Rooney has always been that wonder kid from 2004. Now we can set him free

WAY N E ROONEY played on for nearly 17 years aft er t he 2004 European Championship but for many of us, despite everything he achieved in his brilliant career, all the records for Manc h e s t e r Uni t e d and for England, all the trophies and all the l andmarks, he will always be preserved there in those balmy evenings at the Estadio da Luz amid the brief flowering of a nation’s hopes and dreams.

When Rooney announced his retirement as a player on Friday, the news transported some of us straight back to that golden summer in Portugal, walking through the pines t hat ringed t he Estadio Nacional outside Lisbon to watch Rooney t rain in t he morning sunshine, believing for the first and l ast t i me in t he l i ves of t he post-1966 generation that England were going to win a major trophy.

For him, Friday’s announcement marks the beginning of a new career as a manager and it is both his gift and his curse that those fleeting few weeks by the Atlantic Ocean are what many of us will always remember him for most. In t hose weeks, when his t alent exploded on the world stage, it felt for the first time since 1966 as though England were on the brink of new glories and fresh triumphs.

Assessments of football talent are subjective, of course, but for natural ability, it is hard to look beyond Rooney and Paul Gascoigne as t he best t hi s country has produced in the last 50 years as we chased the ghosts of the Boys of 66. Perhaps both might have achieved more but it is better to be thankful they achieved as much as they did.

It was i ntoxicating to follow England at Euro 2004, to drive along the coast from the little resort of Cascais, not far from where England were staying, to the group games in Lisbon and Coimbra and to feel that this was England’s time. England supporters have not felt a sense of possibility like that either before or since.

THERE have been isolated moments of hope like the 4-1 victory over the Netherlands at Euro 96, t he s emi- f i nal against Germany at t he s ame tournament and the World Cup semi-finals of 1990 and 2018 but we never believed we were the best team then. None of them were quite like 2004. And that was because of Rooney.

In 2004, it felt fleetingly as if England had the best player in the world and that nobody could stop him. It felt then as if anything was possible, as if we had found our own Pele. It was a new feeling for our generation at the time, a feeling of momentum and excitement, a realisation of what it was like to have a player with the X-factor, a man who made the world stop when he played.

Rooney was still a kid then. He was 18. He had no fear. He knew nothing of what could go wrong in a life or a career. He knew nothing of injuries or dips in form or the pressure to live up to expectations or scrutiny or the occasions when your own fans boo you. He was a man-child who knew instinctively that he could express himself like few others when he had the ball.

He was marked out as a prodigy from the moment he took the ball down out of the sky against Arsenal at Goodison Park in October 2002 and curled a shot around Sol Campbell, over David Seaman and in off the underside of the crossbar to give Everton a 1-0 victory over a side that would be invincible the following season. He was 16 when that happened. ‘ Remember the name,’ Clive Tyldesley said on commentary. Even the established England players saw him as a wunderkind. Even the Golden Generation knew he was something special. Before the crucial qualifier against Turkey in April 2003, there were reports of players being open-mouthed at his audacity and brilliance in training. They urged Sven Goran Eriksson to play him from the start. Which he did.

In Portugal, he took the tournament by storm. He terrorised a France defence that included players of the calibre of William Gallas and Lilian Thuram and ran at them as if they were kids on the playground at his school in Croxteth. They had no answer. He ran more than half the length of the pitch to win the late penalty that should have sealed victory for England.

I t was s a v e d a n d Engl a n d contrived a way to lose but Rooney duly scored two in the next game against Switzerland and two more against Croatia. Perhaps for some the hubbub of that tournament is fading in the memory now but not for me and not for most of the England fans who were there. It felt like a new king had arrived. All that remained was for him to be crowned.

And then it all disappeared in the quarter-final against Portugal. The injury happened away to the right of the press box at the Estadio da Luz, on the right side of the penalty area as Rooney attacked. When Rooney went down, clearly in pain, in the 27th minute and limped off with England 1- 0 up, everyone knew the dream had died.

That night was up there with England’s defeat by West Germany in Leon in 1970 as the country’s greatest football disappointments. Both times, the side had what it took to win the tournament. But now we knew even if Eriksson’s team got through — and it was a good team — without Rooney, it would be shorn of the component that made it special.

So if there is some lingering disappointment about what might have been, it i s not meant to denigrate in any way the greatness that Rooney built for himself. It is just a lament for the glory that was snatched away when he was still a boy and which never came his way — or ours — again.

The truth is that, for some of us, Rooney has always been that kid in Portugal in 2004. We wanted him to be impervious to the years. We wanted him to take us back to those fleeting moments when we felt as if we were kings. Despite everything he won, we always tried to imprison him in the form of that boy we had watched in Lisbon. Now, at last, we can let him go.