Wayne Rooney proves worthy of the honour as England's latest captain After the chaos of the past few weeks, Roy Hodgson turned to Rooney for stability, order, gravitas: again, an unlikely outcome after the Manchester United man's stamp on Ricardo Carvalho's unmentionables at the 2006 World Cup. Or, indeed, after his bark into a camera in protest at the grumpiness of England fans in Cape Town following the atrocious 0-0 draw with Algeria four years later. Events tend to move quickly in Rooney's life. At the start of this campaign he was out of sorts and out of the United starting XI. As he nursed his gashed thigh, pundits speculated that both of his main jobs had been given away to newcomers by Sir Alex Ferguson. The playmaking role had passed to Shinji Kagawa while Robin van Persie had waltzed in from Arsenal to score the goals. So now here he was leading England, lean and lively, with another child on the way, and doubts about his club form in abeyance. Never mind that the opposition had lost 54 competitive fixtures in a row and had not scored in one for four years. Grumble not about their maladroit passing, clumsy tackling and joint-lowest ranking on Fifa's worldwide list. Every political career has to start somewhere. On Tuesday in Warsaw, for England's big test of nerve, that little red cotton band will return to another Merseysider, Steven Gerrard, who seemed instantly elevated and enlivened by the bestowing of the honour in Hodgson's early days. In one of Fabio Capello's many misreadings of the culture he walked into for a £5million annual reward, Gerrard was considered too introspective to be a leader of men. Instead, Capello invested his faith in Terry, with a brief interruption to allow the Wayne Bridge furore to subside, thus entraining events that led to his own downfall. So the England captaincy does retain a certain mystic power. It can contort the nation's feelings and bring managers down. But it can also breath fire into Gerrard and perhaps make Rooney feel just a bit more embedded in the whole English tradition. An old managerial trick is to tame a 'difficult" star by loading him up with "responsibility." The idea is to calm him down by manufacturing a sense of duty to the other players. Rooney made all the right moves, chatting to the mascots, greeting Bernstein warmly, introducing the dignitaries to the team and mumbling the national anthem just about well enough to ward off pro-passion newspaper columnists. Afterwards he admitted: "It was great to captain my country at Wembley. It is a great feeling and a great honour and something I will treasure for the rest of my life. It was a big difference leading a side out. Normally I have been stood behind a player but to lead the team up and look up and see the crowd and sense the atmosphere is quite a feeling, and something I am honoured to do. Of course, it gives you a taste for it for further along in my career. As a player, you want to do it. If you get an opportunity to captain your country, it is something you need to grab with both hands. Steven is the captain at the moment and he is a great leader for us but in the future, hopefully, the captaincy will happen. But for the moment, Steven is our captain and he will continue to lead by example for us. But it is a great honour. I have kept the armband and will keep it forever. I gave my shirt to one of their players and had to give my shorts away as well. That was a first. It has certainly never happened before! Earlier, Rooney had repeated his remorse for the senseless foul in Montenegro that sent Capello and an FA delegation scuttling to Switzerland to plead for mercy against an original three-match suspension. That was a stupid thing to do. I regretted it the moment I did it. Reliable sources say the contrition was real. Since then Rooney has been booked only once for club and country in 44 outings. A bigger issue than self-discipline has been the stagnation of his talent, the dips in muscle tone and the sense that his career had reached a T-junction. In a week when the FA allowed Ashley Cole to call them a "bunch of t-----" without ejecting him front the England squad - and then introduced a code of conduct - Rooney could claim to inhabit a world far above racial abuse investigations and twitter rants. He was up there above Shearer, Finney and Lofthouse.