Anyone looking to chart the evolution of the England football team’s strangely fraught sense of their place in the world could do worse than start off with the tournament songs. There probably won’t be a song when England go to France for the Euros next year, or at least not an official one with the players in suits looking sad, lost and noble. There hasn’t been one of those for a while, and with good reason too. It is no coincidence the best tournament songs were produced out of a distinct period of emotional uncertainty, that 14-year spell between 1982 (This Time) and 1996 (Three Lions) when it was possible for the England team to make you feel tortured and doomed, but also genuinely hopeful all at the same time. The idea was still out there that England should be winning these tournaments, a period of English football history we might call Sustained Delusional Endgame.

The 1982 World Cup anthem, This Time, always seemed the most painfully telling. “This Time,” England’s players sang. “This time, more than any other time. This time, we’re going to find a way.” Oh yes. This time. This time. This. Time. So many times. And now finally: this time.

Let’s put this in context. In 1982 England had won the World Cup only 16 years previously. The equivalent now would be if England had won Euro 2000 but still decided to record a song for France 2016 called, Oh For Christ’s Sake When Will We Ever Get To Win a Trophy It’s So Unfair. And so on they go, the 1982 World Cup squad, embracing the pain, repeating that willingly sullen refrain that captures perfectly the sense of doomed footballing entitlement, a yearning for the comfort of enraged disappointment.

These feelings are still there, albeit in more diffuse form. As the possibility of actual victory becomes ever more implausible, they have tended to attach themselves to specific moments and players. Above all, they’ve tended to attach themselves to Wayne Rooney, 12 years an England player and on the verge of breaking Bobby Charlton’s goal record, but already with a fair case to be enshrined as the nation’s most widely condemned, inexplicably blamed and chastised long-serving footballer, England’s own prisoner of delusion.

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Personally I hope Rooney doesn’t get that record on Saturday against San Marino. Ideally he’d score the two goals he needs against Switzerland next week or Estonia next month. Just don’t get it against the minnows, Wayne. Because you know what’s going to happen. There will be squeals and jeers. Social media will erupt in a shared howl of snark. False connections will be made, a bogus pattern of easy gains, minnow-bashing, stolen glory sketched out.

Rooney has plenty of goodwill among those who watch in the stadium but outside of it; on, say, the internet? Oh, the rage. The righteous disappointment. This has been the background music to most of Rooney’s mature England career. The charges are familiar enough. The general prognosis among the anti-Wayne faction seems to be of a high end dead-weight, a choker, a tournament-pooper. At the last World Cup the mere mention of his name on social media was a muster point for frothing, squealing rage.

And yet Rooney did at least create and score England’s only goals in Brazil. He is England’s joint third-highest goalscorer at tournaments, all-time top scorer in qualifying games and gets his goals at the same rate as Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. And now here comes the record. Remind me. Why aren’t we cheering this a little more?

Wayne Rooney celebrates scoring England’s winner against Slovenia in June. Photograph: Michael Regan/The FA Collection

Let’s be clear about this, Rooney deserves that record. Don’t believe what they tell you. These have been decent, proper, respectable goals, with only seven against real makeweights – Liechtenstein, Andorra and San Marino – and 14 in friendlies, compared with 26 out of 48 for Gary Lineker and 22 of 49 for Charlton. In a time of shrinking horizons Rooney remains England’s master of the possible, king of the awkward October qualifier in a team for whom seeing off some tricky Balkan middleweight represents a moment of actual, achievable success.

Why so cross then? It is perhaps part symbolic. In a sense Rooney is the perfect modern England player, his career a kind of clenched, tearful fading back, a retreat from the cloudless promise of his 17-year-old self into the clogged arteries of early sporting middle age. Even his style now comes across like a very English, garden-shed take on how to play modern attacking football, all hustle and barge and the odd explosive moment of illumination.

Of late there has even been a suggestion that Rooney has in some way held back the team, that it is geared too much to his needs, to the detriment of other, more brilliant England players. To illustrate this point here is a brief recap of every other striker given a game in the years since Rooney made his debut, a roll call that goes Defoe-Crouch-Bent-Nugent-Ashton-Agbonlahor-Cole (Carlton)-Zamora-Davies-Carroll-Bothroyd-Welbeck-Sturridge-Campbell (Frazier)-Lambert-Rodriguez-Kane-Vardy. Between them these 18 Wayne-damaged alternatives have scored 71 goals in 200 games, 41 of them from Crouch and Defoe. But, you know, if Wayne hadn’t been there. Well. Who knows?

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Perhaps part of the antipathy may even be down to something as simple as Rooney’s slightly unfortunate TV close-up face, the dominant image of any England tournament defeat these days. England miss an easy chance; cut to Wayne looking angry, slot-mouthed, spam-faced, sad, knackered, sullen and generally like he’s deliberately not winning. He’s not really any of these things. In the flesh you notice that he runs and chivvies constantly and is – let’s be clear on this – a muscular athlete with a well-toned physique. If only he could look urgent and darkly heroic when England are losing, as David Beckham always did, haring about like some brilliantly handsome fireman with a soot-stained puppy under each arm.

You will still hear the charge that Rooney has always been overrated. But this is wrong. The young Wayne was correctly rated. He was brilliant. He simply got worse over time, each step taking him further away from that alluringly itchy, twitchy nonstop teenager. Rooney was never a creative player in the style of a classic No10, those ruminative, drifting manipulators of space. Instead he was physically inventive, able to shape his body, seize a moment, exploit a dropping of the guard, like a boxer with an eye for the sudden, unanswerable combination punch.

As that physical edge has dwindled, he has fallen back on other qualities: his fine finishing, an intermittent eye for a pass, the ability to hustle. His crime is simply that he was briefly almost-great, pre-great. The real betrayal that he had to grow older, unwilling to remain for ever a thrillingly fearless 17-year-old goal-munchkin genius.

England fans don’t get much to be pleased about. The taking down of Bobby after all these years – in fewer games, in a worse team – deserves at least to be marked with a little grace, some magnanimity, a flushing out of all that blame and bile. In a sense this is a test of what you’re actually watching for. If you really want to be cross, to see only the failings, then the record will be met with the familiar slow handclap. Otherwise let’s bang the gong a little. Rooney may or may not get there this week. He may wobble over the line with a penalty, a tap-in, out-sprinting a postman, skilling up a chartered surveyor. But if he does – this time, more than any other time – let’s at least give ourselves a moment to cheer.