I’VE been at the Echo for over 13 years now, and when I was first appointed, I arrived with one request. Could I have some time off to stick to a pre-arranged plan to watch England at Euro 2004 in Portugal with a group of mates?

Thankfully, the answer was yes. More than a decade on, and the tournament is still my favourite footballing memory. Admittedly, that’s partly because the sun shone every day and I drank far too many bottles of Superbock. But it’s also because of Wayne Rooney.

If you were there in Portugal, you’ll know what I mean. For a couple of halcyon days, Rooney was the epicentre of the footballing world, and with him in the team, it felt like anything and everything was possible.

He scored twice against Switzerland as England blitzed to a three-goal win. Then four days later, he scored two goals again as Sven-Goran Eriksson’s side thrashed Croatia 4-2 with a display that remains the high watermark in terms of England performances at a major tournament since Euro 96.

Here was a young English striker, rampaging through opposition defences as if they were not there. Every time you picked up a Portuguese newspaper, he was on the back page. Every time you walked into a bar or restaurant, fans from other countries wanted to find out where this ebullient 18-year-old had come from. Eriksson likened him to a young Pele. In years to come, the comment would become a millstone around Rooney’s neck. At the time, amid the excitement of an England side actually doing itself justice on the international stage, it felt spot on.

Of course we all know what happened next. Rooney broke a metatarsal in the quarter-final against Portugal, England lost on penalties, and the striker spent the next decade trying and failing to live up to the sky-high expectations that were piled onto his shoulders at the start of his career.

Now that career, in international terms at least, is at an end. Rooney retires as England’s all-time leading goalscorer, having broken Sir Bobby Charlton’s record at Wembley in 2015. He won 119 caps, more than any other outfield player and only six behind Peter Shilton, who tops the all-time list. Yet for every person queuing up to laud Rooney after he announced his departure from the international stage on Wednesday, there was another desperate to do him down.

Not good enough in the matches that really count. A flat-track bully, only capable of scoring against limited opposition. A hot-head, whose lack of discipline cost England on a number of high-profile occasions. A working-class oik who should never have been handed the captain’s armband.

Disparaging Rooney has become a national pastime, but it is grossly unfair. Often the criticism comes from a misguided assessment of what he should have been capable of, and far too regularly, it strays into a character assassination of a kid who came from nothing and occasionally struggled to come to terms with the profile and standing he had assumed.

In footballing terms, it is true that Rooney never quite scaled the heights many had envisaged, but then how many players have during his career? It doesn’t help that he emerged at the same time at Cristiano Ronaldo, both in the red of Manchester United and on the international stage, but to denigrate Rooney because he has not gone to achieve as much as his former team-mate is like berating Paul McCartney because he was never quite John Lennon.

Rooney never really did it at a major tournament after 2004, but the same can be said of each and every England player since Paul Gascoigne at Italia 90. He was part of a so-called ‘golden generation’ that ultimately achieved nothing, but it seems unfair that he carries the can for that failure when plenty of others were underperforming just as regularly.

While the majority of his team-mates drifted out of the international game – either through choice or deselection – Rooney ploughed on, powering England through six different qualifying campaigns, never ducking out of a friendly or unglamorous trip.

It was that commitment that really shone through, and for all that he might have muttered about the England fans as he trudged off the field in Cape Town after a desperate World Cup draw with Algeria in 2010, he was the player the travelling faithful were always keen to serenade during a far-flung trip to Sofia or Skopje.

He captained his country with distinction, and while he was occasionally guilty of trying to be too many things at once, tearing here, there and everywhere on the pitch rather than filling one position, an over-zealous desperation to succeed is hardly the most heinous of crimes.

To a man, his team-mates speak glowingly of his contribution to the England cause, and a succession of England managers were quick to pin their faith on him. He repaid that faith with goals, 53 of them from the first, as a 17-year-old against Macedonia, to the last, which came from the penalty-spot in last summer’s ill-fated European Championships defeat to Iceland.

In time, he will rightly be remembered as one of England’s all-time greats. He didn’t lift the World Cup, and he didn’t become the World Player of the Year. He made England fans smile though, and spent more than a decade straining every sinew for his country. And if nothing else, we’ll always have Coimbra and Lisbon to remember him by.


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THIS weekend should provide the highlight of 2017’s cricketing calendar in this part of the world. England are hosting the legendary West Indies at Headingley in their penultimate Test outing before the start of the Ashes. The only problem is that the West Indies aren’t so legendary any more.

Last week’s innings-and-209-run win in the first Test at Edgbaston illustrated the gaping chasm that now separates England from their opponents. It is even wider than the one that enabled the West Indies to claim their fabled ‘Blackwash’ in the 1980s.

There are explanations for the West Indies’ demise that are specific to the politics of cricket in the Caribbean. There are also much wider factors at work, casting a shadow over the long-term future of Test cricket in a world increasingly dominated by the IPL and the advent of the itinerant Twenty20 specialist.

However you want to couch it though, the sight of a callow West Indies side meekly surrendering without even the semblance of a fight is one of the sorriest in sport. I will be at Headingley this weekend, but I will be watching through my fingers.