Harry Kane: England’s brilliant captain regains his form

Whatever his travails at

Whatever his travails at club level, Harry Kane is still
England’s “leading light”, said Henry Winter in The Times^[1]. When he’s at his best,
Gareth Southgate’s team generally performs well too. That was
certainly the case with England’s World Cup qualifier against
Albania last Friday. England produced one of their best recent
performances to demolish their opponents 5-0, an occasion “lit up”
by a superb hat-trick from the Tottenham player.

Kane, in fact, scored a “perfect hat-trick”, said Barney Ronay
in The Guardian^[2]: a goal with his head,
and one with each foot. Gone was the disconsolate air he sometimes
projects, of an “old, damp faithful hound dutifully tramping the
moors”. Instead, he was “thrillingly urgent” as he careered about,
“head held high, blue socks pumping the turf”.

That result meant that England went into their final qualifier
on Monday needing just a draw to guarantee topping their group,
said James Gheerbrant in The Times^[3]. Since they were facing
San Marino – “the worst men’s national team in the world” – the
result was a foregone conclusion. Thanks to a random quirk of
qualifying draws, it’s a fixture that has become oddly familiar,
and “even the tropes have become customary: the day jobs of San
Marino’s part-timers, the number of times over that the
microstate’s population could fit into Wembley Stadium”. 

There is little meaning to be extracted from such a contest, but
it was a chance for Kane to bring himself closer to Wayne Rooney^[4]’s all-time England
scoring record of 53 goals. And he wasn’t going to waste such an
opportunity, said David Hytner in The Guardian^[5]. The striker duly scored
four goals in a 15-minute period of the first half, bringing his
tally to 48. The final victory margin was 10-0. Southgate
substituted Kane just after the hour. Had we left him on, he joked
afterwards, “we’d have had Rooney’s family on the phone”.