James Lawton: Only Rooney's riches can replenish a football nation living off a diet of scraps

Chris Waddle, aghast like so many who once wore the colours of their country, held the floor into the early hours yesterday and if his main theory was heretical, to say the least, who was going to dispute his right to advance it in all his anger and frustration and disbelief that an England team could play so badly, so dimly after all the rewards and the celebrity that has been piled upon a generation that some have chosen to describe as golden? He won 62 caps and played 10 World Cup games, including a substitute's stint from hell: trying to repair, in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, the damage inflicted by Diego Maradona's "Hand of God" and arguably the best goal ever scored at the highest level of the game.

This is perspective forged right down in the furnace of the game and so when he says that too much is being asked of Wayne Rooney, and that Maradona himself might have been pushed to renovate the avalanche of brainless football England heaped upon themselves in Nuremberg on Thursday night, you are bound to listen.

The Waddle heresy, at least to English ears, is that Rooney is not, and never will be, a Maradona. His hunch is that in its hour of need the nation has mistaken an extremely good young player for a great one. This means that everyone, and no one more passionately than Sven Goran Eriksson, who is supposed to be in charge of a ship that has never listed more grotesquely than it did on Thursday evening in what should have been the smooth water of brave but astonishingly modest Caribbean opposition, is obliged to pray that an old and engaging hero is wrong.

Frankly, if he is not, you can take down the flags of St George right now. You are not supporting a team but a fantasy. You are investing in a failure of responsibility and leadership, an inability to educate in logic, even fundamental football knowledge, talent that deserves better from its leadership and, maybe in some ways, itself.

After a shamefully barren performance, there were the usual platitudes from England. They were redeemed only by the fact that as he fights to regain match-sharpness, Rooney represents so much more than a relief column galloping to the aid of a team currently showing a shockingly low ratio of football intelligence.

What Rooney brings, and here it is indeed necessary to challenge Waddle's reservations, is something that can be sensed as much as seen.

It is something as unchartable as a gust of the most capricious wind. It is an instinct to be in the right place, not necessarily with a churning run, but a precious, unplayable drifting into a point of danger. Eriksson, who has had five years to create a team ethos and rhythm and yet is still making wholesale changes of tactics and personnel with the World Cup now more than a week old, was praised for his replacement of Jamie Carragher with the bite of Aaron Lennon. Yes, it worked, but then nothing else had, and was recognition of Lennon's ability to get behind a defence, to give width and shape to a team, requiring some brilliant insight?

Lennon was a point of light at Tottenham for most of the season, something that could have been noted by the most casual observer. Lennon helped England out of a terrible confusion of purpose and strength. But it was Rooney who made a coherent team seem possible, who showed the presence and the touch of those who understand most perfectly, most instinctively, what they are doing.

Waddle the devil's advocate says that the notices Rooney received in the European Championship two years ago were too extravagant; who had he beaten but Switzerland and Croatia? Certainly there is a counter-argument here. He terrified the French defence, won the penalty that David Beckham blew. Before his injury, England were leading Portugal in the quarter-final. When he left, it was though someone had switched off a light.

Here in Germany, without the force of his intelligence, the range of his game, England have been reduced to next to nothing. They are celebrating six points and a confirmed place in the last 16, but they have looked wretched and dumb against Trinidad & Tobago and pointless Paraguay, a reality that was made to look even more threadbare yesterday when Argentina reduced Serbia & Montenegro to rubble by doing all those things that seem to have been stripped from England's game: running with bite and subtlety, passing the ball in smoothly formed triangles, opening up the ground, fashioning strikes on goal. An English observer saw this as an urchin, his stomach growling, might press his nose against the window of a fabulous restaurant.

Rooney was an urchin on Thursday night, throwing open the doors of the glittering restaurant. Waddle says it is too much to expect him to make a banquet for his starving football nation, as Maradona did in 1986, and then, four years later and pumped full of painkillers, dragged his team to the final. Maybe Waddle is right, perhaps we are asking too much. But as a central force of football talent and insight Rooney is all we have. We have to believe; it is necessary when you have been forced on to a diet of bread and water.

Switch to 4-5-1 could plug hole in England's middle

Argentina's master class yesterday has highlighted England's direst need. It is the semblance of a midfield. Without one, attackers die on the vine and defenders come under unsupportable pressure.

It means that Sven Goran Eriksson has to attempt to augment the stay of execution he earned for his team and maybe himself - as his work here is scrutinised by potential employers like Real Madrid - by providing the width and bite of Aaron Lennon and the oxygen of Wayne Rooney.

He must now play Michael Carrick. And tell Michael Owen, as softly but also as firmly as he can, that at the moment he is no more than a nostalgic luxury. The Spurs player might not have a place in the ante-room of Argentina's engine room or design centre but he does have an important attribute. His instinct is to pass the ball, something England omitted to do almost totally against Trinidad & Tobago. Without a rhythm of passing, England can do nothing. Their football is embarrassingly antediluvian.

The solution, with the continuing evidence that Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard are utterly uncomplementary and know only one way of playing, which is to go forward with explosive energy, particularly in Gerrard's case, in their pursuit of power goals, is to play 4-5-1. Of course, it puts a burden on the sole attacker, who would be Peter Crouch right up to the moment Rooney is deemed able to go for 90 minutes, but the weakness of England is so deep and basic that the pattern simply has to be changed. Crouch has already proved that he is a valuable asset, but in these circumstances his role, if England do progress to a significant point in a tournament now dazzled by Argentina, his strengths will have to be brought in from the bench.

Absurd to be discussing such tactical convolutions at this point in the great tournament? Yes, no doubt, but this has been the story of England's approach to every major tournament under Eriksson. It is an appalling story. It has none of the strands of development which go into the creation of a confident, winning team. Some praised the selection of young Theo Walcott for its boldness. Now, perhaps, it will seen for surely what it is. A desperate throw by a coach without a pattern, without even it seems a practical thought about what his team should be, and how it should play.

Against Sweden next week, in a match which may retain the importance of offering the chance to bypass the charged if not flawless hosts, Germany, in the round of 16 - something of value in the current state of English disrepair - Eriksson's best selection is thus, surely: Robinson; Neville, Ferdinand, Terry, Ashley Cole; Beckham (with Lennon itching for action from the bench), Carrick, Gerrard, Lampard, Joe Cole; Rooney or Crouch.

There is no pure world-class midfielder (the Argentinians reminded us that for all their virtues, Gerrard and Lampard simply don't play that game) but there is serious individual talent. In this formation, it may just get a chance to breathe.