Sense of timing puts Scholes on centre stage for England

Quietly-spoken and unassuming midfielder is rated the most technically accomplished member of Eriksson's squad but must put a disappointing season with Manchester United behind him.

In a world of personal websites, footballers as style icons and an almost obsessive interest in the minutiae of the game, Paul Scholes has remained nigh on invisible.

For someone so important to the smooth functioning of Manchester United and England, very little is known about the red-head from Salford. He likes cricket, dislikes Sir Alex Ferguson's 4-5-1 formation, and, while Teddy Sheringham was spending the run-up to the 1998 World Cup being photographed with a cigarette and a can of lager in a Portuguese nightclub, Scholes was doing some DIY improvements to his home. It wasn't quite Alan Shearer creosoting the fence the day after Blackburn won the championship, but it put him a world away from certain of his team-mates. In a rare press conference in France he looked genuinely horrified at the suggestion he might drive a Ferrari.

Scholes is a throwback to a different generation of footballers; one which did not court celebrity, who played for their neighbourhood club and married a local lass who did not have an overwhelming desire to tip off photographers when she went shopping. Whenever the Manchester United players take their partners to an official function, Claire Scholes stands out because she does not possess the plastic features of a typical footballer's wife. She looks wonderfully natural, the kind of person you marry in real life.

He may have less column inches devoted to him than David Beckham or Michael Owen but Scholes is every bit as important. If England are to progress beyond the group stages of these World Cup finals, the common wisdom is that victory against Sweden in the opening match is essential. Scholes is good at beginnings.

He scored in his first full match for England, against Italy in Le Tournoi in 1997, found the mark in the opening contest of the last World Cup against Tunisia, and scored again as England raced into a wholly illusory 2-0 lead against Portugal when the curtain went up on their disastrous Euro 2000 campaign. With neither Steven Gerrard's nor David Beckham's fitness guaranteed and Joe Cole unproven at the highest level, much is weighing on Scholes' shoulders, which have had to withstand a lot from a very young age.

The quietly-spoken local lad was famously a key member of the golden Manchester United team which stormed to the FA Youth Cup a decade ago and which proved that Ferguson could win everything with kids. Although born in Salford, Scholes grew up in the Manchester suburb of Middleton, not far from Brian Kidd, who was to fashion him, the young Beckham, Giggs and Gary Neville into a force that would underpin the resurgence of Manchester United. "Paul Scholes had the best football brain of anyone I've seen as a kid," he recalled. "I first spotted him playing in a little five-a-side game and I never had any doubts he would make it."

His youth-team coach, Eric Harrison, believed that, even at 16, Scholes displayed striking similarities to the young Kenny Dalglish. "He seemed to have eyes in the back of his head; he seemed to know where every player in the pitch was and in what direction he was moving," Harrison remembers. "He could split a defence with a single pass, score every type of goal and, like Kenny Dalglish, he could handle himself in a confrontation. He is a quiet lad but kind-hearted; he accepted without a moment's hesitation when I asked if he could visit a special needs school in Halifax with Ryan Giggs."

Scholes was the last of the class of 1992 to achieve international honours, making his debut, appropriately for a Manchester lad, against South Africa at Old Trafford in 1997 and, until he began to lose form and momentum this season, his goalscoring rate bore comparisons with Bobby Charlton's.

He preferred Glenn Hoddle to Kevin Keegan as England manager, partly because Hoddle was a better tactician but also because he was more aloof and less pally with his players. Scholes genuinely felt uncomfortable when Keegan joined the England team at dinner, where he admitted there was a separate Manchester United table. He has not passed comment on Sven Goran Eriksson but the Swede's reserve would probably suit him fine.

Nevertheless, Scholes produced some of his most dramatic performances in an England shirt in Keegan's brief, fitful reign. Before his first match in charge, the European Championship qualifier against Poland in March 1999, Keegan took Scholes to one side and told him "to drop hand-grenades all over the pitch." The explosions generated by his hat-trick at Wembley helped propel a demoralised England towards a play-off against Scotland at Hampden Park, where Scholes scored twice and, ironically given his shyness, was booked for an over-exuberant celebration. He was also one of the few whose reputation did not suffer from England's disappointing performance in the Low Countries the following year and returned to be voted Manchester United's player of the season in 2001.

Thereafter, things began to go wrong. Scholes had begun his career in youth football as a striker and had returned to that role in the opening months of the 1995-96 season while Eric Cantona was serving the remainder of his ban for the assault on a fan at Selhurst Park. When Juan Sebastian Veron arrived at Old Trafford last summer, Ferguson was persuaded the talented Argentinian could be accommodated by shifting Scholes into a more attacking role, behind Ruud van Nistelrooy, who would operate as the lone striker.

The switch from 4-4-2, the foundations of United's success under Ferguson, did not work and nobody suffered more than Scholes. Jim Ryan, United's assistant manager, told a Champions' League press conference that Scholes was unhappy with the system and did not fully understand his role within it. Curiously, Ryan has not been asked to address the press again, but it was perhaps understandable that, in the midst of all this tactical tinkering, Scholes should give his worst performance for England in the desperately-tense draw with Greece at Old Trafford in October which was ultimately salvaged only by Beckham's dramatic, last-minute intervention.

This has been a season that Scholes, like many in the red half of Manchester, would prefer to forget but as good a judge as Alan Hansen has commented that Scholes is the only player England possess with genuine world-class technique. Now would be as good a time as any to prove it.