Fabio Capello is convinced Rooney should start for England, but that would be madness

Fabio Capello was not in doubt: Wayne Rooney should not only be selected for the England party destined for France this summer, he should be first choice in matches too.

“It is important to have him on the pitch because he understands the game well and he sets an example for the other players,” the former England coach, speaking at the Laureus World Sports Awards in Berlin this week, insisted. “This is a very important role he can play.”

Which, if nothing else, suggests Capello is no longer watching a lot of English football. It seems ridiculous in a season of pace and precision, of dynamism and directness, of Jamie Vardy, Harry Kane and Dele Alli, that Rooney’s name should even be in consideration.

Anyone who has seen him in action this season – cumbersome, ineffective, his fire quenched by the march of time – will appreciate that what he has to offer is way behind the new generation in every respect. Frankly it seems amazing there is even an argument to make for a player who was underwhelming again against Crystal Palace on Wednesday: in making a choice between Kane, Vardy and Rooney the United man is such a distant third as to require the use of binoculars to pick him up out in the far country.

And yet, among those at the top of the game, among international coaches and leading pundits, he remains an unimpeachable gem, England’s star, the name around which the international team should still be built.

Capello, like many an Italian coach, has an almost reverential attitude to experience. This is what counts. Knowledge of what to expect, knowing what happens in such circumstances, having been there and done that: these are invaluable qualities for Capello. Rooney, he says, will bring the benefit of knowledge to a callow team. He will be the guide for the others. It will be his brain and their legs.

Which might be an argument for having him in the dressing room, on the training pitch and on the bench, but not in the starting eleven.

Yet Capello believes it is out there in the fray that Rooney’s nous would prove most valuable. He knows where to move to create the space for others to exploit. His wiles, the Italian believes, would make Kane, Vardy, Alli and Barkley better, more effective players.

The irony in all this is that the one and only international tournament in his career when Rooney has demonstrated anything close to world class was his first, when he was but 18. In Euro 2004, when he was tearing great holes in the defences of Croatia and the rest, when it would not have been far-fetched to suggest England might well have gone on to victory had he not snapped a metatarsal in the quarter-final, much of his brilliance was attributed to his naivety.

The fact he was only 18, brimful of the confidence of youth, not yet old enough to have succumbed to the crushing burden of expectation was reckoned his principal asset. Back then he was all the better for being inexperienced.

Indeed when that point was put to him when he served as a pundit during ITV’s coverage of the last England game, he was quick to point out the difference in circumstances. Back then, he was alone in being young and new to things. He was surrounded by wise old heads. You cannot, he said in a thinly veiled job application, go to a tournament with a team entirely lacking in past know-how. You need players who know.

Yet surely, what should be the presiding criterion when selecting a national side is form. And on that, never mind in the starting eleven, Rooney should be nowhere near the Eurostar. The way he has played this season – barely visible at times in the blandest and least impressive United team in a generation – would suggest it was madness to pick him ahead of Kane, Vardy, Sturridge, Welbeck or even Andy Carroll. Not to mention the glorious uninhibited talent that is Marcus Rashford, a player every Manchester United fan would rather see play for their club right now than the skipper.

Moreover, a notoriously slow starter after an injury set back, he remains still at the very beginning of a comeback from a knee issue, a rehabilitation which will continue with some minutes in this evening’s game with Crystal Palace. Wouldn’t England be better off taking Rashford and seeing if he can set the tournament alight as Rooney did in 2004?

Though even that, Capello reckoned, was a reason to play the old timer. What always stymies England’s chances in competitions, the Italian believes, is exhaustion. There is no issue with talent or ability, he suggests. Were a tournament to be held in December, England would do fine, he thinks. But in June, after the full-on physical rush of the Premier League season has drained the players of their energy, players who play in England can never match those who ply their trade in the less intensely, full-on demanding environs of the Spanish or German leagues.

So Rooney, with two months off to rest and recuperate while everyone else has been tearing around knackering themselves, could be ideally positioned, fresh and ready.

It is a nice theory. And I have a hunch it is one that Roy Hodgson will adhere to come the game against Russia in mid-June. Unless Rooney suffers an injury relapse, I think we can safely predict he will be in the first starting line-up. And the likes of Carroll, Rashford and Theo Walcott can plan for their holidays.