeners, “and it’s just occurred to me we’re drawing 0-0 with a mountain-top.” The football history of San Marino reads: one win, four draws, 125 defeats, 17 goals scored and 530 conceded. Rooney has scored more times against this Saturday’s opponents, four, than against any other nation and, whatever the strength of Charlton’s paean, there will inevitably be those who feel the achievement is diminished when the player is topping up his figures against a team with the grand total of three points out of a possible 348 in qualifying competitions.

Jimmy Greaves made that point last October when he said: “The quality of opposition England are up against today is nothing like it used to be.” In total, 18 of Rooney’s goals – more than a third of his tally – have come against seven of the teams who are generally found by scrolling towards the last few pages of Fifa’s rankings. There were three against Kazakhstan and two against each of Andorra, Estonia, Iceland and Belarus. Another came against Liechtenstein, the only team to play San Marino and lose, and he also has one against Macedonia and Lithuania. If we were to judge Rooney’s England career as a whole there was certainly something revealing about his response recently when he was asked to nominate his favourite three goals.

Rooney’s first choice was the one he scored against Macedonia in September 2003 to become England’s youngest ever scorer, at the age of 17 years and 317 days. The other two were from Euro 2004, against Switzerland and Croatia, back in the days when Rooney’s precocious ability to surge past opponents, slaloming through defences with those raw, thrilling qualities, caused the kind of apprehension among opposition defences that Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi now inspire.

In other words, none of Rooney’s selections have been from the last 11 years and all go back to his first 18 months in the England setup, in the days when he seemed to hold the keys to the football universe and Sven‑Goran Eriksson would try to play down the hype while simultaneously predicting this would be England’s Pelé. It was the power of his running, the way he would immediately drive forwards, no matter who was in his way, and the manner in which he backed himself every time. More fool us, perhaps, but I can distinctly remember at the time that those of us in Eriksson’s company did not think his prediction to be so outlandish as it maybe sounds now. Rooney was wonderful.

As it has turned out, the assassin-faced baby has not become the player English football expected him to be. He stopped taking on opponents a long while back. The snap left his legs. His pace and touch became heavier. The scoring bursts have become interspersed with listless spells when it feels misplaced to compare him with the real titans of his sport and, in the worst moments, it does appear that all the warnings came true and, approaching 30, he is suffering the sapping effects of what is known in football as burnout.

Other parts of his game – his football intelligence, his temperament and one-on-one finishing – have advanced but the electricity, that frisson of excitement that used to exist every time he had the ball, simply isn’t there any more and it isn’t coming back. “You can only do what your legs do,” as Bobby Moore once said. Rooney, in turn, has stopped being the player who made you quicken your step on the walk to the ground. He can be caught, overtaken, restrained. There is no point dressing it up: he disappoints more than he thrills these days.

But let’s cut him some slack. Rooney is on the verge of a scoring feat that will help to distinguish whether he is remembered as a football great or merely a great footballer. There is a difference and a player who finishes his career as the leading scorer for England and Manchester United is entitled to think he has done enough to be remembered in the highest bracket.

Perhaps it is ungrateful to have expected more and maybe, in time, nostalgia will be the file to smooth away the rough edges and he will be remembered with more affection than he regularly encounters now. Indeed, an argument could be made – and it would be an argument – that a statue should eventually go up of him outside Old Trafford given there is already one of Charlton, Best and Law on Sir Matt Busby Way. The suggestion, one imagines, would leave many United supporters in a froth of moral indignation but, in terms of black‑and‑white achievement, Rooney is on course to surpass all three members of the holy trinity. Yes, he did try to desert the club a couple of times, with previous dalliances with Manchester City and Chelsea, but if such matters were judged on behaviour and professional standards would Best, as fondly as he is remembered, have been immortalised in bronze?

For now, let’s just say Rooney deserves the acclaim that will come his way assuming he avoids what happened to Gary Lineker when he was in a similar position, one behind Charlton, only to suffer what a golfer would call the yips, most notably with the penalty he harmlessly plopped into the arms of Brazil’s goalkeeper, Carlos, at the old Wembley.

San Marino are a different kind of opponent entirely but if that is to be used against Rooney let’s not forget either that Charlton’s total included five goals in two games against Luxembourg and the hat‑trick he scored in 1959 against the USA. For Rooney, there have been goals against Argentina, Holland and, on two separate occasions, Brazil, including one particularly sumptuous strike on the day they reopened the Maracaña when, for this observer, the lingering memory was of how the Rio de Janeiro crowd greeted him with more enthusiasm than they could muster for any of their own players, bar Neymar.

It is just a shame, perhaps, that Rooney has reached this point where it still isn’t straightforward knowing how to think of one of the sport’s history-makers, and that it has left us in the very strange position where his performance, crazy as it sounds, can inspire both awe and disappointment.

Everton’s Stones stand laudable but it’s not so simple

Everton’s impressive refusal to crumple in the face of persistent bidding from Chelsea for John Stones bucks the trend of the top four getting their way and, for those of us who were sceptical initially about their prospects of keeping him, it is only fair to say Roberto Martínez and his chairman, Bill Kenwright, should be congratulated for reminding everyone they are a big club in their own right.

Tottenham Hotspur have encountered the same kind of opposition from West Bromwich Albion with Saido Berahino and, in both cases, the late tactic of the player submitting a transfer request has not worked. Equally, Southampton appear to be genuine when they say Sadio Mané will not be transferred to Manchester United and, for the first time in a while, there is the sense that it is the clubs, not the players, who are in control.

All the same, it was rich of Martínez to complain about the way that people in football are willing to break contracts to move up the ladder when another club, with better pay and opportunities, come calling. “What we need to do is give more value to contracts,” the Everton manager said. “We need to bring more seriousness to being part of a football club and to making sure that contracts are important.”

In an ideal world, yes. Let’s not forget, however, that Martínez once left his job at Swansea City, then in the Championship, to join Wigan Athletic in the Premier League, having previously stated the only way he would leave was if he were “forced out”. Or, indeed, that when he was at Wigan he had a year of his contract left when Everton made their approach. “Roberto wanted permission to move,” Dave Whelan, the chairman at the time, said. “So I’ve given that.”

Martínez’s double standards have been mentioned here before when he accused Chelsea of deliberately trying to unsettle Stones even though his own club have previous – in the form of a £45,000 fine from the Premier League – for tapping-up of a much more blatant variety, having sneaked another young English centre-half, Jamaal Lascelles, up to Merseyside and given him a full tour of the club, when he was under contract at Nottingham Forest.

The last few weeks have been a show of strength from Everton but, if Martínez is so adamant that footballers should place more value in their contracts, is he saying that he and Kenwright will no longer try to sign players, like Stones was at Barnsley, who are affiliated to other clubs?

 

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