It
has all seemed so joyless at times, with so many long, difficult
periods when it has seemed like a black drape could be placed over the
entire team it might surprise you to learn that when Gareth Southgate
took his seat in the Stadion Stozice and set out his reasons for
dropping Wayne Rooney it was seven years to the day since England had
lost a qualifying fixture.
It can seem almost a trick of the mind to remind yourself that England
are unbeaten in all qualifiers since a 2009 defeat in Ukraine when Rob
Green was sent off and, losing 1-0, Fabio Capello brought on Carlton
Cole to try to conjure up a late equaliser.
Of 31 games, 24 have been won and England have a goal difference of
plus 73. Anyone unfamiliar with the England tragicomedy would look at
that record and never know this is a team that appears to be locked in a
permanent battle for credibility.
In truth it has been a grey team occupying a grey place for longer
than most people would probably care to remember, and especially in the
years since Rooney’s body started to fail him, the touch stopped being
quite so certain, and a footballer who once always backed himself in any
situation gave up taking on opponents. The young Rooney was like a
force of nature. “He’s incredible,” Sven Goran Eriksson said at Euro
2004. “I don’t remember anyone making such an impression on a tournament since Pelé in 1958.”
English football loved the assassin‑faced baby but the days have
passed since he made us quicken our step en route to wherever he was
playing. What we are left with now is a fading old pro, approaching his
31st birthday, after starting at the age of 16 and never going through a
season without playing at least 42 games.
That is why Southgate has done the sensible thing, removing Rooney,
and we should probably avoid calling it courageous, or bottle, or any of
the other words that have been applied so far. This is what it is:
overdue. It cannot have been easy for Southgate to break the news but
Rooney’s deterioration has not just been accelerating since the start of
the season. There are plenty of us who have been suggesting for the
past year or so that it was time to cut him free, and the only issue
really for debate is why Sam Allardyce, and especially Roy Hodgson,
always seemed so in thrall of the Manchester United player.
The mind goes back to an audience with Hodgson just before Euro 2016,
sitting around a table at L’Escargot in Soho, when the England manager
challenged the football writers in his company to jot down their
starting lineups for the tournament. Six chose Rooney, nine left him
out. It was not an exact science, admittedly, but it was still probably a
reasonable reflection of public opinion. Hodgson smiled thinly, folded
up the pieces of paper and passed them to a press officer, saying we
would look back at the end of the tournament to see who was right.
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