Ushering in the End of the Wayne Rooney Era

Wayne Rooney is a footballer who plays for Manchester United and England. He's also not a footballer at all: often he instead looks like a McCain's Potato Shape that got above its station and ended up playing in the #10 role instead of being fed as roughage to a horse. Wayne Rooney as a footballer in recent years has transcended every accepted idea about the game: that the players need to be prime-condition athletes (How will Wayne Rooney go post-retirement: Southall or Gascoigne? The wait to find out is truly thrilling); that players have to have a defined position that they operate in, and that their managers know where to play them, and that they don't huff around the pitch like trains, chasing the ball like a frustrated toddler crossed with a particularly clumsy bull, hoping vaguely that when they do finally get their foot on it they are more-or-less in the position of a striker; and Rooney even plays with the concept of compensation in football, the lofty idea that a man being paid £300,000-a-week might actually do anything, that he might have a final product and scores goals – Rooney transcends the final product, transcends goals. He is slowly blunting from a knife-sharp one-man attacking wunderkind into a sort of totem to adidas and Nike, a statue in a tracksuit that occasionally shouts 'FUCK OFF' directly at a referee. Rooney is such a modern player because he doesn't really play: he just collects the money, telegraphs a few grunted scousisms into a hi-def, hi-production value summer advert, spanks a ball directly into the crowd, then hobbles off on the 86th minute and hands the captain's armband off to someone else. The role of Wayne Rooney could have been played by a very agitated hologram for years, and we wouldn't really know it. Wayne Rooney is more the idea of a footballer, now, the ghostly memory of what was, what could have been, suddenly wiped from the frame, and in its stead, large and red, is a 30-year-old man who's really sad and knackered.

Interesting, then, that Wayne Rooney has announced his international retirement. Not his immediate international retirement, of course: that would be too easy, too obvious, make sense. Instead, in the topsy-turvy world of Wayne 'Wazzaroon' Rooney, he has announced that the World Cup in Russia will be his last tournament for England. The World Cup that is in two years' time. That England haven't even qualified for yet. When he will be 32.

"Realistically I know myself that Russia will be my last opportunity to do anything with England," he said yesterday. "Hopefully I can end my time with England on a high. I said before the Euros I enjoyed playing in this team, and that's the case still. There were some questions about whether I should stop playing, but I am looking forward to getting back on the pitch. My mind is made up … Russia will be my last tournament."

For any other footballer, announcing your not-even-imminent retirement from international tournament football would be seen as high temerity, some sort of fantastical idea of your own worth to the team and country, a flash-forward of your own form and importance to the team, the idea that nothing will go wrong over the next two years that can prevent you from going to Russia. But this is Wayne Rooney, and you feel like only death can stop him being picked for the English national team. That we could feasibly flash forward to the year 2050, and Wayne Rooney – huge and pained and tottering around on crutches, the dregs of Wayne Rooney, the end – will still be forced to suit up and sit on the bench, in case England need someone to come on and "add that touch of class". Wayne Rooney, honking on an oxygen mask and then immediately missing a penalty. Wayne Rooney, his sixth round of hair plugs just bloodily refusing to take, standing on a Portuguese defender's bollocks. Wayne Rooney holding a Lucozade Sports bottle up to his stoma and squeezing before getting the England manager sacked for not picking him.

This continued faith with Wayne Rooney (that will never end until he dies) is because we are constantly searching to try and rediscover The Old Wayne Rooney. Rooney's form can be roughly broken down into three categories: the current form he is in, that start-of-the-season, actually-good-for-his-team form, where he starts the first four games of the year all gangbusters, two assists and a goal, on paper a world-class player; and then the second run of form, which I am pencilling in for mid-September, which is just 'extremely angry face/extremely listless body', where Rooney throws his arms up and down in great balletic swoops and tilts his head to the sky and exhales every time he fails to trap a ball, or doesn't get passed to because he's in the wrong position, or shoots a few feet wide of the post; then there's the third run of form, the worst one, the one that offers hope, a brief, rare flash of something Other, that brilliance that Wayne Rooney was so capable of from the age of 16 to 22, and then sort of was but mainly wasn't until he was about 27, and now he just shuffles around the pitch like a lost removal man, very very very occasionally pinging in an immaculate, perfect, other worldly free kick but mainly just shouting so loudly under a floodlight that you can see the flecks of his spit illuminated in the cold night air.

So we must all begrudgingly admit that we are nearing the end of the Wayne Rooney era (I mean not anytime soon, but: we are vaguely nearing the end of the Wayne Rooney era). And in a way, this is the most fitting way to start the long goodbye: with a quiet announcement based on the assumption of England's success in a qualifying campaign; with a new England manager showing yet more faith in him and keeping Rooney on as captain; with his forehead slowly smoothing and concaving in that central bit between the eyes and his hairline where it really looks like he's had a site-specific facelift. Ah, Wayne Rooney: no other England player in history could announce his retirement in such a blasé, distant way and get away with it, but we let him, because he once was really really good. Let's just enjoy the next two years of him chuntering around and looking knackered and leading England to an ignominious first-round exit for what it is: the last fading sparks of a dying icon, the likes of which we'll never see again.

@joelgolby

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