ROONEY’S WRONG TO ANNOUNCE HIS RETIREMENT DATE

I’M trying to think the best of England football because I really believe Sam Allardyce can pull it around but my heart sank a little when Wayne Rooney announced he would retire from international football in 2018 after the World Cup in Russia. Wrong time, wrong message, muddy thinking. Sam had just reappointed Rooney (right) as his captain and what I wanted to hear from the England skipper was some upbeat positivity about Sunday’s tricky game against Slovakia and a warm welcome and words of advice for the new guys in the squad. One of the big problems with England is that those concerned sometimes forget it is a team sport and there is no ‘I’ in team. They will live and fall by their collective effort. No individual, and his fate, is ever bigger than the team. It’s what some people term ‘teamship’ and as Rooney stepped back into the limelight again it should have been all about England. I also have other issues with all this. For me it’s a curious thought process for sportsmen to announce their retirements at some future, often remote, date. If you have reached a pinnacle late in your career, I understand a player announcing their immediate retirement from international sport — like Martin Johnson captaining England to the 2003 Rugby World Cup. But to set that date in stone ahead of a long World Cup qualifying process and hopefully the World Cup itself just feels a bit odd. It’s about the individual not the team and that’s never right. It also implies a little subliminal pressure for the manager to pick Rooney at all times, a player Sam has already backed with the captaincy. Rooney, 30, is a gifted and experienced player and I genuinely hope for England’s sake he enjoys an Indian summer to his career which takes him all the way through to Russia but if his form or motivation drop Sam must ruthlessly drop him. That could happen at any time. He could be gone by Christmas. At the 2003 Rugby World Cup I thought it was odd that France set such great store in their captain Fabien Galthie who had announced some time previously he would be retiring straight after the tournament. France saw it as a positive but I don’t think such announcements are great for the psychology of teams. I wouldn’t include anybody in my England rugby squads who was talking about retirement. I always wanted players thinking of the immediate present not some indeterminate future.