One of the side effects of living in London and caring about football is that you're never far away from the Wayne Rooney debate. That applies to both versions: the Manchester United one and the England one, which has the delightful coda of also being a captaincy debate.
With this being an international break, the focus was firmly on the latter. Some papers called for him being stripped of the captaincy in favor of John Stones. Others revealed that he was going to be dropped for Tuesday's clash with Slovenia despite still training with the team.
If you have no interest in this, I don't blame you. Feel free to skip to the next item. But the way the Rooney tale is unfolding is in many ways emblematic of a different malaise: the inability to see the forest for the trees.
Rooney was just OK in England's 2-0 win over Malta. It's true that scoring five or six might have mitigated the headlines and yes, England weren't as good after the break following a first half when they could have scored four or five. But, really, what does it matter?
You have an interim boss, Gareth Southgate, whose aim is simply not to screw things up until the Football Association decide what they want to do. You have an opponent who puts eight guys in front of the keeper and shows little interest in getting forward until late in the game. You have a captain, Rooney, who is under fire for club and country and who simply wants to play his way out of his perceived slump. You're not going to learn anything significant from any of this. All that matters is that England were bright in patches and won the game.
Frankly, the debate over the captain's armband is grotesque. Rooney doesn't play well, so you punish him by giving the little strip of cloth to somebody else? Huh? If he's not good enough, drop him. If he is, keep him in there and let him have the armband, not least because he has more caps than the next two outfield players combined.
Most nations give the captain's armband to somebody who is pretty much a guaranteed starter and who is the most experienced. That's Rooney -- until he's dropped. Once he's gone, it's a bit tricky because it's hard to tell who is a nailed-on regular on this team. Maybe Joe Hart (for now), maybe Stones (but then he only has 12 caps), maybe somebody else.
What you don't do is heap even more pressure on Southgate, particularly given his interim status. After all, he should not be making decisions that affect the long-term well-being of England. And given the way the media (and Rooney) are, changing the England captain is, for better or worse, one of those decisions.