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.
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