We shouldn’t expect Roo to steal the show

TIME CATCHES UP WITH US ALL...

THE greatest player ever to grace NonLeague football? There are plenty of contenders for that accolade.

Ian Wright, who left Greenwich Borough at the age of 22 to join Crystal Palace and ended up as Arsenal’s alltime leading scorer.

Or John Barnes, famously spotted playing for Sudbury Court and signed by Watford for a set of tracksuits.

Jamie Vardy, currently the Premier League’s leading scorer, is the National League’s most expensive export at £1m.

But for sheer impact, it is hard to look beyond Mike Marsh. A member of arguably the greatest Liverpool side in history, Marsh was a midfield playmaker of considerable talent whose career was terminated by injury at the age of 29.

Unwilling to shelve his boots but banned from professional football under the terms of an insurance payout, he joined Southport.

Cue fireworks. Promotion to the Football League with Kidderminster Harriers. Then Boston United. Then Accrington Stanley. For three peerless years Marsh looked liked an F1 car in a go-kart race.

“He galvanised the entire club,” said John Coleman, then in the first of two lengthy managerial stints at Accrington.

“And it wasn’t just on the pitch. He made everyone – the players, the supporters – believe we could succeed. He was the foundation of everything the club became.”

What Marsh achieved is a wonderful story that fulfils our collective desire to see old gunslingers go out in a blaze of glory; football’s answer to Clint Eastwood routing the saloon at the climax of Unforgiven.

It is also worth remembering, however, that David Webb Peoples’ Oscar-winning film is a deliberate subversion of the western legend.

Frail and incompetent for the previous 90 minutes, Eastwood’s resurgence – cathartic but cartoonishly implausible – is Peoples’ way of illustrating that myth will always trump reality.

Experience

Marsh, too, embodies a fallacy. His success was wrought not of inherent superiority but of several unique advantages, the most notable of which was his background.

Signed from a pub team and chronically overawed by his Anfield team-mates, the midfielder felt happier in the Unibond League than he ever did in the UEFA Cup.

He also played for well-backed teams in an era when NonLeague sides were populated exclusively by part-timers largely deprived of elite coaching. Today, even semi-pros are likely to have spent some time in an academy.

Yet so much of our thinking on football is wrapped up in notions of fixed ability – good, better, best – that the narrative of an ageing maestro outclassing opponents and elevating lesser mortals to greatness is impossible to resist.

Wayne Rooney is a player greatly diminished from his Manchester United pomp. When the 34-year-old kicks off his Derby career in the New Year, the Rams will see a player of minimal pace who, even at his best, lacked a natural position.

“We can’t think we get Wayne in January and everything will be fine,” said Derby manager Phillip Cocu. “I don’t think that’s enough.”

He’s right, of course. In a league as physically demanding as the Championship, the most anyone can realistically expect from Rooney is composure and experience; to be a competent cog in a mundane machine. Unlike Marsh, he simply isn’t that much better than everyone else.

To demand more is unfair, and we know it. Yet in every fan there lurks a desire to see myth trump reality; to see the legend lay waste to the saloon in a final explosive flurry of brilliance.

It is why, no matter how well Rooney performs, his stint at Pride Park will inevitably be tinged with disappointment.