It was an appalling weekend for English soccer. On Saturday, in the space of a few seconds, England’s chances of winning the upcoming World Cup slumped alarmingly when boy-wonder Wayne Rooney, playing for his club Manchester United, broke the fourth metatarsal in his right foot.

This is Wayne Rooney, the 20-year-old wunderkind who in just two years has become the most talked-about player in England, who is repeatedly being hailed as the best player in the world,a working class boy who recently signed a 12-year, $5 million deal to write a five-volume autobiography.

Wrote the staid London Times, “England Holds Its Breath” as Rooney began the race to get fit. Suddenly Rooney’s extraordinary talents have been upstaged by a tiny bone. Metatarsal definitions and anatomical drawings are filling the sports pages,and the medical experts are having their say. The most optimistic prognoses are that it will take between six to eight weeks for Rooney to be fit again,which is cutting it close. England’s first World Cup game, against Paraguay, is on June 10.

If you’re of the pessimistic persuasion, Rooney is out of the World Cup, because you know from past experience that healing and achieving total fitness always take longer than the forecasts. Rooney himself can vouch for that. In 2004 he suffered an almost identical injury – that time it was the fifth metatarsal. Eight weeks for recovery, the experts said, but it took 12.

Gloom now shrouds the English soccer scene. “We’ve gone from possible World Cup winners to outsiders,” Sir Bobby Robson, a former coach of the England national team, said. Steven Gerrard, a midfield pillar of the current team, piled on the dismay: “It would be a disaster for England if we had to go to the World Cup without Wayne … I think it’s impossible to have a successful World Cup without him.”

Former England captain Terry Butcher, now coaching in Scotland, admitted that Rooney’s injury was a “sickening” blow to England’s chances, but said firmly, “I wouldn’t take him. It would be a huge gamble. You have got to have really fit players, because the demands are extraordinary.”

Butcher recalled what happened at the 2002 World Cup, when David Beckham suffered a metatarsal break seven weeks before the tournament. On that occasion, coach Sven Goran Eriksson included Beckham on the roster and the midfielder played in all four of England’s games, though admitted later he was not fully fit. “He was miles off the pace in that tournament,” Butcher said.

Eriksson is making the best of a bad situation. He’ll give Rooney “every chance” to prove his fitness, which means taking him to Germany even if he’ll be fit only for the later rounds of the tournament.

Eriksson, like every World Cup coach, has been living with the fear of players being ruled out by last-minute injuries, but this is the cruelest possible blow. Rooney,Eriksson said,”is one of the best players in the world.”An opinion widely shared, indeed trumpeted, by the English press. Rooney has been built up to the point where a myth has been created: England cannot win without him.

The image of Rooney, from the start of England’s qualifying campaign two years ago,has been one of bustling,goalscoring skill allied to the infectious, unquenchable optimism of youth: “Of course we’re going to win the World Cup,” he said in February.

That was before Black Saturday. The game was Chelsea vs.Manchester United, a key game for Chelsea, for which a win would mean clinching the English Premier League championship. A pumped-up Rooney took only seven minutes to make his mark on the game – and on the Chelsea defender John Terry, himself a key member of the England World Cup squad. Rooney’s clumsy tackle sent Terry to the sidelines with a foot injury that, at half time, was treated with 10 stitches.

Chelsea prevailed and ManU was duly swept aside 3-0, but Chelsea’s onfield celebrations were clouded by what had happened only 15 minutes earlier, when Rooney was carried off the field in evident pain.

It happened like this: Rooney was dribbling the ball into the Chelsea penalty area when he was tackled by defender Paulo Ferreira, who poked the ball away and brought Rooney crashing to earth in one sliding movement.

Referee Mike Dean saw nothing wrong with the tackle and Ferreira seems to have totally escaped public criticism for what the BBC reported as “an innocuous challenge.”

That view seems to me utterly wrong. The rules say this: “A tackle which endangers the safety of an opponent must be sanctioned as serious foul play.”That means a red card ejection.

Yet it would be unfair to heap blame on Ferreira, who is not known as a violent player and who ironically spent part of last season recuperating from … a fractured metatarsal.

Ferreira was only doing what players all over the world – but particularly in England, where the sliding tackle is a hallowed part of the game – are regularly allowed to get away with.

Earlier this year, FIFA emphasized the point in a carefully worded a statement, ruling that any dangerous tackle,from the rear, side, or front should be punished with a red card.

But referees simply do not enforce the rule. The usual justification for their non-calls is that the tackler got the ball before making contact with the opponent and that therefore the tackle must have been “clean.”

This was certainly true of Ferreira, but his forceful slide made it absolutely certain that he would also take out Rooney in a way that, inevitably, would “endanger his safety.”

Rooney’s injury is the latest to hit the England team in the ongoing Curse of the Metatarsals.The injury is now said to account for about a third of soccer players’ foot fractures. The Beckham 2002 and Rooney 2004 injuries are now history, but alongside Rooney 2006 there are three more England players with metatarsal fractures who are fighting to get themselves fit enough to make the England roster: defenders Ashley Cole and Ledley King, and forward Michael Owen, who played 30 minutes on Saturday, his first action for four months.

Eriksson only has two weeks to decide whether to include Rooney on his roster for Germany. FIFA regulations require that Eriksson name his full 23-man roster by May 15.

pgardner@nysun.com