After another slow-burn but still effective night as England’s captain and enduring razor edge, Wayne Rooney’s next landmark – at a stage when these are starting to come around quite regularly – is a numerical one. England’s 1-0 defeat of Estonia in Tallinn was also Rooney’s 99th cap, 11 years on from his debut against Australia at Upton Park. The 100th should arrive in England’s qualifier against Slovenia at Wembley in November, although if Rooney has any slight regrets it is that he won’t – all being well – get to pass the landmark against Scotland in the friendly that follows three days later.
“It would have been great to get it against Scotland at Celtic Park,” said Rooney, whose goal on Sunday had given England a third straight qualifying win. “But it’s a great honour to get a hundred caps for England and I’ll be very excited and looking forward to that game.”
If there is something a little sentimental about granting such emotional weight to a friendly against England’s first ever international opponents then this is perhaps also a measure of Rooney’s old-school reverence for playing for his country. In a sense, simply being able to stick it out over a gruelling decade – maintaining his own brilliantly reliable standards of finishing even as the youthful speed and explosiveness fade – is achievement enough. Of his England team-mates at Upton Park in 2003, four ended up retiring from international football before their club days were out, and England’s scorer that day, Francis Jeffers is a cautionary tale of inflated early expectations in his own right.
Asked about his fellow 100-cap players of recent years Rooney said it was “a fantastic achievement to play for your country for so long”.
“Obviously the last few years getting to 70, 80 you think about it,” he said. “Hopefully it’s going to happen and there can be a few more.”
Seven goals short of Bobby Charlton’s England record, Rooney’s goalscoring form also remains in boisterous good health. As captain and most visible star player he remains a kind of social media piñata for some disenfranchised England fans, but the fact remains Rooney has still mustered five goals, three assists and more than 50 shots at goal in his past 10 games. It is a tangible influence too: in five of the last seven matches where England have scored, Rooney has either made or scored the first goal, although this includes, a little charitably, his part in the opener against the Swiss in Basel, simply because the link-up play with Danny Welbeck and Raheem Sterling, whose cross was the final pass, was so exhilarating.
If England’s opponents in that time have been almost uniformly poor, Rooney as captain is eager to point to a sense of improvement in the team as a whole. “We know we’ve got quality in the team and the pleasing thing since the World Cup is the lads are willing to learn and take information in. People are doing a lot of work on the small details making sure we get them right and the lads are really bang into it. It’s great to see and it’s great to be a part of.”
