On Wayne Rooney and not living up to teenage hype

As Wayne Rooney accepts the inevitable and moves into his epilogue, it seems as good a time as any to think back to the opening chapters. That goal against Arsenal; those giddy few weeks where Euro 2004 seemed to be surrendering at his feet; the debut hat trick that followed his move to Manchester United.

The hype.

Generally speaking, and perhaps a little paradoxically, sporting hype gets really bad press. At times, it can have a direct and malign influence on those subject to it. Some players collapse under the weight of hype; others come to believe it and get carried away. And there is always the suspicion that something cynical is going on, that this force is being whipped up by somebody who is trying to sell something. Hype can be leveraged by advisers and agents to secure transfers and to inflate fees. It is not always leveraged wisely.

So it is, at best, something to be wary of. And in Rooney's case, though it's impossible to criticise the goals or the trophies he amassed in his Manchester United career, there's an accompanying sense of compromise. Yes, he scored 253 goals while wearing red. But they weren't all dipping 25-yard volleys over a flailing goalkeeper, and for a while there, it looked like they could have been.

In part, this is just how things work. Time marches in a linear direction, and the young and exciting become the old and careworn. Rooney, who once seemed like he could become anything, and maybe even everything, had to become something. And something is always less exciting than anything because it is limited, bound, and defined.

This is always particularly stark when it comes to sport, where careers can be redirected in the tweak of a hamstring or the break of a bone. So we end up in the strange situation where Rooney, measured against most other footballers, has had an extraordinary career. But measured against the projected and imagined version of himself that we all came up with when he was 16, he doesn't quite stack up.

There's the hype in action. First it provokes the imagination to set unlikely and perhaps impossible standards, and then it provokes a backlash as the poor victim fails to deliver that which was never really promised in the first place.

But there is pleasure there too. Hype can come from cynical places and have ruinous consequences. But going back to Rooney's early years is a reminder that it often comes from the best places of all: hope, joy, excitement, and optimism. Watching young footballers announce themselves isn't just fun in itself. It is inspirational, if that's not too grand a word. When Rooney larruped the ball over David Seaman, he gave the entire footballing-watching world the excuse to slip its imagination into the highest possible gear and carry itself away.

This kind of thing is important. Despite the best efforts of Sky Sports, there is still more time when football isn't happening than when it is. Yet this time is still filled with football. It is filled with wish lists and transfer gossip. It is filled with best 11s, Sporcle quizzes, history, and nostalgia. It is filled with discussions, and arguments, and other people's wrongness; that's where the game of opinions comes in. And when somebody like the young Rooney turns up, it is filled with wonder. Just how good can he be?

Even though the eventual answer came with caveats — "really very good, but in occasionally quite unexciting ways and with a long and noticeable decline that got quite weird toward the end" — the memory of that wonder remains. It's not his fault, really, that he never fulfilled everything that everybody imagined for him; perhaps he never could. (Certainly, his failure to lift England's second World Cup isn't entirely on him.)

Surrendering to hype may make any disappointment sharper, but it's difficult to avoid without willful contrarianism and it comes with its own consolation. Watching young Rooney was exhilarating. Getting carried away was inevitable. His emergence was a communal moment of shared optimism, centred on the simple joy of watching a footballing talent unfold and keep unfolding, without apparent limits. Wherever that optimism went, it was great fun at the time.