James Lawton: Rooney left to rage in the shadows as England dishonour golden memories

One old man in the Ramat Gan Stadium in Tel Aviv shook his head as though he had encountered some unfathomable contradiction in the scriptures.

In a way, he had, when he had it revealed to him that the English could play football intelligently, even creatively.

The lesson came from a prophet called Tom Finney, who was serving in the British army in the Middle East at the time.

He was a hands-on kind of prophet, a bit like Moses. He could split a defence in one beautiful movement playing for his army team just after the war.

If you happen to cover English football across the world you regularly encounter such old guys coming out of the shadows and talking about how it was when the name of English football glowed, when their greatest players were God-like in their status.

Another one was on a tram in Rome after England had performed pitifully against Italy in failing to qualify for the 1978 World Cup finals in Argentina. He said he had been in Turin in 1948 when England had stars like Stanley Matthews, Finney and Stan Mortensen ripping the Azzuri apart.

But then not all of Job's witnesses are rooted in ancient football history.

The veteran Israeli on Saturday night for example had a withering exit line after speaking of his astonishment at the lack of quality in Steve McClaren's England when failing to score against a scarcely half-formed home team.

"And what is all this nonsense I've been reading," he asked, "about Wayne Rooney being one of the best young players in the world. He was one of the worst on this field and that's saying something cruel."

If not the worst, appearances said, certainly the angriest, the unhappiest, the least comfortable in his own skin.

The McClaren crisis of confidence will meander on for some time, give or take an eruption of brilliant expression against a glorified pub team Andorra or another pratfall against the likes of Estonia, but for one on Saturday night to most trouble those who care passionately about the English game was the truly terrible decline of Wayne Rooney.

Reports of his angry reaction to McClaren's criticisms after his latest anonymous performance in an England shirt were scarcely earth-shattering in the level of their surprise. Rooney has rarely looked so out of sorts and spirit. He ran close to serious problems when allowing flash points to smoulder and there were times when it seemed that he might even headbutt his own shadow.

A week earlier he had shown on behalf of Manchester United more than a flash of his old splendour against Tal Ben Haim of Bolton Wanderers. But when the big, shrewdly abrasive man reappeared in the blue and white of Israel you might have thought he'd become a giant of the game rather than merely a competent pro. It is as though Rooney can occasionally unlock the iron chains of memory and find again the brilliant exuberance which made him the greatest, most exciting talent bred in these islands since Paul Gascoigne. But like the tragically ill-starred Gazza, the wonder kid is besieged, it seems, by some of the most oppressive demons since the ones who hunted down even the genius of George Best.

There are no reports of Rooney and wine and roses. No suggestion that he is failing in any overt way to cope with the onslaught of wealth and celebrity that first propelled him from the back streets of Merseyside. Only it is football, that seems for most of the time now, too much, which is both the irony and the tragedy.

The whole point of Rooney, as it was of the young Best and Gazza, was that he adored to play football.

It welled out of him so beautifully, and with such originality at times, that Arsène Wenger said he was the best young English player he had ever seen. Johnny Giles, a flint-hearted judge of what he considers football pretensions, came away from one match saying that he had seen one of the authentic greats, someone who will reasonably progress and would surely walk naturally in the footsteps of the Maradonas and the Cruyffs, even a Pele.

Today Giles, despite the currently unpromising evidence, does not go back on that first assessment. But he admits it has become worryingly vulnerable to the ebb of Rooney's performance not just for a few weeks, a few months, but the best part of a whole season.

Says Giles: "It's very hard criticising a player like Rooney going through a dry spell. Unlike a midfielder he cannot go out and shape a game. Even though he is brilliant in his talent he is more dependent on the rest of the team and let's be honest, the English team is not one to bring the best out of anybody at the moment. Still, the same can't be said of the United situation where he has also put in some performances which have made him look quite unrecognisable. Sometimes in football you have the sense that someone is not just quite right in himself, that there is something running deeper than mere form.

"In this boy's case I don't think anyone, even Ferguson is at the moment able to put his finger on it. But I know how it was when I played and you see somebody underperforming so much and you look at him and say, 'this lad is just not right, there is something weighing him down.'

"I don't know Wayne Rooney, I just look at him as a great admirer of his talent and I have those old suspicions. I'd like to think he could walk out in a few days' time and make us all look silly. Certainly he looked a lot better last weekend against Bolton. There was some of the old wit, the old bite, but then it just seems to disappear again."

Giles is addressing one of the mysteries of football - one that has rarely been so invasive of a career, which seemed so clear, so dazzling.

That was the extent of Rooney's impact and in Israel on Saturday night it was among all the other miseries of England's game, something that might have made you weep.

At Old Trafford Rooney is being eclipsed by Cristiano Ronaldo, a formidable and thrilling talent by any standards and one whose combination of showy pyrotechnics and authentic brilliance has made him a strong favourite for footballer of the year. But even as Ronaldo flourishes, sometimes a little too extravagantly for the taste of those who most keenly measure the gaps between reputation and consistent performance, Rooney seems to slip a little further into leaden disbelief in his own powers.

That Ronaldo is outstripping him so clearly in both popular and critical regards is the most dramatic evidence of the extent of the crisis.

Ronaldo is a star, unquestionably but is all that Rooney has brought to the game really destined for the shadows? A year or so ago the idea would have been bizarre but there is no question now that as Ronaldo is so exultant Rooney looks as though he wants to retreat from his own.

When McClaren waded in on Saturday night he was undoubtedly treading on dangerous ground. This is the troubled prodigy indeed and if it is a problem currently beyond the curative resources of a great manager like Sir Alex Ferguson, the prospects cannot be encouraging in the current vacuum of leadership afflicting England's.

Wayne Rooney was supposed to be the future of English football, and it should be unthinkable that he should go the way of the rest of the "golden generation", those players who the more they were lauded to the stars found it so difficult to get airborne. The pain is that it is no longer so - it is no longer unthinkable.

In his desperation Steve McClaren took himself to the heart of England's problem, one in which he is undoubtedly making a contribution. It is that England cannot get the best out of their most luminously talented young player.

That, when all the other analysis was done in Israel, was the most depressing conclusion of all. It is not just that Wayne Rooney is not showing his best. He's showing nothing and in the process the pain he carries is the terrible rebuke to the game he was supposed to adorn.