Top-level footballers often tend to generate a very specific kind of emotion. In happier times this is a simple sense of joy at seeing them capering about in pursuit of a ball. Dwight Yorke for example – even in the later years when you half expected to look down and notice he was out there running around in a leotard and a pair of plimsolls – always managed to make the basic act of playing football seem unavoidably hilarious. Similarly, the sight of David Beckham scurrying about in an England shirt like a doomed, faithful cartoon horse tended to inspire above all a desire to burst into brave, hot husky tears of moon-faced joy.

It can be a more insidious process, too. In the case of Wayne Rooney the emotional register seems to have become inexorably jammed the other way, the needle forever stuck on red. Anger! Rage! Inconsolable fury! After a disappointing game against Norway on Wednesday and with a potentially gruelling Euro 2016 qualifier in Switzerland to come, Rooney rage is once again the dominant note around this new-build England team, with just a glimpse of the captain enough to inspire the now familiar background surge of vomit-flecked rage and derision. Oh, Wayne. How did this happen? And is it ever going to stop?

There is, of course, a broader trend here. Premier League footballers are an unpopular species generally, even among those who like and follow and indeed fund and support Premier League football. Yet the level of ambient Rooney rage seems not just disproportionate but unusually curdled and toxic, a kind of herd-spume within which more interesting questions of actual worth and value and merit can too easily be submerged. For one thing it is easy to forget right now what a sensationally effective, even rather joyful and unbound, footballer Rooney was in his very recent physical prime. He is still on course to become within the next 18 months the all-time leading scorer for both Manchester United and England, a phenomenal achievement for a player known as much for his graft and creativity, albeit one that will be greeted, by some, with a sneer of disenfranchised rage, as though Rooney has in some way cruised or cheated or extorted his way to this astonishingly fine sporting career.

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 Rooney’s 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, let’s 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 Rooney’s close-range passing is up to it, his short game suitably refined. And so he has continued – in the classic English style – to play exactly the same way, just with a fatally reduced sense of mobility, as though this is all a temporary interruption, a blip.

Beyond this there is a simple case of weariness here. Rooney’s flaws – the snarls, the trapped energy, the slot-mouthed mid-match TV close-up – 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.

Quite what to do from here is another matter. It seems fairly clear it was a mistake to have made Rooney England captain and thereby (for reasons that remain obscure) undroppable. England play best under Roy Hodgson when they play quickly in possession but too often recently Rooney has clogged the movement ahead of him in a system where he is no longer the best No10 or the best No9. Instead he seems to present a kind of roving black hole, the dark heart of this England team around which so much hopeful effort seems to flounder, and so much angst from the periphery coalesce.

In a happier world Rooney could still be a wonderfully useful senior player, a supersub, a voice of authority, his job not so much to lead this team but to ease the succession to those who must come next. Instead England will no doubt continue to play like England against Switzerland and the blame will continue to fall mainly on Wayne, who is in effect guilty of no more than a failure to adapt so far to an early footballing middle age, hoist at the head of a retreating army at the precise moment his powers to lead a decisive recovery have, for now, deserted him.