Sven minus Rooney equals no chance?

Ceefax Page 338 has a great morning service where each of the various lies invented to fill the ever-expanding football pages is set side by side and each paper credited with the various inventions. So it came to pass, on the Sunday morning after "Metatarsal 5: Rooney Redux" the following headlines appeared in order: "Stephen Gerrard says England can't win the World Cup without Rooney" (Express) and "Sven Goran Eriksson says England can win the World Cup without Rooney" (Times).

The England fans will remember that Stephen Gerrard suffers from the tyranny of low expectations and that he's been here before. It was during his prevarication about his future, in the middle of the ultimately successful Champions League campaign, that he said Liverpool couldn't win the European Cup. Rafa Benitez chastised him openly at the next opportunity and masterminded one of the strangest triumphs we've seen in modern sport. Only flaw here is that Sven is no Rafa.

Rooney got injured as Chelsea picked up the Premiership trophy after a three-nil win against Manchester United. He broke his metatarsal 50 minutes after his horrible tackle on the Chelsea captain left John Terry with 12 stitches and blood clearly visible through strapping and sock. Now he misses the World Cup. It wasn't a good afternoon for the new Pele. For Sven it was an awful few moments.

The fumbling afterwards about how Rooney will definitely be in the squad and how he might be fit for a quarter-final was desperation on the part of Eriksson and doesn't tally with the Ceefax headline above. Now we have the gambling firms offering wildly different prices on whether or not Rooney will be named in the squad. The "poor boy" (as Alex Ferguson has taken to calling him) must be tempted to have a large punt on that himself.

Ferguson moved quickly to ridicule the idea of Rooney playing in the last eight of the World Cup with no match practice in between. He's right of course. No-one has yet mentioned the tempting-fate element of picking players to be available halfway through a tournament.

With Rooney's injury and the inevitable carnival which will follow, Sven has his readymade excuse. With Michael Owen and Ashley Cole both horribly short of match practice, England are in a lot of trouble heading into the World Cup.

Only Joe Cole, Frank Lampard, Gerrard and Terry have had really solid seasons of the first-choice outfield players. Rio could be good or equally could knock England out. Beckham, if Sven is lucky, may contribute a free-kick against Trinidad. The rest of the team is filled with players who are injured or haven't played much.

All of which means that Sven will do everything to bring Wayne Rooney to Germany, carrying him around from press conference to press conference, like a relic or his very own stigmata. In reality he should say now Rooney's loss is just a spur to greater things and use it as a rallying cry uniting the players and fans. The Rooney decision is why they pay him the big money and the wrong decision will cost England whatever chance they have of winning the World Cup. Don't bet on Sven to make the right one.