Football: Icon on the Wayne

Wayne Rooney has amassed a dizzying resume of honours but lacks a career-defining performance. Photo / AP

Like his idol Mike Tyson, Rooney is fading before hitting very top his game.

Mike Tyson had the world at his fists before he was even old enough to drink in the United States, becoming the youngest world heavyweight champion at the age of 20, unifying the division one year later and threatening to obliterate every record and landmark in front of him.

By the time Iron Mike had reached 30, however, the aura had gone, the limbs had slowed and the early predictions of greatness had been drowned out by accusations of an unfulfilled talent and a failure to claim the place reserved for him at the summit of his sporting landscape.

Tyson had failed to heed the maxim that you should always leave them wanting more - he was too good, too young and ultimately fell short of maintaining such impossible standards because he gave them everything at the very beginning.

As Wayne Rooney prepares to mark his 30th birthday, he will do so fending off claims that he, just like his idol Tyson, shot for the stars too early and reached his prime before he was even able to appreciate the scale of his achievements. He has broken records, and will go on to break others, but there is just that sense that there could and should have been so much more.

Tyson never did dislodge Muhammad Ali as The Greatest, and Rooney? Did the so-called golden boy of English football ever live up to the hype or is he destined to be remembered as one who promised so much, but failed to deliver?

Rooney is in danger of allowing his reputation to be defined by what is happening now, with his loss of form, and that old combustible spark, framing the picture of a player who, once his career is actually truly assessed, has actually been everything, and more, that could have been wished of him when he broke into Everton's first team as a 16-year-old.

Consider Rooney's achievements. Five Premier League titles, one Champions League winners' medal, Footballer of the Year and PFA Player of the Year awards, 107 England caps, his country's all-time leading goalscorer and, almost certainly at some point, Manchester United's all-time leading goalscorer. There have also been League Cups, Community Shields and Fifa Club World Cup success during his time at Old Trafford, not to mention iconic goals against Newcastle United, Manchester City, Fenerbahce and others.

For many, however, all of this has still not been enough. Steven Gerrard, in contrast, with an honours list dwarfed by Rooney's, left Liverpool at the end of last season feted as a player who had wrung every last drop from his potential to become arguably Anfield's greatest player.

This is the contradiction of Rooney's record. If the next 16-year-old wonderkid is told he will near 30 with Rooney's CV, he should turn to the heavens and offer his grateful thanks but, for some reason, it has not been quite enough in Wayne's world.

It is true that Rooney has not produced a defining performance in the Champions League - no Roy Keane or Gerrard-style heroics to drag United to glory - or delivered on the international stage since Euro 2004. If Rooney's career ends with those same boxes unticked, it will add weight to the argument that he never became what he should have been.

Injuries have robbed him of the chance to perform at his best on the international stage, while at club level his personal honours could have been even greater but for the sacrifices he and others at Old Trafford made to provide the platform for Cristiano Ronaldo to destroy opponents in his final two seasons at United - the years when Rooney was at his very peak.

Rooney has not been able to rise into the stratosphere alongside the likes of Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, but perhaps he was never destined to do so.

Ronaldo and Messi have seen their careers rise and rise, but neither started quite so brilliantly as Rooney. Just like his great hero Tyson, Rooney set off at such a pace that it was inevitable it could never last. Telegraph Group Ltd