This could be a seminal summer for England's talisman who though missing for the first two games of the tournament, may be a trump card at Euro 2012
As the Premier League season dwindles towards an unusually incestuous twin-headed climax at the Etihad Stadium on Monday night, it is very nearly time to start looking beyond: to survey, in traditional fashion, the damage and begin the process of early-summer ramping-up that precedes any international tournament. To date, for England, Euro 2012 has lurked rather unhappily at season's end, expectation muted by recent tournament scars and the ongoing post-Capello shemozzle.
But the mists will soon clear and the green shoots of callow expectation emerge trembling into the light. In recent times this process has tended to revolve around the figure of Wayne Rooney. Dear old Wayne: gamely stumbling into view every other spring, toting with him his personalised brouhaha of club and country woes: burnt out, overburdened, carrying his head under his arm and destined to end his summer being either carried, ordered or – as against Germany two years ago – played off some foreign field.
This time around, though, there is something a little odd about Wayne. He looks … different. Un-jaded, uninjured, un-exhausted: Rooney is instead jarringly fresh, spring like in a tournament-year springtime for the first time since his own white Pelé-era international coming-out of Euro 2004. The fear of the jinx must always be confronted, and so I'm going to say it here. Nothing has gone wrong with Rooney. Yet. This is new. This is different. But what does it mean?
There are of course good reasons for Rooney's freshness. Manchester United have had an unusually light European season, easing the traditional end-of-season constipation of midweek mega-fixtures. Last year, from February to the end of May, Rooney played 24 games, including six Champions League matches, topped off with a final at Wembley. This season over the same period he will have played only 17 matches. Two years ago he arrived in South Africa diminished by a 56-game club season. This time around he will have played 10 games fewer.
And what a season it has been on a personal note. Robin van Persie may have swept the individual gongs, but Rooney has finished the stronger. He now has 36 goals in 43 matches and 16 in his past 14 spanning that mercifully thinned-out springtime schedule. More than this, he looks impish and unscarred. Rooney's temper is often a barometer of mental fatigue but, astonishingly, he hasn't been booked in the Premier League all season – although this will of course be entirely overshadowed by that wretched straight red against Montenegro last October.
Intriguingly enough – and Monday night at the Etihad aside – Rooney's biggest matches of the season are yet to come. Suspension served, he will be free to play for England against Ukraine in Donetsk on 19 June, a likely Group D decider against the host nation. This could well be followed – possibly, maybe, hopefully – by a quarter-final against Spain or Italy four days later. Before all of this Rooney won't have played a competitive game for five weeks. Fit and in form, he will be not just fresh, but unprecedentedly fresh, close even to being undercooked.
At the age of 26, perhaps this may even yet turn out to be a seminal summer for Rooney the England player. It has so far been a peculiar international career. Rooney hasn't scored or created a goal at a tournament for eight years. And yet his performance in three matches at Euro 2004 – when Everton's schedule allowed him four weeks in between competitive domestic and international games – still represents the best showing by any English player at any European Championship away from these shores. Aged 18, Rooney already had nine England goals. His next nine took more than four years. He has three in the past three years, including two in one match last September. And yet he still has 27 in total and, post-Michael Owen, has borne the weight of England's attack with little coherent support.
This is the thing with Rooney now: it is perhaps not outrageous to suggest that never before has England's best player been so obviously better than England's other players, and better by such a grand margin. The dimming of the lights on the self-propelling luminaries of the "golden generation" leaves him pretty much steering the ship alone as an England outfield player who can claim to be among the world's best.
Rooney is also an oddity in other ways, unusually fluid and tactically versatile in his position. The second striker is not a role in which the English generally excel – Peter Beardsley and Teddy Sheringham had their moments – but Rooney was sublime at times in that role under Fabio Capello. He has also shown since 2009 that he can play as a lone striker, a wonderful finisher with head and both feet, providing a rare combination of subtle movement and hard running.
If Rooney has yet to show this at a tournament since his move to Manchester United this looks like his best opportunity to spring a surprise. It is both unfashionable and also – let's face it – quite difficult to summon any kind of genuine optimism about England's prospects in June. But there is still the odd glimmer: Gary Cahill and John Terry have yet to lose a match in harness at Chelsea; Ashley Cole is back in form; Kyle Walker is the PFA young player of the year. There's a back four suddenly.
And beyond this it is, as ever, all about Rooney, albeit on this occasion a Rooney unburdened by routine expectation and also jarringly under-exhausted. For once England expects nothing at all. And Rooney, so often strung upon the gurney of jingoistic expectation, is currently romping about the place like a kitten. It is, at least, entirely different to what we've seen before. And for England, and England's best player, that might not be a bad place to start. Read More
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