Harry Kane will feel like he needs tournament glory more than anyone in England squad
In perhaps the most consequential summer of his life so far, Harry Kane is being careful to screen out the noise. His response to England’s dismal defeat to Iceland at Wembley was firmly in character, as he purged any frustrations with a weekend’s golf at Queenwood, the ritzy Surrey course that reputedly costs over £200,000 to join. Whether at Tottenham or Bayern Munich, the game has always served as his surest stress relief, with Kane recently suggesting that he was capable of turning professional if he set his mind to it.
From anyone else, this might appear an idle boast. From Kane, it seems eminently plausible. North London to Bavaria might represent the road less travelled for an England captain, but he handled the switch with such polish that he broke Uwe Seeler’s 60-year-old scoring record for a debut Bundesliga campaign with two months to spare. And yet a season built on remarkable numbers – 36 goals in the Bundesliga, eight more in the Champions League – still attracted the same casual disdain he had sought to leave behind.
On a torrid night at the Bernabeu last month, Kane, substituted with five minutes left against Real Madrid, wore the faraway look of a man who knew the reckoning that awaited. Over 500 club games, but zero trophies: this, when you stripped away the individual brilliance, was the pitiless reality. In one sense, defining a player’s career by precious metal alone can be a fool’s errand. Kane has less silverware, for example, than Jurrien Timber, the young Dutch centre-back who has not even managed two hours’ first-team football for Arsenal but who can still claim a Community Shield.
At another level, the sparseness of Kane’s cabinet – save for a 2010 Tiger Cup with Tottenham, a pre-season bauble emblazoned with a Singaporean beer logo that he could not even bring himself to hold aloft – still hurts. “I want to be winning the biggest prizes there is to offer,” he said in 2021, describing his Premier League player of the year award as “bittersweet”. It is barely believable that, three years on, this thirst remains unquenched. Bayern looked the best bet in Europe for filling the one glaring gap in his CV: Thomas Muller, his regular golf partner, had won 12 league titles in Germany, including 11 in a row. Then Kane turned up, and the club finished third, 18 points adrift of a Leverkusen team toasting the first such triumph in their history.
What was anomalous for Bayern has become routine for Kane. As such, his yearning to change the record with England is doubly intense this summer. He has ticked off every personal accolade, with a Golden Boot at the 2018 World Cup and anointment last year as his nation’s all-time leading scorer, overtaking Wayne Rooney’s 53 goals in 39 fewer games. He now has 63 in only 91 matches, a superior international ratio to Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Thierry Henry. This weekend, he arrives in Gelsenkirchen as leader of an England team who, for the first time in living memory, are considered favourites.
It is a billing with myriad caveats. Against Iceland, England did nothing to stir hope that they would even escape their group, never mind win a European Championship. Kane, for his part, failed to register a shot on target. But history suggests that he reinvents himself in tournament mode. He performed listlessly at first in his last Euros, so anonymous that Jamie Carragher argued he needed to be dropped for the last group game. Then came decisive knockout goals against Germany, Ukraine and Denmark, and all was forgiven. The less said about the final, where England scarcely troubled the Italian goal after Luke Shaw’s second-minute opener, the better.
The time is now
Even with England, Kane is not yet the type of player who inspires awe. Many, if asked to select a defining moment from his nine years’ service, would choose the penalty that he skied high into the Qatari night en route to World Cup quarter-final agony. What Ronaldo, Messi and Henry all have, despite scoring at an inferior strike-rate, are the medals to palliate the pain. Should Kane taste glory as captain in Berlin next month, you can guarantee the Bobby Moore parallels will be piled high. Until then, he will exude only the aura of someone perennially unfulfilled.
There is an unavoidable sense that this has to be time. Come the 2026 World Cup, he will be approaching his 33rd birthday. That is hardly a pensionable age, but it is still older than when Geoff Hurst, Bobby Charlton, Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer stepped away from international duty for good. These happy circumstances at the Euros, where Kane is feted as the finest player in Germany and England as the best in the tournament, coincide once in a lifetime if you are lucky. For once, the greatest prize is begging to be seized.
By temperament, Kane is not inclined towards tub-thumping rhetoric. He eschews ostentation of any kind, preferring to be distinguished by his professionalism. “This squad is one of the best, if not the best, we’ve ever had,” he said in Blankenhain this week. “We’ve got incredible young talent who are fearless and just want to play.”
“Best”, “fearless”: these are not labels that England players naturally reach for to describe themselves, having spent over half a century being anything but. Kane, though, is speaking as if the psychological scar tissue has been shed, as if the stage is his to conquer. There is a colossal temptation of fate here, of course. The image of a crestfallen Kane saluting the fans as another dream dies is seared on the collective consciousness. But on this of all occasions, the stars could be aligning at last.
