In the end, it had to be Wayne. On a turgid, oddly sleepy afternoon England produced a performance that seemed in the opening hour to leave most of the team in danger of being ejected by stewards for flouting Wembley’s “no persistent standing” rules. With 56 minutes gone they even contrived to go behind to Jordan Henderson’s own goal, against the run of play for Slovenia but not undeserved.
At which point: enter Wayne Rooney, on the occasion of his 100th cap.
Within a minute of the restart England’s captain had brought Wembley to its feet, finally, at a stage in the match when most of the home crowd appeared to be burrowing out under their seats towards Dollis Hill and freedom.
It was a lovely moment of incision. Picking up the ball from Jack Wilshere as England finally crunched up out of first gear, Rooney drove into the penalty area, beat two players with a combination of neat footwork and muscle and fell as his ankle was tapped.
Only one man was going to take the penalty. Rooney buried it, via Samir Handanovic’s left hand, to score his 44th goal for England. His team had found their belated spark and within 10 minutes of going behind they were ahead, Danny Welbeck bobbling in the second from close range after some fine work by Adam Lallana, and then slotting in a third after neat play by Raheem Sterling and Kieran Gibbs. In the end it was, in its own uncomfortable way, a perfect 100-cap cameo for Rooney: king of the qualifiers and a player who has so often been party to moments of uplift and incision in otherwise rather dreary circumstances.
Before kick-off Rooney was politely clapped by the crowd as, accompanied by his children Kai and Klay, he received his commemorative golden centurion’s cap, entombed within an unwieldy perspex box. The presentation was made by Sir Bobby Charlton, on whose goalscoring records Rooney is currently mounting a pincer offensive.
Charlton’s own 100th cap came in the same stadium against Northern Ireland 44 years ago. Although presumably any regrets Sir Bobby may have felt here at the absence of a commemorative perspex box on that occasion will have been soothed a little by the fact England were, at the time, still champions of the world.
As England made a horribly slow start against a compact Slovenia, and Wembley, as it does now, settled into a kind of murmuring somnolence, Rooney was at the heart of what bright moments there were in the opening 20 minutes, once helping the purposeful Nathaniel Clyne set up Raheem Sterling for a shot.
For a while after that England seemed to be luring their opponents to sleep, presumably in order to strike via one of several long passes launched down the middle in search of Rooney by the centre-backs. This ploy was talked up during the week as a variation, a Mourinho-style shock tactic. As a variation it does, however, require something else to be happening in between.
Instead there was a slightly eerie stasis to the home team’s movement and passing as the opening act of Wayne’s big day ended with England having produced one of the more ennui-inducing halves of competitive football in recent memory – albeit even in this there is perhaps a reminder of Rooney’s consistent value across those 100 caps.
There have been plenty of suggestions over the past couple of years that the captain is the problem with England, that his insistence on playing as England’s hustle-bustle No10 has gummed up the wheels where a fresher player might have made England sing. Here he played ahead of Sterling in the first half with little obvious benefit, and unsurprisingly too.
One man does not make or un-make a nation of historically stodgy footballers even if this has, too often, been Rooney’s lot, hailed, always unreasonably, as both the poison and the cure.
One hundred caps down the line he may not be the greatest Wayne Rooney he could have been, but he is unarguably the Wayne Rooney we have got, a player of craft and stamina whose burden it is, in a middling team, to be pilloried for not being great rather than celebrated for being good.
From a certain angle Rooney is in many ways the perfect England footballer, his entire England career played out against a tableau of confused expectations, creditable achievement too often downplayed in favour of dreams of something grander, pursued always by his own personalised parallel Wayne: the ghost Wayne who never grew up but remained a fearless teenager for ever.
By now Rooney has perhaps come full circle, the raggedly brilliant teenager evolved into a room temperature stalwart who delivers on the medium-sized stage with brilliant regularity.
England did at last look fluid and promisingly pacey in the last 20 minutes here. Fittingly, it was Rooney who gave them an overdue spark.
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