Wayne Rooney eclipsed not only Arsenal but his teenage self with a virtuoso display at Old Trafford on Sunday
It was not just the two beautifully executed free-kicks and the exemplary penalty. Everything else about Wayne Rooney's performance against Arsenal on Sunday spoke of a player restored to the peak of his powers, looking ? perhaps more than at any time since his teenage years ? as though he could take a football and do anything with it that he wished.
This was the performance of a complete No10 in the classic mould, a fantasist and a finisher in one package, inspiring his colleagues with a flow of nimble-witted, technically flawless interventions. The match was not a quarter of an hour old and still goalless when he orchestrated a move, involving multiple exchanges between Anderson, Ashley Young, Danny Welbeck and himself, which looked like a high?spirited, anything-you-can-do pastiche of Arsenal's own intricate style. His new, slimmer silhouette seemed to be everywhere, at the heart of everything his side did. And this from a man who, quite recently, could not trap a bag of suet.
Two weeks short of a year ago Sir Alex Ferguson left Rooney out of Manchester United's squad for a trip to Goodison Park and nobody even bothered to pretend that he was injured. Ferguson claimed it was to spare the player the abuse of Everton fans still seething with resentment over his departure from the club that raised him. Mike Phelan, Ferguson's assistant, veered slightly off message by observing that "Wayne wasn't ready to play". Most of us peered through the smokescreen and concluded that United's manager was fed up with the way Rooney's life off the pitch was affecting his contribution on it.
The problem with his form went back to the spring, when he suffered an ankle injury during the first leg of a Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich, and played part of the second leg despite having needed to wear a surgical boot while travelling back from Germany, but there seemed to be deeper reasons for a slump that coincided with England's trip to the World Cup finals. Right at the end of a season in which he had scored 35 goals for club and country and had been elected footballer of the year by both his fellow professionals and the football writers, every one of his primary assets ? instinct, control and strength ? had drained away and the only thing he left South Africa with was the shirt of Thomas M�ller, the scorer of two of Germany's four goals.
Six games for his club and 11 for England without scoring were the measure of this natural goalscorer's decline, and even after he finally scored for both ? a penalty against West Ham on 28 August 2010 and a brutal shot from Glen Johnson's cross against Switzerland 10 days later ? there would be only one more goal to celebrate before the end of the year.
But there were signs that he was perking up when he had a hand in all four goals against Bulgaria at Wembley four days before the meeting with the Swiss, and the arrival of Javier Hern�ndez as a strike partner at Old Trafford seemed to invigorate him. As the new year began he picked up pace, ending the season with 17 goals.
Already this year he has five goals in four games, and Fabio Capello, looking ahead to the trip to Bulgaria this week, would be justified in feeling that England have a brand-new player to set the tone for the remainder of the Euro 2012 qualifying campaign, rather than the sad figure, out of shape physically and mentally, who blundered through all four matches in South Africa, unable even to get out of his own way.
Rooney scored his 150th, 151st and 152nd goals for Manchester United on Sunday, at the start of his eighth season with the club. Yet he still has not scored for England in the finals of a major competition since 21 June 2004, when he bagged a pair against Croatia in Lisbon during the European Championship, having used the tournament as a platform to announce his arrival on the world stage, at the age of 18. If he can hold his present form until next summer, that will change.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/aug/29/wayne-rooney-manchester-united-england
Nicholas Drazenovic Chris Drury Brandon Dubinsky Matt Duchene
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