World Cup hopes will be a distant memory by summer
Englishmen are lighting up the Premier League, but history says most will burn out before June, writes Jim White
These guys may be on fire, but most will be broken by the demands of the league season
As 2018 gets under way there is something rather unexpected about the Premier League. Something few of us anticipated. Something different. And something which, experience tells us, we really should not be talking about.
But the fact is, as World Cup year begins, among the best players in the division are a growing number of Englishmen.
Harry Kane cannot stop accumulating hat-tricks, Raheem Sterling increasingly resembles a Brazilian in his skill and endeavour, while Jesse Lingard is in sparkling form, scoring magnificent, cheeky, fun-fuelled goals.
Add in the growing authority of John Stones, the pace and strength of Kyle Walker, the return to prominence of Jack Wilshere and Adam Lallana, and suddenly things are looking rosy. Or rather, if you are an England fan, primed for disappointment. It has only taken 24 years, but it finally appears as if the Premier League is doing what it is supposed to do. One of its founding principles was to improve the quality of the England team. It was a promise that rather got lost in the scramble for immediacy, as clubs brought in talent from around the world rather than develop from within. For the past couple of decades, it has been hard to see how club sides featuring nine, 10 or ever more frequently 11, foreign players were supporting national aspirations.
The defence put forward by the Premier League was that the England set-up would still benefit, because against competition that is now genuinely international, homegrown players would have to prove themselves to be of the highest quality to emerge through the pack.
It was not a theory given much demonstration in World Cups and European Championships since the league was initiated. A couple of quarter-final defeats on penalties do not deliver the most robust defence of the Premier League’s wider purpose.
But – whisper it in the hope not to tempt fate – this season things really do appear to be changing.
Kane, Sterling and Lingard are playing at a standard which would make them nailed-on picks for any national team. And below them, there is a genuine stirring in the academies. Players such as Phil Foden and Rhian Brewster, already age-group World Cup winners at 17, suggest clubs will less frequently see the need to import talent, given they have it in growing abundance on their doorstep.
The trouble is, even to start thinking like this, even to mention the mouth-watering thought of what a front six of Kane, Sterling, Dele Alli, Lingard, Wilshere and Lallana might do come the summer, is to invite disappointment. These guys may be on fire in January, but by the time Gareth Southgate requires them to be sparking, they are unlikely to have anything left so much as smouldering in the tank.
We know from experience that most of them will have been long broken by the demands of the league season by then, exhausted by the flat-out dash that is the domestic calendar. It is a cast-iron certainty that, as the World Cup comes into focus, a tabloid newspaper will be printing a front page with a picture of somebody’s shattered metatarsal.
The truth is – and we really should know this by now – January tells us nothing about June. And it never has.
Frankly, any hope of optimism generating as we watch young Englishmen thrive in the Premier League will have long since dissipated by the time the squad heads east. By then, even a quarter-final defeat on penalties will look way beyond reasonable expectation.