Whereas from a sober perspective he looks more like a source of slight sadness right now. Enter: the Wazza Paradox. Here is a footballer who has been elevated to the pinnacle of what he could reasonably hope to achieve captain of club and country at precisely the stage in his career when he is no longer able to fulfil with genuine distinction either function. In mechanical terms it seems fairly clear what has happened. Rooney has in the past two years lost the vital twitch of explosives that underpinned so much of his effectiveness . With it has gone the quick-footed dribbling, the ability to create a gap from which to shoot so wonderfully from distance. Above all he has lost that sense of absolute joyful certainty in his own powers, reduced instead at times to whirling about fretfully between the lines like a dying crab, eyes fogged with grit, gargling brine and scurf, pincers snapping at empty air.
Is any of this Rooneys fault? He has undoubtedly been caught smoking once too often (once is too often). Beyond this he is perhaps just unfortunate not to have been born with a different physique, the rangy, long levered type that simply seems to run on and on, as opposed to his own endomorphic power-doughnut template. It has, lets face it, been a long, hard 12 years at the sharp end for a player whose career was always likely to be a sprint rather than an endurance event.
If there is a more tangible source of frustration it is perhaps in the failure to develop a set of contingency skills, a deeper texture to his game that might sustain him in diminished maturity. There has been talk of a move into midfield, but as pointed out this week there is some doubt at United that Rooneys close-range passing is up to it, his short game suitably refined. And so he has continued in the classic English style to carry on playing exactly the same way just with a fatally reduced sense of mobility, as though this is all just a temporary interruption, a blip.
Beyond this there is a simple case of weariness here. Rooneys flaws the snarls, the trapped energy, the slot-mouthed mid-match TV closeup have soundtracked the bad times too often. At its best sport is all about that endlessly seductive capacity for renewal and fresh dawns, but Rooney has presented something more realistic and familiar over the years, a sense of an entire adult life lived in miniature, form that brilliantly vital teenager who juggled the ball on the pitch against Turkey to this careworn England captain with all his flaws and omissions and fading reach: a living breathing reminder that every life is to a degree a matter of controlled youthful explosion followed by a levelling out and reckoning up, measuring the outer reaches of talent and possibilities, shadowed always by that sense of having meant, somewhere along the way, to do it all very differently, to have climbed higher, run further, that this was not no, not this what you meant to say at all.