Flaws of Rooney and Gascoigne

It is one of the bitter ironies of contemporary English football that its two outstanding players of recent times have both been such flawed personalities.

First Paul Gascoigne, now Wayne Rooney — though they are flawed in very different ways. Gazza, in fact, far more deeply and destructively than Rooney, who for all the explosive and disastrous moments of his career has contrived to go on playing at the highest level and even wringing a still greater fortune out of Manchester United on his return from a 2010 World Cup in which he had been a wretched disappointment. And all this concurrent with the scandal about his frequenting expensive prostitutes in costly hotels while his wife was pregnant.

For all his abundant natural talents, Rooney has flopped twice in World Cups. While, for all his own wantonly self-destructive tendencies, Gazza excelled in the Italian World Cup of 1990.

Alas, alcoholism has reduced Gazza into a pitiable figure, his money now long gone. That won't, fortunately, happen to Rooney, but his idiotic moment of rage in Montenegro means that England will have to do without him, unless they win an appeal.

Troubled star

That there is no substitute for Rooney is beyond doubt. But which Rooney would we see? The Rooney whose superb talents made him one of the outstanding elements in the European finals of 2004, when, had he not been kicked out of the game by the Portuguese, England might well have gone on to win the trophy? Or the Rooney, admittedly not fully recovered from injury and beset by personal problems, who, with a spiteful kick at Ricardo Carvalho, got himself sent off against Portugal — his plain nemesis — in the World Cup finals of 2006.

It may be that the very recent arrest of both his father and his uncle, accused of involvement in a betting scam with a Motherwell player, well known to them from his Merseyside days, could have been preying on his mind. Fabio Capello confidently announced before the Montenegro match that he was sure this wasn't so, but how could he or anybody else but Rooney himself tell?

To miss not just one but probably all three of England's group games next summer is a devastating blow. Tomorrow, Arsenal have a difficult task in the European Champions Cup in Marseilles, who seem to raise their game for these European ties.

The manager, Didier Deschamps, a World Cup winner, is rich in European experience, both as player and coach. There is also plenty of pace in his Marseille team, with the two Ayew brothers from Ghana, Remy and, attacking from midfield, that accomplished Argentine Lucho Gonzalez and the quick French international Mathieu Valbuena.

The author is an expert on football based in England.