In his long international career, Wayne Rooney played 119 games without having to clock up too many air miles.
It is striking how few matches he played outside Europe. There were four in the South Africa World Cup in 2010, and three more in the Brazil World Cup four years later – plus a couple of warm-up friendlies in Miami. Outside that, there were just two friendlies against Brazil; one in Doha in 2009, and another to mark the re-opening of Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana stadium in 2013, a fixture which can be counted as part of England’s World Cup preparation.
And now, at the age of 31, Rooney has retired from England duty. He lasted a little longer than one of his predecessors. Alan Shearer gave up playing for England in 2000, shortly before his 30th birthday. His international tournament appearances were all in Europe. In nine years wearing the three lions he only once journeyed outside the continent – to a game in China that was part of England’s warm-up for Euro 96.
Shearer acknowledges that turning his back on his country was a tough decision to make. But it was the best way of prolonging his career. It is no way a criticism of him, or Wayne Rooney, to point out that very few South American players go down the same road. Rather, it is a tribute to the extraordinary sacrifices the European-based South American stars are prepared to make in order to play for their national teams.
After the weekend’s club action, an armada of them have flown back across the Atlantic for the next two rounds of the continent’s marathon and hyper-competitive World Cup qualification campaign. With very little time for training or adaption they will take the field on Thursday – and then again the following Tuesday, before rushing back across the Ocean to report for duty with their clubs. And given the vast size of South America, some of them face epic journeys between the two matches.
On Thursday Brazil meet Ecuador in Porto Alegre, in the south. The Selecao then face a seven-and-a-half-hour trip to Colombia’s Caribbean coast, while Ecuador have to go nearly as far to make it back to their mountain fortress of Quito for Tuesday’s visit of Peru. Just these journeys inside South America are longer than anything Europeans have to put up with inside their own continent. Add on the two Atlantic crossings and it is a wonder that the players do not go down with cabin fever. It is, frankly, difficult to imagine many European players putting up with such a schedule in order to play for their national teams.
So why do the South Americans do it? Their sacrifice is especially impressive bearing in mind that if things go wrong on the field, they – the big name European-based stars – are frequently the first to be singled out for criticism. They are Big-time Charlies, it is said, mercenaries who are out of touch with the realities of the land of their birth and who shed no tears if the team is beaten.
To be fair, there are cases of players taking advantage of a jaunt away from the discipline of their club environment to let their hair down back home, but these are the exception. The general rule is that the players come back because they care so much about the fortunes of the national team and are proud to be a part of it.
The South American national football teams are hugely powerful symbols of the nation – and are often its leading representatives on the global stage. How much attention would Uruguay receive without its history of heroics and against-the-odds triumphs on the football field? Even far bigger nations such as Brazil and Argentina are best known and recognised by the colours of their national team.
And so at that moment before the game, when the national anthem plays and the camera pans down the line of players, the country is watching. The player is entitled to feel important, and to parade this fact in front of the schoolteacher who wrote him off, the girl who rejected him because he was poor, perhaps even the father who abandoned him as a child.
It is a glorious moment, and the overwhelming majority of the continents' star players are happy to spend endless hours on aeroplanes in order to experience it.
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