WHY IT’S TOUGH BEING ROONEY

IF Roy Hodgson is genuinely worried about the effect the captaincy of club and country will have on Wayne Rooney, there is a very easy solution. Give the armband to someone else.

This is unthinkable, of course. There are no candidates of significance. Phil Jagielka is England’s only other club captain and he is not guaranteed his place. Joe Hart is isolated in goal, Gary Cahill is without leadership experience. So it is not the job that may drain Rooney, as Hodgson fears, but his status in English football. It must be hard being the main man, and that is a position he has occupied, armband or not, since 2004.

That was the tournament England might have won, had Rooney not got seriously injured in the quarter-final against Portugal. Even so it remains a better campaign than David Beckham ever had, and he is remembered as an England hero.

Rooney should win his 100th cap against Slovenia on Saturday and there will, no doubt, be plenty who sneer. Yet he could one day end up as England’s leading goalscorer and most capped player and these are achievements worthy of enormous respect.

This is why there is little chance of Rooney being weighed down by the captaincy: he has felt the weight as well as the joy of international football even from his earliest years.

Dick Bate, who managed Rooney in England’s Under 17 team, recalls a young man who read aloud a poem at a team dinner speaking of his love of playing for his country. Little has changed.

It is perhaps because Rooney wants it so desperately that he can sometimes disappoint, or lose his way in anger. The real pity is that, shorn of team achievement, we are left to celebrate only personal milestones.