'He has lost his shine...

So where was he? Where was Goldenballs? Did he score? No. Did he show up at all? We hardly saw him until after the game and then we saw a crop-headed stubble-cheeked stormtrooper who, when it comes to glamour, might as well have been a Croatian bonehead.

We have lost our young Apollo. The magic has ebbed away and all that is left is hard work and intelligence. Beckham is no longer the star of the England team; he's now the captain, watching over his players like a father, gaining possession only to place the ball where the team can make the most of it.

His burden is to be ruthlessly marked by nervous opponents, fouled whenever he looks like breaking free, too often winded and on the floor.

It's hard to remember that it's only six years since he got himself sent off in the World Cup for reacting petulantly to a foul. Now he is the soul of toughness and patience.

He has endured rejection by his father figure, Sir Alex Ferguson, who would have sold him off like a brokenwinded horse; he has struggled to integrate with Real Madrid; he has weakened and fallen into the arms of Rebecca Loos. Somehow he silenced the jackals of the press and Loos, too.

How he did this will remain a mystery. There's not much mystery as to why Victoria stayed with him; she had two sons and nowhere else to go. But she, too, has had a sharp reality check. The glory has rubbed off both of them. They are still wealthy, still style-setters, but they are going to have to think about retrenching. Their money is no longer just to be spent.

Which doesn't mean that Beckham's sporting career is over. It just means that the brilliant boy has become a useful man. The transition was necessary, but it remains to be seen whether Beckham will survive it.

He exploited his boyhood to the hilt, rewriting the masculinity rule book. We never knew if he was going to turn up with a pony tail or corn-rows, whether he was going to wear an Armani suit or a Jean Paul Gaultier sarong, or whether he was going to reduce Ferguson to apoplexy by skipping training to be with a sick child.

He bore the hostility of less secure men without feeling any necessity to justify his way of doing things. They said that his wife wore the trousers, but they were wrong. They wanted him to deepen his voice and to act more manly, but he ignored them. Now his voice is darker to be sure, but he's a sadder and a wiser man.

Ever since Beckham invested in his first designer hairdo and became overnight a glamorous blond, he's had to put up with constant predictions of his imminent downfall.

When he played well, it was no more than was expected and even then it wasn't enough. He was never FIFA World Player of the Year, and his teammate at Real Madrid, Zinedine Zidane, won that title three times. He couldn't even beat Lennox Lewis to be British Sports Personality of the Year; twice he had to keep smiling while Lennox hefted the trophy.

He could never have been good enough for long enough to take the bile out of the lesser men who earned a living from spinning words about him. The parasites crawled all over him, nipping, sucking and growing fat like ticks. It was nothing to them if they reduced his resistance, if they wore him down and destroyed the talent that kept them all in business.

As for Beckham, he lived his life as if they weren't there. Only Beckham would have strutted out on the balcony of his Portuguese hotel in his briefs, and stood there adjusting his scrotum as if there was never a paparazzo in the world. Only Beckham would have flown his favourite tattooist out to Madrid so that he could have a ninth hideous emblem scratched onto his perfect body.

We are told that Beckham is not the right captain for England because he can't inspire his team. It's funny that in a desperate attempt to garner some charisma for the national team, a campaign to establish Thierry Henry as a Beckhamstyle superstar was launched by the French.

Henry's soulful features were suddenly to be seen on billboards, in TV ads, on the covers of magazines about everything from fashion and men's health to DIY. But while Becks can sell sunglasses, mobile phones, razor blades, Pepsi, Brylcreem, Jaffa cakes and even used cars (in Japan), "Titi" can't sell anything.

Beckham may be considered to lack charisma because he is soft-voiced and unassertive in speech, but if he starts wearing a diamond earring, diamond earrings suddenly bloom on the ears of football players all over the world.

There are some who realise that his poncey fashions and proliferating tattoos are part homage to gangsta rap; a bit more is acknowledgment of his Essex roots, as if he were just another East End "jewellery boy" flashing his Cartier bracelet and Jacob watch.

Insecure men would panic if caught wearing a sarong but Beckham doesn't miss a beat. When Victoria says he sometimes wears her thong, men feel panic and women just wish they could see him in it.

As an athlete, Beckham will never be allowed to be a man in his own right. He will always have to play junior to an older, less secure but more powerful man whose anxieties are mocked by his metrosexual lifestyle. Beckham didn't fall out with Sir Alex Ferguson; it was Ferguson who couldn't handle him and decided coldly to dump him on Barcelona.

Beckham quietly and effectively resisted, betaking himself instead to Real Madrid, home of the greatest of his contemporaries, where he would still have something to learn.

The rejection must have hurt. Since he was a kid Beckham had just wanted to play for Manchester United and they had done well out of him. But then it must have hurt more to hear enraged fans screaming at him when England lost to Portugal in 2000 that they wished Brooklyn would die of cancer.

If the shine has rubbed off our golden boy, it's because we rubbed it off him. He will survive to re-invent himself again. And again.