EURO 2004 Qualifying: For England's supporters the only lingering regret after Wednesday night's victory over Turkey concerned the need to wait a couple of months for another chance to gaze once more upon the sight of Wayne Rooney in the national shirt.

And if UEFA decides to inflict the obvious punishment on the FA for allowing fans to invade the pitch after England's goals at the Stadium of Light, they may have to wait even longer, perhaps until the visit of Liechtenstein in September.

Rooney played no part in either of the goals that took England to the top of Group Seven but his presence helped infuse the team with a collective vigour unseen since the first half of their match against Denmark in Japan last summer. His alertness, his desire for the ball, his unpredictability and his belief that he can do damage to any defence were significant factors in England's swift improvement.

No doubt the criticism the team received after the drab showing in Vaduz had made them determined to show themselves in something closer to their true light. It was always likely, too, that they would raise their game against the Turks, now a genuinely world-class side whose performance in Japan put them on a level with England, in the sense that both teams were knocked out by the eventual champions. But, if you were looking for the factors that enabled England to shift up a gear, the arrival of Rooney was at least as important as the midfield's return into a diamond formation.

The day before the match some sections of the media were chasing around in an effort to confirm the rumour that Clive Woodward would be giving a special motivational talk to Sven-Goran Eriksson's team. It was a rather good April Fool joke, of course, but Eriksson certainly followed Woodward's example in one respect: he changed a winning team because he thought he could make it better.

So poor Emile Heskey was dropped, after creating the opportunities for both goals against Liechtenstein and enduring a deluge of mostly ignorant criticism. But not even the member of the Emile Heskey Liberation Front distributing propaganda leaflets to the media outside the Stadium of Light on Wednesday could deny that Rooney brought the team an extra dimension.

The effect on Michael Owen, who went off injured on Wednesday, will be interesting to observe. For the first time since Alan Shearer left the international scene, the Liverpool striker has a partner who does not believe that his principal role is to help Owen score goals. Perhaps Eriksson, after all, is not the dummy depicted in some of the papers before this match. His decision to put Rooney into the starting line-up had been made, he said, on Sunday, the day after the Liechtenstein game, but he had kept it quiet because he did not want to subject the teenager to what would surely have been a blizzard of publicity.

He did not add that in order to do the boy that favour, he had to be prepared to accept a couple of days' worth of pretty vivid abuse himself.

David Moyes, meanwhile, has called for Rooney to be omitted from England's squad for next month's friendly in South Africa next month in an effort to avoid the teenager suffering burn-out after his first season in senior football. "What is the point of us trying to look after him if he is going to be travelling away all over the world?"

Talk of a rift between Moyes and Eriksson was dismissed by Everton's deputy chairman Bill Kenwright yesterday, although he also maintains that the club's aim is to stop the teenager falling into the same trap as Paul Gascoigne, whose career became blighted when his private life became too public.