Rooney needs time and support

Wayne Rooney: He's ours but we can't take him for granted.

When things start to go as badly wrong as they are at Everton at the moment, it is natural to examine the form of your star players. Right now that means that Wayne Rooney is under the media's microscope and he has also been the target of barracking from the Goodison boo-boys who just love to have someone to pick on.

Much has been made of Rooney's dip in form this season. He hasn't hit the heights that he did last season, and with just one goal to show from his 12 appearances so far this season it looks as though the more pragmatic observers who said he would find his first full season as a professional much harder than the last were dead right.

Looking at it objectively, his form has been hampered by two overriding factors.

Firstly, he is being closed down and marked very tightly by opposition defences. It is a phenomenon that began towards the end of the last season but has been really noticeable this campaign. When you have a player as dangerous with the ball as Wayne is and the other danger man, Tomasz Radzinski, is not getting sufficient service, your tactic as an opposing defence is to mark the chief threat out of the game.

Secondly, the team in which he is playing week in, week out may be virtually the same in terms of personnel, but it is clearly not the same in terms of attitude, cohesion or level of performance. Apart from the odd flourish, Everton have been awful so far this season which has often left Rooney and his fellow strikers without any decent service from which to prosper. Of course, they haven't helped matters by being unusually profligate in front of goal when chances have come their way, but that is only natural when you consider that they haven't been allowed to develop any sort of rhythm or scoring habit.

Contrast that with Rooney's fortunes for England, and it's not hard to see why he has had so much more success at international level. Not only does the international game afford players more time and space on the ball, Wayne is also playing with the best England has to offer. Simple conclusion: put him in a decent side and he will perform.

All of the above would apply to any player but they are mutiplied when you take into account Rooney's age. Only a month past his 18th birthday and with a little over a year of experience at Premiership level, The Boy is just that — still a boy in terms of physical and mental maturity.

The off-the-field nonsense that Proactive Sports, his agents, are doing nothing to curtail offer only more distractions from Wayne's prime objectives at this stage of his career: develop and mature as a player and score goals for Everton. While the current malaise that has dragged the Blues into the relegation zone for the first time in five years will be good experience for Rooney on its own, Goodison Park is still the best place for him to be right now — especially given the fact that he is a staunch Evertonian.

If the pressure is building on him now at Everton, imagine how much more glaring the spotlight would be if he were at Old Trafford, Highbury or Anfield. Despite his efforts for England, Rooney remains an uncut diamond with the potential to become a truly great player... but he isn't there yet. People, Everton supporters and the country alike, would do well to remember that.

Whether Wayne thinks so or not, David Moyes remains his most valuable influence in all of this. While his advisers allow star-studded birthday parties at Aintree and midweek publicity jaunts to Spain for soft drinks manufacturers, his manager appears to be the only grounding influence on the player outside of his family. His meteoric rise to prominence last season made him impossible to ignore when it came to team selection, but with things not going Rooney's way so far this season, he can afford to remove him from the limelight and help focus his mind more clearly with a more limited role in the first team.

What is of overarching importance now is that Rooney himself does not view this as humiliation or a lack of faith by his manager. He simply must keep his feet on the ground and realise that he still has an enormous amount to learn. The same man who guided him onto the national footballing stage a year ago remains the best person to help him navigate these testing times and emerge on the other side as the next Everton and England great.

How Rooney balances his impatience for fame and footballing honours with the need to learn and grow close to his roots playing for the club he loves will probably be the deciding factor in how his Everton career develops over the medium term. Of almost equal importance is the need for Everton to sort out the mess they are currently in and provide their best home-grown talent with the kind of stage that his abilities deserve.

That is almost certainly going to take time and with it an enormous helping of patience and perspective. Whether young Wayne — or, more appropriately, the media and his advisers — will give allow himself the time to develop at a natural pace at Everton remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, it is absolutely crucial that the Everton family — both the club and the supporters — give him all the support he needs. Otherwise, we risk losing him forever, and that would be a tragedy.

Lyndon Lloyd