Rooney has lost his spark

There was something deeply troubling about Wayne Rooney’s performance at Villa Park on Friday.

It was only one game, and Manchester United won it anyway, but even so there was something deeply troubling about Wayne Rooney’s performance at Villa Park on Friday.

One touch inside the opposing penalty area in over 90 minutes, and that to kick the ball into touch to waste time, having chased it fruitlessly down a channel. No shots at goal, no chances, no impact whatsoever, really.

Rooney can have these fallow spells, but they are usually brief. After getting two goals against Newcastle on Boxing Day last year he didn’t score again until February 16, a run of nine games. He is currently on eight games of blanks for Manchester United, dating back to a goal against Aston Villa on April 4. The difference being he is now the club’s primary forward.

Before, there were others to help shoulder the burden: Robin van Persie, Dimitar Berbatov, Carlos Tevez, Cristiano Ronaldo. This time it is Rooney’s one-man show in what is his 14th season as a professional footballer. Including internationals, he has never played fewer than the 42 games that marked his first year with Everton. He is 30 on October 24. That workload is going to tell eventually.

As England captain there is no respite, so he will chase Sir Bobby Charlton’s goalscoring record again next month, despite the match in San Marino — and even the one at home to Switzerland, considering the state of the group — being as meaningless as it gets at international level.

Is Roy Hodgson worried? Is Louis van Gaal? They should be.

Against Villa, Rooney looked as ineffectual as he has ever been. Only once in his professional career — even as a teenager at Everton — has he gone more than nine games without scoring: in his first full season with Manchester United, a stretch of 12 matches between December 31, 2005 and February 18, 2006. Barren runs of eight or nine games are fingers-of-one-hand rare, so to have two in a calendar year — even taking into account his change of role last season — is disturbing.

Does Van Gaal even know his best position any more? Every time Rooney finds a new role, the club invest heavily in that area. He plays No 10, support striker or high attacking midfield: United pay top money for Juan Mata, Angel di Maria, Memphis Depay, Ashley Young and, possibly, Pedro, who can all play there, too. On Friday the job even went to Adnan Januzaj.

Last season Van Gaal was convinced he was a midfield player but that didn’t stop him buying Morgan Schneiderlin and Bastian Schweinsteiger to go with Ander Herrera, Daley Blind and Michael Carrick. So it is into the forward line again for Rooney.

But has he got the sharpness for it, having played 663 games and counting before his 30th birthday? That is an almost impossibly heavy load. Turning 30 on November 29, 2003, Ryan Giggs, the most exceptional footballer- athlete of the modern era, had played 606 times. Rooney will be close to two seasons ahead of him, in game time.

And he’s not Giggs. We know that. He is built differently, he has lived differently, he takes longer to recover from injury and, at his best, combines exceptional talent with bruising, often brutal physical commitment. Giggs did his shift until the day he retired, but it wasn’t the same one that Rooney puts in.

Some who know Rooney well fear he is near to the tipping point. He is a thoroughbred with the ethic of a dray horse and looks increasingly exhausted by it. Van Gaal must be careful from here. Going it alone for a whole season at United might leave Rooney ready for little more than the glue factory. – Daily Mail