Stan Hey: One Wayne Rooney, there's only one Wayne Rooney ...

There we all were, depressed by war, anxious about the Budget, terrified by international viruses and wondering how long it would be before some good news came along. It arrived last Wednesday night in the unlikely setting of Sunderland's Stadium of Light and in the even

more unlikely shape of Wayne Rooney, the 17-year-old Merseyside marvel whose full English international début thrilled the nation.

It wasn't just Rooney's sustained bursts of skill during the match against Turkey that gave us a reason to be cheerful, it was also the sight of a young sportsman taking to the big stage with no sign of fear or inhibition. If a Turkish defender came to challenge him, Rooney rebuffed him with a swerve and a surge of pace. If he was tackled, he tackled back. And nor did the essential selfishness required of a goalscorer blind him to the opportunities to pass to team-mates around him.

In other spheres of our culture – music or acting perhaps – such levels of achievement would have seen the performer in question hailed as a prodigy, invited on to arty chatshows and photographed for all the smart supplements. But with football, it's different. Rooney needs wrapping in cotton wool, not just to protect him against the would-be hangers-on, but also against the creation of a potentially destructive belief within himself that he is special.

This stems partly from a typically Protestant instinct that outrageous talent is doomed, and partly from a paternalistic notion that 17-year-olds shouldn't be exposed to the excesses of public life, of which celebrity obsession is currently the worst. Even within his own small circle of English Premiership football, Rooney has been unleashed only in small doses, making tantalising appearances as a substitute for his club, Everton, one of which featured his remarkable match-winning goal against champions Arsenal last October. It was a goal that confirmed the rumours of his precocious talent.

The Everton manager, David Moyes, has rationed Rooney's subsequent exposure and begged both the media and England not to make too many demands on him. This might be considered reasonable given Rooney's age and size – his five-and-a-half-feet frame may be chunky but seeing his baby face on the pitch still conjures images of child labour. It's also true that on one of his few public excursions – a televised sports awards ceremony – Rooney mumbled and artlessly picked his nose when the microphones and cameras were thrust at him.

Behind the protection is a professional fear that too much praise will turn Rooney's head. He'll become a media tart, more interested in appearing on television than getting out on the pitch. He'll fall prey to all the freebies that are the plankton of celebrity life: parties, film premières, late nights in designer bars, girls with a kiss-and-tell-a-tabloid agenda. That's how professional football thinks.

Then there is "burn-out", either through the physical stresses of the game, or through frustrated ambition. The last "next big thing", Joe Cole of West Ham, could be seen in the England Under-21 side on Tuesday, playing ineffective and self-indulgent football in equal measure, trying too hard to prove himself again.

And looming darkest over Rooney's future, say the pros, are the spectres of George Best and Paul Gascoigne, and umpteen other football prodigies who fell into dissolution, leaving only wistful snapshots of brilliance rather than a structured, movie-length career. The cautious handling of young talent even extended five years ago to the 18-year-old Michael Owen, whom the England coach of the time, Glenn Hoddle, felt unable to trust with more than a place on the substitutes' bench. "Not a natural goalscorer," was the coach's judgement, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Yet when Owen was fully pitched in, against Argentina, in a key World Cup match in St Etienne, he delivered a fantastic goal and a fearless performance that was virtually matched by Rooney's against Turkey last Wednesday. So are we wrong to overprotect these young English talents, even if the urge is well intentioned?

In the sporting cultures of many other countries, there are fewer inhibitions about dealing with the prodigious. The Indian cricket authorities were happy to rush the school-age batsman Sachin Tendulkar into the international arena. And South American countries had little hesitation in announcing such football talents as Diego Maradona of Argentina, a full international at 16, or Pele of Brazil, playing in the 1958 World Cup at just 17. Ronaldo, also of Brazil, was the most recent wonderkid, though his "breakdown" before the 1998 World Cup final suggested that too much had been expected of him, while Maradona learnt hard lessons quickly, dazzled the world but veered into the abyss in the latter part of his career.

Britain's instincts of what youth is capable of dealing with are defined by our legislative confusion over the minimum ages at which our children should fight a war, vote, drink alcohol, drive a car or have sex legally. It took our Swedish coach, Sven Eriksson, to break football's cultural taboo, to pick the youngest English international in 120 years and put his, and our, faith in the kid they now call Roonaldo.