BLANKENHAIN — One of the bizarre realities of a major tournament is how it plays with the space-time continuum.
Or, in other words, how long ago does Iceland at Wembley feel (less than one month before England’s quarter-final against Switzerland, calendar fans)? We are older, greyer and this team is still damn difficult to get a handle on. That at least hasn’t changed.
Ah, 7 June, those sepia-tinted days of yore when everyone was frantically panicking that England’s defensive absentees and injuries might ruin things for a prodigious attacking corps. Now it’s which of our excellent stand-in centre-backs gets to keep their place and should we drop our record goalscorer. Welcome to the England headache whack-a-mole.
There are two trains of thought here. The first is that Harry Kane has been very bad in this tournament, or at least has been such a side actor that he has had no chance to be good. Kane, who had emphatic main character energy during major tournaments in 2018 and 2022 – for better and worse – has lost that mojo.
The evidence: watch the quarter-final back. Kane had nine touches of the ball during the first half. He completed eight passes in 109 minutes before being substituted, of which one was made within 30 yards of Switzerland’s goal.
There were three balls into the box in the first half where we might have expected Kane to dash-strike-score as we know he can.
Each time he seemed on the balls of his feet, like a snoozy security guard.
Then there’s the positive (NB: possibly to the point of ignoring your own eyes) spin.
England have been sluggish in the main but produced in flickering moments in this tournament and maybe that’s enough; so has Kane. He has scored a winner and an opening goal. He has – and this feels entirely ridiculous – had more shots than all but four players at this tournament and none of them have more goals.
Something isn’t quite right; on that we can agree. One theory is that troublesome back injury, which caused a rush of pre-tournament panic – the broken metatarsal for the TikTok generation – is still causing Kane grief, lingering as they had been since before Bayern Munich’s Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid.
The alternative is that Kane is merely being stymied by the tactics and failing to adapt.
If the solution of whether to play Jude Bellingham or Phil Foden as the roaming No 10 has been solved by allowing both to do it, it complicates Kane’s own love of dropping deep. His forte is drifting to meet midfield, then playing passes on the spin to overlapping wingers and then getting into the box for the return. That works with Leroy Sane and Serge Gnabry; less so with Bellingham and Foden and a wing-back formation.
Kane is also likely suffering for the tactical conservatism of the team as a whole, exacerbated by the defensive worries England travelled to Germany with. For all the criticism of Southgate, England have faced the lowest xG per match of any team in the tournament. But playing closer towards your own goal means that when Kane drops deep it’s not midway in the opposition’s half but 20 yards into his own.
As ever, the advice from the sidelines is heated and varied. Start Ivan Toney, because he would be the best fully-fit version of Kane. Start Ollie Watkins, because he was converted into a penalty-box striker by Unai Emery this season. Tell Kane to stay in the box and stop dropping deep, or he will be substituted. Shout angry things about Southgate and hope that helps.
Kane will surely keep his place. He has earnt the faith of his manager and of us all.
That will anger some and make others fret; that’s only natural. But he has the record and the influence.
Should he come off earlier if things aren’t working again? Absolutely.
But the rewards for it clicking are too high for us not to try.
“I know there will be a lot of questions being asked about him at the moment, but he has been through that 100 times before,” says Gareth Southgate, sounding a little weary at the negative inflexion of every question.
“I have answered that in this role several times in the past and he has come up with the goals that have won us the next games and I expect that to be the same moving forward.”
Those words weren’t spoken after the game in Dusseldorf, but in London in 2021.
England were being criticised for getting through without playing well or expansively and Kane had scored no times rather than two as now. England looked stodgy, the record goalscorer seemed stymied or unfit.
Everybody breathe a little. All is not lost.
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