One down: seven more to go. For Wayne Rooney, and also for a fitful but increasingly dominant England team in this forgettable 5-0 Wembley win, this was a job passably well done. There has been plenty of talk this week about Rooney’s inexorable advance on one of the enduring marks in English football, Bobby Charlton’s England goals record. He scored once here, from a penalty, tried to claim a deflected own goal in the second half, and might have had a hat-trick but for some surprisingly fuzzy finishing after half-time, twice failing to beat Aldo Simoncini one-on-one.
Or maybe it wasn’t that surprising in the end. For all the customary anti-Rooney snark that seems to surround any England match now, it would perhaps have been more Rooney-ish not to have scored at all against San Marino. As it is seven of Rooney’s 42 international goals have now come against makeweights – Liechtenstein, Andorra and San Marino – the rest against middle-rankers, and 30 of them in competitive matches. Rooney may have been muted at times in tournament matches: but he hits the middle notes with unerring accuracy.
Here he took another small step towards Charlton’s 49-goal total and gave a performance that was so-so without needing to be any more on an occasion that carried all the pure sporting white heat of a slightly damp flannel. Before kick-off Wembley was, as expected, not so much electric as running on the last dregs of reserve battery power, disturbed only by the ludicrously dramatic musical buildup with which the Wembley public address once again assaulted the ears of the 50,000 or so people quietly sipping a pre-match cup of tea.
There was a reassuring rumble of excitement once a discordant Jazz-funeral-style God Save The Queen had been despatched, and a respectable roar for the announcement of Rooney’s name before kick-off. Like David Beckham before him Rooney splits England’s fans these days. Those in the stadium seem delighted to see him and are always politely reverent. Those watching beyond Wembley, presented with that familiar visage of major tournament disappointment too often seem appalled that England’s best goalscorer is on the pitch at all.
As the game kicked off in a cauldron of polite interest Rooney flitted only narrowly from his central role alongside Danny Welbeck as the game settled into a kind of sleepwalk towards the inevitable.
In the end there was a monkeys-with-typewriters element to England’s opening goal as after 23 minutes of attack-style football in the semi-vicinity of the San Marino goal the ball was finally processed into the net via Phil Jagielka’s header from a corner.
It took another 20 minutes for Rooney’s moment to arrive, as it always seemed likely to. As England continued to wallow vaguely around the San Marino penalty area Rooney himself was kung-fu barged to the ground by Luca Tosi. There was only ever one candidate to take the penalty. Simoncini dived the right way, but Rooney’s kick was too well hit, high to his left. And there it was: goal No42, putting Rooney two short of Jimmy Greaves (who only played 57 times), six off Gary Lineker and eight away from that outright record tally.
Rooney pointed to the skies and in a sense that was that. The only two really significant outcomes – an England win; Rooney scores a statistically significant goal – were in the bag with 43 minutes gone, although Roy Hodgson left Rooney on the pitch for the rest of the match in search of more.
If he does get to 50 goals – as he surely will – it would be nice to think there will be some genuine celebration of a fine achievement by a current England player in an era when such moments have been rare. But then, this is Rooney. This is England. And nobody, it seems, is ever really happy. The charges against him when it comes to goalscoring are that Rooney has become a hammer of the minnows, a trader in cheap glory, a home-track bully. And yet of Rooney’s 42 England goals just 12 have come in friendlies, compared to 26 out of 48 for Lineker and 22 of 49 for Charlton. Lineker, naturally, steams ahead when it comes to World Cups: his total of 10 represent an eighth of all England World Cup goals ever scored (Rooney isn’t alone in this: the all-time list reads: Lineker, then fresh air, then everyone else).
Instead the rump of Rooney’s goals have come in moderately awkward qualification matches, usually away from home, and with this in mind he deserves his room temperature San Marino penalty here. As a pure scorer the stats still suggest he is getting better rather than worse, always an additional plus point when it comes to passing a famous old sporting record (Kapil Dev, famously was said to have “surpassed” rather than broken the record for Test Match wickets, breasting the tape with his final gasp). Rooney now has 13 goals in his last two years with England, the most prolific 24 months of his international career.
Beyond that it is simply a part of Rooney’s burden in a middling team to be pilloried for not being great rather than celebrated for simply being good. He may be a functional, fixed-wheel- kind of striker now, with just a ghost of that old youthful grandeur. But he’s England’s functional fixed-wheel striker – and, if it comes, that record will be well-deserved.
