ROONEY IS DOOMED

Last updated : 10 October 2006 By Ed

James Lawton piles more unnecessary pressure on Wayne Rooney in the Independent.

As if Paul Gascoigne, the tragic Gazza, has any heartbreak to spare, he bestows what must be the last remnants of it on Wayne Rooney. This makes the worry first broached here two weeks ago official.

The wunderkind is in some kind of trouble because if Gazza's chief current regret is indeed that he wasn't on the England bench to give Rooney a "cuddle" when he was hauled off the field at Old Trafford at the weekend, we have to accept that we are talking here about rather more than a mere fleeting slippage of form.

The big question now - and sadly it is probably true that no former professional footballer on earth is so painfully ill-equipped as Gascoigne to provide the answer - concerns the nature of Rooney's problem.

If it is purely football-related, and maybe inevitably we are now hearing the first whispers of doubt about this, it is certainly not easy to understand the decision of the England coach, Steve McClaren, to withdraw Rooney with 15 minutes to go against Macedonia.

At every level of the game, there is no question about the circumstance a pro most hates. It is to be replaced when the action is unresolved. Rooney's face on Saturday was a picture of frustration and anger when he was forced to surrender his place to Jermain Defoe, but then such a deep-set expression has been in place for some time. McClaren had said that he was confident Rooney was about to explode, but the conviction had a short shelf-life indeed... just 75 minutes. It was replaced by confirmation that what we had was something more than the blip so airily designated by some of Rooney's senior team-mates.

The player's apparent misery inspired McClaren to wrap his arm around the 20-year-old in training last week and tell him to "go out and enjoy himself". Gazza's intervention as a football agony aunt yesterday carried the headline: "Get the cheeky grin back, son."

Yes, the fear may be excessive, even disordered. Rooney may get the break here tomorrow against Croatia that in one surge of blood can banish a thousand doubts and quite as many demons. It would be entirely appropriate because it was of course against the Croats that Rooney gave us one dramatic measure of his brilliance in the European Championship group game in Lisbon two years ago, when on the ground where George Best gave undying evidence of his genius for Manchester United against Benfica, he destroyed all will to resist the range and the bite of his game.

We know better now, and maybe we should have suspected it even as the first tides of celebrity rolled in. There was a conviction then that appears more than a little naïve now. It was that Rooney was quite unlike Best and Gascoigne. He was more focused, more immersed in the challenge of football.

Now his face suggests that playing football is just another torment, an impression that certainly brought more than a little touch of poignancy to Gazza's debut as a football adviser this week.

Said Gascoigne: "Football was my escape. Whatever troubles I was experiencing, once I got out there with a ball at my feet the smile soon returned. Nobody could hurt me out there. I could express myself and I felt safe and happy."

Gazza's conclusion is: "Wayne doesn't look happy and I just want to see him smiling again, looking like he is enjoying himself again. So my advice would be, 'get your head up, the form will come'."

The hope, maybe even the prayer, is that Rooney is indeed a sturdier figure. Here, certainly, it is something that dwarfs the meaning of a single match. It is, after all, about rather more than the course of sporting genius. It concerns the life of a brilliant but deeply troubled young man.