COME FLY WITH ME Skipper Harry promises Three Lions will take tournament ‘head on’ & cannot wait to get amongst goals
WHEN Harry Kane leads his team up the aeroplane steps today and out to Russia, he will carry the captain’s armband and the hopes of a nation.
The Tottenham striker’s remarkable rise to world prominence over the past four seasons has propelled him from supporter at the last World Cup to poster boy this time round. Clean-living and dedicated to maximising every last iota of his talent, Kane sets the perfect example for Gareth Southgate, the manager who chose him to lead from the front, on and off the pitch. Lauded from all directions and sent off to the World Cup with a new six-year, £60million Spurs contract freshly signed, there are few blots on the 24-year-old’s landscape. Yet when he touches down today, Kane will be a man who needs to prove a point, a player under pressure with a burning desire to light the blue touchpaper in front of goal in Russia. For all his goals that have given club and country optimism for the future, in an England shirt his recent tournament form has been poor. Controversially taken to the Under-21 European Championship in the summer of 2015, Kane played every minute of the three group games and failed to score as England finished bottom. At the senior Euros a year later, he was hooked at half-time in the group game against Wales and was as dreadful as most in the loss to Iceland. “I want to score in tournament football, it’s something I want to change,” he says. “Hopefully, it will happen this summer. I’ve always felt you go through spells. The ball goes in, sometimes it doesn’t, like every August for me.” It does not go down as bullishly reassuring, but at least Kane is confident England’s approach will be ultra-positive. “We want to take this tournament head on,” he declares. “Sometimes, going into a big tournament is about not losing and being passive but, for us, it’s about winning the first game, winning the second game. We have a lot of attacking
flair that can do some damage.” If Kane is used as the sole, out-and-out striker, a lot of that attacking flair – in the form of Marcus Rashford and Jamie Vardy – will be on the bench.
It means Southgate has decent options, but the same was true for Roy Hodgson in Kane’s last tournament match, the Iceland debacle.
“It was a really bad moment for us,” Kane says. “But I’m confident it won’t happen again. You cannot say 100 per cent it won’t but, first and foremost, we will work hard and be energetic in everything we do.
“All we can do is fight on the pitch and give 120 per cent in every game and wear that badge with pride. This is a squad that wears its heart on its sleeve. I am sure the country will take to that.”
It is hard not to be lifted by Kane’s bursting pride, by his sense of honour, by what representing England at a World Cup clearly means to him.
“I would love to win everything with Tottenham but, for me personally, the World Cup outweighs them all,” he adds. “I’m not someone who cries, I didn’t cry when I was given the captaincy, but maybe I will if we win the World Cup.” But we all know the sort of tears that normally stain England’s tournament fate and they are not the ones Harry’s thinking of.
And for all his pride and patriotism, Kane’s form on the grand, international stage will need to improve if that is to change.
He looks a natural leader, talks like a natural leader, but when business begins, England’s captain will be a man under pressure.