Rooney rediscovering form despite lack of goals

Despite a lack of goals this season, Wayne Rooney appears to be rediscovering his form.

Jonathan Wilson writes about whether goals scored is the measure of a player's performance.

Wayne Rooney didn't score on Saturday. He did help set up three of Manchester United's five goals against Birmingham City and generally looked as though he may at last be approaching his best, but he didn't net himself. So a sub-plot in most of the reviews of the game was the fact that Rooney failed to score, and that he has managed just one goal from open play for his club since March. He is in a "goal-drought," and no matter what he does between now and scoring half a dozen goals, that will always be the first thing that is mentioned about him after games.

The obsession with who scores goals is mystifying. The idea that attackers attack, defenders defend and midfielders do a bit of each was outdated a century ago, and yet it weirdly persists; soccer, as the great Russian Boris Arkadiev was preaching the thirties, is a combination game, devoid of discrete roles. Last season Rooney scored 25 league goals, more than he had scored in the previous two seasons combined. United won only the Carling Cup. In each of the two previous years, United won the league and reached the Champions League final, winning one of them. Yet it was the third season, most seem to think, in which Rooney found his best form. It was common at this time last year to read paeans talking about how he'd emerged from the shadow of Cristiano Ronaldo to occupy his true position. Yet that emergence was probably at least in part behind England's poor showing at the World Cup.

In 2007-08, Cristiano Ronaldo scored 31 league goals, and was eulogized as Rooney was last season. To score than many goals is, of course, a startling achievement, but that season United picked up 2.38 point per Premier League game Ronaldo started. When Tevez started it picked up 2.44; when Rooney started it picked up 2.52. That's one measure, and it's fairly crude, but it does at least give an indication that goals aren't everything.