James Lawton: Rage and frustration threaten to destroy Rooney's rare talent

Ivan Helguera, for the moment at least, is right. Wayne Rooney is all those things he was said to be by the Real Madrid defender: overstrung, overrated and for the first time in his astonishingly precocious career he cannot defend the charge that he is, as he presented himself on the greatest stage of his infant career, a liability to England.

Ivan Helguera, for the moment at least, is right. Wayne Rooney is all those things he was said to be by the Real Madrid defender: overstrung, overrated and for the first time in his astonishingly precocious career he cannot defend the charge that he is, as he presented himself on the greatest stage of his infant career, a liability to England.

These are hard words for anyone who cares to believe that the kid from the wrong side of Liverpool is possibly the best thing to have happened to football in the British isles since the birth of George Best. But here in one of the great temples of the game Rooney, aided and abetted, it has to be said, by older colleagues in their mood of anarchy, let down both his country and himself.

When the England coach, Sven Goran Eriksson, pulled off Rooney a few minutes before half-time he was doing the job of the Greek referee Georges Kasnaferis. Rooney should have had a yellow card for a horribly crude tackle on the Spanish flier Joaquin and then a red card should have been produced when he pushed goalkeeper Iker Casillas in the back and sent him flying into the railings behind the goal.

Both offences were the ugly fruit of a mixture of rage and frustration. Rage that he had lost control of the ball. Frustration that he couldn't recover it.

The proper reaction is that Rooney and his advisers are told that this was behaviour well below what can be reasonably expected from a member of an international team - even one whose captain is allowed to walk away without even the gentlest rap for admitting that he deliberately broke the laws of football while earning a yellow card and suspension.

Eriksson, whatever the pressure for results, should let Rooney know that he needs to go away and rethink his attitude to the game. Maybe even take a little rage therapy. The Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, might also be told that his £28m prodigy is in danger of destroying a wondrous talent.

Ashley Cole, having already received a yellow card, was also in danger of dismissal when he shoulder-charged Raul over the touchline... and then pushed the Spanish coach, Luis Aragones, in the chest.

Cole, however, does have a workable defence. If England played ugly, pathetically at times, they were more than matched by the racist content of many of the cries of the Spanish fans. Cole, and then later Shaun Wright-Phillips, when he replaced the toothless and irrelevant David Beckham after 58 minutes, caught the worst of it. In Cole you could see the anger rising before your eyes.

Was Eriksson right to send out the inflamed Cole in the second half? On balance, you have to say yes. If he was confident enough that his player could control a legitimate anger, he had every right not to bow before this institutionalised bane of some of southern Europe's most civilised cities.

In all of this we lost a little of the fact that England were utterly outclassed and that Beckham had failed miserably to make the impact on a night which he said promised to be one of the greatest of his career. He repeatedly strayed out of position, gave the ball away and allowed the Spanish free movement down their left.

Beckham plainly wanted to dazzle the Bernabeu. Mano a mano is not supposed to happen in a team sport, but then the same is true of the galactico system at Real, which for several months left Michael Owen feeling like an urchin looking for scraps from the high table of Beckham and fellow members of the celebrity club. It meant that on a night when Madrilenos found little or no compulsion to come to the Bernabeu, except perhaps to taunt England's black players, the idea of the England captain and his English club-mate competing hand to hand for prestige in the Spanish capital was not so easy to resist.

Beckham was plainly in need of the oxygen of spectacular achievement, a requirement heightened by the decision of a leading Madrid football paper to compare the record of the team with and without the man who went absent in such ludicrous circumstances in the World Cup qualifier against Wales.

The reality, certainly, is that Beckham's departure through injury just happened to coincide with a huge improvement in Real's level of performance. Last night the implication for Beckham was plain enough. It would be nice to cause something of a stir.

It didn't happen for him - nor for Owen, a new hero at the Bernabeu after his run of six goals, most of them vital in the Real renaissance, and also returned to his status of an automatic selection for England with his vital goal and impressive leadership in place of Beckham on a hellish night in Azerbaijan last month.

Owen was stranded at the front of dysfunctional midfield and beside the disastrously immature Rooney. He will surely see the big game against Barcelona, if he is called into the action, as not a trial but a deliverance.