IN some ways, Wayne Rooney’s international retirement is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. If the media hadn’t reported it to death, and if it hadn’t coincided with his 200th top-flight goal, would it even be a story in the grand scheme of the England team?

Rooney hadn’t actually played for England since November and the 3-0 win over Scotland. His last goal was the penalty in the infamous defeat to Iceland at the European Championships. And he hadn’t actually scored from open play in a competitive game in more than two years.

In terms of actual on-the-pitch contribution, the impact will be minimal. Not being around for the qualifiers against Malta and Slovakia makes little or no difference in the short term. In the longer term though, it’s important for the simple reason that no Rooney equals no Rooney talk. No nutty hypotheticals about reinventing him as a “No 10” or (worse) a “deep-lying playmaker”.

No red-top stakeouts at bars and casinos.

Few national sides are as media-driven, or as media-obsessed, as England and the presence of an ageing national treasure for whom nobody can seem to find a place, like a valuable (but ugly) piece of art in your front room, did Gareth Southgate no favours.

Rooney understood this quite clearly, as is evident from his statement. Equally, he must be aware that the more he can devote himself to Everton, the more he can play like the 31-year-old superstar he is supposed to be rather than the 38-year-old washout he often appeared to be last season. And his tremendous start at Goodison – two goals in two games – is an excellent omen. Besides, if come the spring Rooney is still performing at a high level and there’s a sudden need for him with the Three Lions, unretirement is pretty straight-forward.

Without Rooney hanging around, Southgate can do the rational thing: figure out how to transplant the Dele Alli-Harry Kane partnership into the England team and finding the right players to deploy around them. The two Spurs players may well be the most-gifted attacking players at his disposal and they have the added benefit of training together every single day. Right now, they are the present and the future of the England side.

IF the Champions League groups have looked increasingly unbalanced in recent years, well, that’s because they are. Uefa’s decision in 2015 to automatically seed national champions in Pot 1 has had a hefty side-effect. It has ensured that a couple of top-seeded sides are substantially weaker than some second-seeds.

Monaco (especially now they have been gutted by departures), Spartak Moscow and Shakhtar Donetsk aren’t in the same ballpark as the Pot 2 contingent, which includes Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, Borussia Dortmund and the two Manchester clubs. Indeed, under the old system – seeding by co-efficient (a calculation based on results over the past five years in the Champions League and Europa League) – Monaco would be in Pot 3 and Spartak in Pot 4.

That is how a side like Spurs end up stuck with Dortmund and Real Madrid, Chelsea get to face Atletico Madrid and Roma and Celtic entertain Bayern, PSG and Olympiacos, whereas Manchester United have a decidedly soft landing (Basel, Benfica, CSKA Moscow).

What’s a side like Celtic – who actually had the highest coefficient in Pot 4, meaning they have pulled their weight in Europe – to do?

Well, they can finish ahead of Bayern or PSG (a tall order). Or they can pray for a “soft” group – they could just as easily have ended up with Anderlecht, Porto and Spartak Moscow (statistically hugely improbable). Or they can cheer on their fellow Scots so the Scottish league rises up Uefa’s country ranking and moves into the top eight, so if they win the league they get to be in Pot 1 (also rather a tall order, given that Scotland would have to leapfrog 15 other nations).

Or they can hope the football world wakes up and realises that the extreme polarisation and disparity of resources isn’t good for the game. And does something about it.

LAST week saw the Fancy Bears – the team of hackers responsible for, among other things, breaking into the United States Democratic Party National Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the IAAF – set their sights on football.

According to a statement on their website, they set out to prove that while football officials affirm their sport is free from doping, they are, in fact “lying”. To prove this, they released various files showing evidence of drug use in football.

There are several problems with this. First, if football believed the sport was somehow insulated from performance-enhancing drugs and other forms of doping, they would not be spendings tens of millions on drug testing. So the premise is a bit flawed.

More specifically, the nature of the Fancy Bears leak leaves a lot to be desired. There is a document citing 13 cases of controlled drug use at the 2010 World Cup. The problem is those cases all relate to “therapeutic use exemptions” (TUEs). Athletes apply for TUEs and Wada decide whether or not to grant them. Obviously they can be abused, but it’s worth noting that these are situations where athletes have effectively asked permission to take drugs to treat medical conditions.

If those conditions were bogus, sure, that’s cheating. But there is no evidence this was the case or that Wada didn’t check.

The other “trove” of documents lists 150 footballers, including women and youth footballers, who tested positive in 2015. The bulk of the cases are outside Europe and, at least at the highest level, doesn’t quite suggest

a nefarious pattern of performance-enhancing drugs. There were four incidents in Great Britain, two for cocaine, one for cannabis and one for MDMA (ecstasy).

Obviously none of this suggests we should not be vigilant. But none of it is the proverbial smoking gun, either. You almost wonder whether Fancy Bears were looking to test the credulity of certain media organisations.