It's all so easy for the boy wonder

SOCCER Post-match reaction: Great footballers tend to make everything look and sound easy.

Wayne Rooney, a player who surely stands poised on the threshold of greatness, certainly lived up to that tradition at the post-match news conference in Coimbra last night, offering the most disarmingly simple of explanations for England's winning 3-0 performance.

"I'm glad we played well but we could have played better. We weren't so good in the first half but in the end we won 3-0 so that's not so bad," said the Merseysider.

What about your goals, Wayne, can you talk us through them?

"I just go out looking to do well for the team. For the first goal, Michael put the ball on my head and I couldn't really miss. For the second, I just hit it as hard as I could and it went in."

It is easy, really, isn't it. No complicated tactical nonsense, no discussions about 4-4-2 or 4-2-3-1 or whatever, just give the boy the ball and he will score for you.

So then, are those the most important goals of your young career, Wayne?

"I suppose the second goal is the most important because that really killed them off."

So it did, too. In the post-match analysis yesterday evening, it was difficult to get away from Rooney.

Even the defeated Swiss coach, Jakob Kuhn, called him a "fantastic player", adding: "It was a huge pleasure to watch a player like this, even if he was playing for England."

The Swiss coach did concede his sense of disappointment, but did feel that his defender Bernt Haas was harshly dealt with when being sent off.

"For the second game in a row, we ended up with just 10 men on the field. It would be nice to end up with 11. However, for the 100th time, I've got to remind you that our potential is relatively small," he said.

The only sour post-match note came from the Swiss press officer who went beyond his duties as translator to add his own pithy comment re England and Rooney's second goal, alleging that when Darius Vassell fouled Patrick Muller when winning the ball he then knocked a cross to Rooney: "That second goal came from a foul by them. It was hard enough being down to 10 men, but we found ourselves playing 10 men against 12 in the second half. Everybody but the referee (Russian Valentin Ivanov) saw the foul on Muller," commented the somewhat discomfited press officer.

England manager Sven Goran Eriksson admitted to feeling relieved that England had got back to winning ways in the wake of that traumatic late loss to France on Sunday night: "You never really know how the team will react. Switzerland did better than us in the first half but once we got the goal we settled and the longer the game went, the better we played."

Rooney, voted man of the match by UEFA's technical team, inevitably earned himself a few words of praise from his coach, who commented in an echo of his Swiss colleague: "He is simply a fantastic player, ready for any stage. Today he scored two good goals, one more beautiful than the other."

Eriksson, too, had words of praise for midfielder Steven Gerrard, commenting: "Gerrard is no surprise for me. He is a complete player. You can play him on the right, in the centre, on the left. You can ask him to do a holding job or to do an attacking job. He has everything."

So, where do England go from now, Sven?

"We have to win against Croatia on Monday, we will have to do another big performance.

"Mind you, after we played so well against France, I thought things might be easier today.

"Yet, we all saw that they came out and played better than us in the first half.

"However, I am optimistic."

With good reason, too.