Doubting Wayne Rooney was foolish

Number 10, the captain in red, dinked the ball over the splayed Sinan Bolat, wheeled away and stared high into the Belgian night sky as his frustration finally fell away.

"Look at the relief on Wayne Rooney's face," the television commentator said, as Rooney celebrated the first of his three goals in Manchester United's 4-0 win over Club Brugge in the UEFA Champions League playoff round on Wednesday. He hadn't scored in 10 games, or some 876 minutes.

[FC Yahoo: Watch every goal of Man United's 4-0 win at Club Brugge]

After the drought, the downpour. They were Rooney's 231st, 232nd and 233rd goals for United. Rooney is still two months removed from his 30th birthday.

"Obviously delighted to get the goals," Rooney said after the game, before deflecting credit to his peers, as a good professional and captain is supposed to do.

Sure, the goals had only come against a side from the badly decayed Belgian league, in a qualifying game no less. But there had been criticism. There had been questions about how much the Liverpudlian striker had left in this, his 14th season of professional soccer. And here, as in all matters, Rooney lumbers on under the heft of his own weighty legacy.

Before he showed a commendable composure on all three of his tallies – a little chip, a tap-in, and a diagonal shot – and almost got a fourth, which Bolat had tapped just wide, many had wondered loudly whether he was really fit to lead United's attack yet again. The club had reinforced every other line on the field but his, and manager Louis van Gaal insisted that Rooney could be his everyday striker. On Wednesday, he delivered a resounding endorsement of his own staying power.

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Yet there had been so much doubt. And he'd had to prove himself yet again, like some scrub or rookie just lucky to be at the club. It all cuts to the heart of the enduring trouble with assessing Wayne Rooney. He has done so much, for so long, that he's always expected to do more. He's the rare prodigy who not only came good, but also stayed good. And because those who came before him, and were just like him, never managed to keep up his kind of pace, he is watched closely for his every failing.

It seems like, with Rooney, all anyone has ever projected is a sorry end like Paul Gascoigne's or a simple flame-out like Michael Owen's, or something in the middle, like in Robbie Fowler's case. He was only 16 when he broke out with Everton. He was 18 when Manchester United made him the most expensive teenager ever. And in the 11 years since, there have been stellar seasons and there have been relatively forgettable ones. But there have been no bad seasons. Never once has Rooney delivered fewer than 11 league goals in a campaign, while he once got 26 and bagged 27 two years later. He very often played behind the striker, rather than act as the point of the attack himself.

Yet across all competitions, last season was his least productive, with 14 goals. And while that hardly suggests the advent of a decline – it was a difficult year for the entire club, after all – it does underscore an important truth about Rooney. He's been around far longer than most realize, and he's consistently been among the best forwards in the Premier League for that entire time.

By conventional wisdom, his age, 29, suggests that he should be at the tail end of his prime, but that also assumes that he became a regular in his early 20s. He didn't. He'd put in half a decade of hard labor by then. He's been around the block a few times now. Thirteen times, in fact. And if we can argue over whether the Premier League is the best league in the world or not, it's surely the most taxing between the grind of physical defenders and the glare of constant scrutiny.

For whatever reason, English strikers don't often age well. That's particularly true when they become household names very early on.

Look at the top 10 of all-time Premier League goal scorers, and of the seven English strikers in there – Frenchman Thierry Henry, midfielder Frank Lampard, and Dutchman Robin van Persie are the interlopers – none delivered as early, as consistently, or for as long as Rooney has. Alan Shearer, still the reigning goals king with 260, didn't put together a double-digit season until the 1991-92 season, when he turned 21, by which age Rooney already had two. Shearer went on his longest run of consecutive double-digit campaigns then but stranded at six. Rooney's now stands at 11 and counting.

Andy Cole, the only other man still ahead of Rooney on the list – with 187 goals to Wazza's 185 – never did it more than three years in a row. Fowler, who also emerged as a teenager, fell off after his sixth year. Owen did after his eighth season. That was what happened to young English prodigies until Rooney came along. They burst to the surface, thrived and then slowed down before they hit their late 20s.

Rooney hasn't. Others have put together bigger years – Shearer once scored 30-plus goals in three consecutive seasons for Blackburn Rovers in the mid-90s – nobody has produced as reliably as Rooney.

United has gotten a rather remarkable return on its 25 million pound outlay that, even then-United manager Sir Alex Ferguson conceded, raised "plenty of eyebrows." In just 11 years and change, it has gotten 170 league goals from him and another 63 in other competitive games.

Certainly, Rooney is paid like soccer royalty, befitting a veteran with such an overwhelming CV. And in exchange for that kind of paycheck, there are expectations. Yet to ignore the notion that Rooney is defying just about every trend, that his continued effectiveness is something closer to phenomenal than logical, feels disingenuous.

Every now and again, Rooney, like all the other strikers, will stop scoring for a spell. But it probably won't signify the end prophesized all too zealously for him. There's no sense comparing him to others, as above, because he isn't like all the others. Rooney is an English striker who just keeps on scoring, a prodigy who became and remained a superstar.

There have always been more goals. And by now, Rooney deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.