I am what I am, I’m a professional footballer who loves his job, his family and who sometimes can’t believe his luck.” One charge that can never be levelled against Shearer is inconsistency of style or purpose.Eight years ago, when Blackburn Rovers made him the most expensive footballer in the history of the English game with the £3.6m they paid his first club Southampton, he was asked about the resulting pressure “What pressure?” asked the 21-year-old “I don’t see any pressure I didn’t rate myself at £3.6m Kenny Dalglish, the Blackburn manager, did that. All I’ve ever done since I was a kid was play the best that I could. I’ll always do that, whether I’m valued at three million or three bob. I think if you have that approach you will cut down any pressure on yourself Remember I earn my money doing something I love. That’s a privilege.”At a time when the prodigy Paul Gascoigne was taking his first steps toward professional self-immolation – and being advised by Terry Wogan in front of a national television audience to, “forget your critics and earn as much money as you can while you can” – Shearer ’s embryo mantra was naturally dismissed as rather anodyne.

But crusades had been launched with less conviction.Certainly his heaviest critics, who have been operating with surprising force as Shearer (disturbed by a nagging knee injury which kept him off training with the English squad yesterday) approaches his Last Hurrah as captain of England, are obliged to concede him one point. In a capricious business which can see a man’s livelihood ruined in one rash moment, one ill-conceived tackle, one physical lunge performed without balance, Shearer has created an aura of rough certainty untouched down the years by players of far greater natural talent. Legendary names such as Finney and Charlton are revered even today by football aficionados, but in their playing days they could never assume, as Shearer has for some years, that their names would be the first on the team list written down by the England coach. It has been Shearer’s reward for relentless application and, his critics would say, the deftest touch in the matter of projecting his competitive personality.Shearer’s first professional manager, fellow Geordie Lawrie McMenemy, likened the raw young footballer to a “gunslinger, old beyond his years”. At Southampton, Shearer would listen attentively, nod at all the right places at the team talks and was always quick to make a joke. He was popular among his new team-mates but, even as a teenager, he had staked out his territory.

“The image of a gunfighter struck me very strongly,” says McMenemy. “Someone might make a harsh tackle on the training field, give him a jab, but he didn’t spring back impetuously. You just saw his eyes narrow and you thought to yourself, oh dear, he’s stored that one away.’ You could bet your life retribution would come quickly enough.”It meant that years later, when two directors of Newcastle United (who paid another record fee of £15m for Shearer in 1996) were caught on tape while carousing in a Marbella brothel, not the least of their miscalculations was the depicting of Shearer as “Mary Poppins”. Ruthless, calculating, self-serving to a high degree, possibly… but Mary Poppins? It was a bit like stressing the folksiness of Joe Stalin.For confirmation, we need only take the reference of Neil Lennon, a busy and not notably reticent young midfielder at Leicester City. Lennon lunged at Shearer in a game at Newcastle during the approach to the 1998 World Cup in France Shearer’s reaction was swift and harsh Some would say savage. It put the Football Association and the then England team coach Glenn Hoddle on the most delicate of spots.