James Lawton: Boy with world at his feet strides into a minefield of fame

On Saturday morning Rooney was a wonderful prospect. By Saturday night he was a property – and it doesn't matter that he is only 16 years old

Forty eight hours on, the blood still pulses with the thrill of young Wayne Rooney's goal. But now, perhaps inevitably, there is a little ice in the veins. Ten days after the appointment of his new, big-time agents, his signing-on ceremony for Everton is delayed for at least a month.

On Saturday morning he was a big, wonderful prospect. On Saturday night he was a property, one, if this was your business, you wouldn't want to rush into a sentimental and perhaps cut-price signing ritual. Business is business, and it doesn't really matter that the kid is only 16 years old.

Old enough to keep a level head? Old enough not to be dazzled, and becalmed, by an earning power which means that whatever happened he would leave the game a rich man – after one goal. Old enough just to keep on playing as though it was precisely what he was born to do? These are questions which will not figure in his first professional contract.

First, though, there was the goal that changed everything so quickly. It has fired up so many memories of those moments which are most precious in sport, the kind that brought the charge when you first saw Muhammad Ali, or the turn of Nijinksy's hoof, or Brian Lara sending the ball like a bullet past a stationary cover point.

Sometimes sport takes you into its confidence. It shows you something quite stunning – and beyond any misinterpretation.

Rooney's goal beat the best team in England and if you had any doubts about its quality, and what it could mean to the future of the game in this country, they were surely largely dispelled by the widely reported reaction of Arsenal's manager, Arsène Wenger.

Understandably his eulogy of the goal, and the potential of the boy who scored it, has been given massive coverage, and rightly so. In the black and white of newsprint, Wenger's unequivocal statement that Rooney is the most naturally talented young Englishman he has ever seen was dramatic enough. But to be around him when he said it was to increase the effect. Wenger's response flew so far above the usual disingenuous post-game reflections. He had been beaten but also thrilled by that thing most guaranteed to excite a football man, especially one with Wenger's reputation as the manger with the golden signing arm: evidence of unique talent. So Wenger's eyes glowed even more brightly than his words.

But if that exhilaration stayed in the blood yesterday, there was also something else. It was that familiar chill which came with the news that Rooney's signing of professional terms with Everton had been put on hold.

Earlier this month Rooney's football affairs were taken over by the agency Pro-Active, which is the firm of Paul Stretford, who came to most early notice with his stewardship – if this is not a contradiction in terms – of the career of Stan Collymore. This is, of course, in itself no reflection on the professional expertise of Mr Stretford. Indeed, it might be said that Collymore's football life was so volatile its proper control would have probably tested not only a squad of agents and motivational experts but also a middle-sized regiment of the line.

Still, the sudden juxtaposition of the names of Rooney and Collymore is unfortunate. It is, at the very least, a crushing reminder that the mere possession of outstanding talent is so far from a guarantee of success in today's game. Collymore was an extraordinary prospect. He operated at a time when Alan Shearer was head and shoulders above all English strikers, but there were times when Collymore made a nonsense of that status. He scored a goal at White Hart Lane, while admittedly some years older than today's Rooney, which was received in awed silence. He was a giant stunted by his erratic nature – and his opulent times.

The prospects for Rooney on the face of it appear so much better. He is devoted to football, his younger brothers are already on his trail, and in David Moyes he has a young Everton manager whose passion and decency are already bywords in the game. But then he is just 16 and it is said that Paul Gascoigne lived for football when he was that age; it was his buffer against an unpromising world. George Best was the supreme football animal, sleek and brilliant, and his appetite to play was so immense that he remained the outstanding trainer at Manchester United even on those frequent occasions when he arrived straight from the pub.

The force of celebrity did in Best; that, and the fact that Manchester United were slow to see its ravaging effects on their stunning asset. When Frank O'Farrell took over at United, Best's fate was just about settled. He went off on a drinking spree in Marbella while the rest of the team toured Majorca and Israel. O'Farrell said: "I worry about George in 20 or 30 years' time. He still has his fame and his looks but how will he be when they have gone." Well, the fame never left and Best, as the grand old man of football rebellion, has never been one for regrets.

Gascoigne may not be so philosophical and it is no harder recalling the words of his Tottenham manager, Terry Venables, than those of O'Farrell. "Sometimes," said Venables as Gascoigne's career careered from one crisis to another, "I look at the face of Maradona, I see all the pain in it and I just hope I don't see the same look on Gazza's face down the road." Venables had briefly known the chaos of Maradona's life in Barcelona, where the ill-starred Argentinian already had an entourage which included a barber and a priest.

Such self-destruction is plainly not imminent in the life of Wayne Rooney, and it would be naïve to believe that a talent of such obvious weight would not already be automatically in the hands of high-powered agents. Yesterday's news merely broke the spell of Rooney's goal and that sense that maybe for a little while the pattern of decades of accumulating wealth and changing priorities in our football players had been pushed aside by the simple need of a young man to play the game for which he is so brilliantly equipped.

At least one old pro, deeply impressed by the young man's presence on the field, is prepared to be optimistic. He says: "There is no doubt that the atmosphere around football today often works against a kid keeping focused simply on his game and letting the rewards look after themselves. But a lot of the talk about careful handling of young talent really misses the point. I'm sure David Moyes is a fine young manager, he has a great reputation for honesty, but whatever he does, whatever the club does, or the boy's agent, the most vital thing of all is the boy's character.

"You cannot wet-nurse a kid for 24 hours. You cannot make him something he isn't. George Best threw his career away because that was his instinct, and he couldn't really fight it. The same is true of Gazza. Maybe this kid is different. Maybe he can put all the other stuff on one side and get on with the game because that is the most important thing to him. Looking at him on the field, there is reason to believe this might just be so. Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are drenched in money. But they want to win, they still want to be the best."

It is, anyway, something to hope as the money men calculate the value of the goal that briefly made football stand still.