An innate energy and enthusiasm have helped the forward adapt to become several different players during a career that has refused to waste away

Friday 12 June 2015

The England football team are tired. Not just in the existential sense, as in filled with worldly ennui, drained of purpose, consumed by Weltschmerz. Or even in the sense of recherche, outmoded, like last Spring’s pastel jumpsuit. England are, it turns out, simply tired. According to sources close to the fatigued aces there has been an inappropriate degree of intensity to the team’s post-season training ahead of Sunday’s qualifier, Roy Hodgson seizing his moment with furious trapped zeal, like a minor uncle at a family wedding leaping up and trotting out his own doggedly interminable speech just as everyone else has begun filing out into the disco.

The most obvious response to England’s tiredness is, well, of course. All elite sports people, blessed with that capricious gift of talent, brains and spirit, should be tired. Anyone in any field with youth, talent and opportunity should be tired. If you’re not tired, you’re not doing it right. Exhaust yourself while you still have energy that can be exhausted. Choose tiredness, young, beautiful, healthy people. And before tiredness, as it most assuredly will, chooses you.

Except, of course, it is more likely that rather than tired England’s players are simply bored. Boredom has been a feature of the national team for some time as at successive tournaments England haven’t so much failed to outscore and outplay their opponents as simply keeled over with pachydermic tedium, always pushing against the flow, exhausted by the sheer soul‑sucking trial of being themselves.

Working out What The Problem Is With English Football is of course an ingrained national pastime. But at some point perhaps the debate will settle on the mental rather than technical, the notion that what English football suffers from above all is a lack of intellectual curiosity, a failure to adapt and learn, hemmed in by coaching structures that are still geared to rote-learning, to telling players where to stand, where to run, rather than how to think, how to manage themselves, to solve and react within the matrix of the match itself.

These ideas – boredom, stasis, entropy – came to mind while reading Michael Owen’s thoughts earlier this week about Wayne Rooney and the England goals record. Owen, of course, knows a bit about this. His comments on the imminent Wayne Supremacy (Rooney is just two goals off Bobby Charlton on 47) were generous and thoughtful, but also revealing in other ways. “I had to change because I was reliant on certain aspects of my game but I don’t think Wayne is,” Owen said, lamenting the loss of his own adrenal teenage acceleration while also suggesting Rooney has remained England’s chief attacker for so long because he doesn’t have any real competition.

It is an interesting perspective. In Owen’s mind the difference between the two is that while he was forced to change his game, Rooney has been able simply to carry on much the same, a less extreme and therefore less vulnerable footballer.

Another way of looking at it would be to take the complete opposite view. To suggest that there really is no comparison at all, that Rooney has always been a more sophisticated, intelligent, versatile footballer. That he has scored goals at the same rate as Owen in a weaker team while also playing as a No9, trequartista-bruiser, all-purpose inside-forward, taker of terrible corners and general team leader.

The main difference though is that in one sense Rooney and Owen embody both the good and the bad in the way English footballers manage their own talent. This might seem a little counterintuitive, given that Rooney has become – unfairly – a social media muster point for a certain diffuse rage about English underachievement, still unforgiven for his perverse insistence on not simply remaining a fearlessly explosive 17-year-old man-boy genius his entire career. But the fact is Rooney is not just a fine English footballer, but an instructive and unusual one too.

The trajectory of Owen’s career was always an unchecked retreat from the cloudless brilliance of his own teenage self, a dwindling away. By contrast we are currently in at least the third major Age of Wayne. First came early Wayne: barrelling out of the traps like some pasty-faced junior superhero in borrowed kit who only has about five minutes to show all these mannered terrified grown-ups what they’re supposed to be doing before he has to vault the perimeter fence and dodge the stewards. Then came mature Wayne of The Ronaldo Years, an all-purpose attacker at the peak of his abilities and a brilliantly versatile, incisive, title‑winning footballer.

And now we have Wayne 3.0, an adaptable, high grade factotum and enduring cutting edge. The point here is Rooney’s ability to contract intelligently, to learn, to work within his own capacities. Like Owen he has lost his youthful spring. Look back at a showreel of Rooney goals prior to his mid-20s slowdown. There he is bouncing around like an angry cartoon rubber ball, always on the verge of some brilliantly dismissive display of power finishing.

If Rooney deserves to be celebrated for breaking that scoring record he also offers a lesson in adaptability that goes against the greater tide of English football. The journey from explosive phenomenon to decent, all-round attacking B-lister may have its shades of disappointment. But there is a least a method here, an adaptive intelligence, and a refusal to bend.

There may be some selfishness, a hint of obsession as he approaches that scoring record, but this should be enjoyed, even encouraged. What the England team have to fear above all is disengagement, a failure not just to fret about becoming better. But to be interested in the first place, to feel that galvanising libido that keeps the entire excretes afloat. With Rooney, whatever the dulled edges, the dwindling sense of possibilities, there has always been energy, heat, an absence of stasis. It has, at the very least, never been boring.

Questions and Tasks:

1. Find the key words leading to the understanding of the author’s intention.

2. What’s the topic of the article?

3. What’s the main idea of the article? Where is it formulated?

4. According to what pattern is the information in the article arranged?

5. What’s the author’s attitude to the problem?

6. Are you familiar with problem? What’s your background knowledge of the problem?

7. What’s your attitude to the problem? Do you support the author’s point of view or not?

8. Render the article in the English language according to the plan.

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