Oh, Harry. It just had to be didn’t it? Plenty of England strikers have scored on their debut. Very few have done so with their third touch 78 seconds after walking on to the pitch. And yet there was Harry Kane in the 76th minute at Wembley, loitering in that portable little pocket of space he carries about with him at all times ready to nod in Raheem Sterling’s excellent far-post cross and make the score 4-0 to England on the night.
Who writes his scripts? Presumably somebody who spent a lot of their formative years reading children’s comics of the 1950s. Wembley erupted, Kane wheeled away to the corner flag – a man who just keeps on hitting the jackpot, cherries zeroing in every time – while up in his box even Greg Dyke could be seen leaping about in a state of chairmanly delirium.
It all adds up to another staging post in a vertiginous rise for Tottenham’s likeable, puppyish sniper of a centre forward. When England last played, against Scotland in November, Kane had scored four career Premier League goals and was being given his first real run in the Spurs team. The months since have been seen through a gathering mist of Hazzamania. Before this game Kane was already 50-1 to end up breaking England’s all-time goalscoring record, the current holder of which made his debut in 1958. Presumably he is now also an ever narrowing price to have this year’s Christmas No1, outperform David Cameron in the final televised election debate and open the batting for England at Cardiff in the first Ashes Test.
Either way Kane has not only produced a blizzard of goals – this was his 30th of the season – but proved a relentlessly engaging presence, all unaffected dubbin-and-Brylcreem charm. Frankly it is still hard to take in the scale of his impact in the last 16 weeks. There have always been unlikely purple patches. Mark Stein once set a record by scoring in seven top-flight matches in a row. Paul Warhurst, a converted centre-back, scored 12 well-taken goals in 12 games for Sheffield Wednesday and earned an England call-up. This though is something else, a 21-year-old who is simply a natural, a scorer of all kinds of goals, with no obvious weakness in his game, just a full hand of strengths that include now a genuine sense of presence, a bespoke Kane glow that sent a buzz around Wembley from the moment he started warming up.
Otherwise this was a night on which England continued to chug on towards qualification for Euro 2016 with another romp against game but limited opposition. Indeed for 84 minutes here the only real mystery about this 4-0 defeat of Lithuania was whether it might end up being six, or eight, or 12.
Danny Welbeck or Kane was the big question before kick off. And for all Kane’s headline turn it was still hard to disagree with Hodgson’s decision to start with Welbeck, who scored his 14th England goal in the first half, and in the process went out on his own as top scorer in qualifying on six goals, one ahead of Omer Damari of Israel.
Welbeck has long been a Hodgson favourite, all the more so now as his hustle and versatility fits perfectly with the manager’s favoured 4-3-3 against weaker teams. Here Welbeck started on the left and was consistently the most influential attacker on show. Although for a while at the start it looked as though Wayne Rooney might steal the show by bullocking past Bobby Charlton’s scoring record before a laughably brittle Lithuania had even drawn breath. Rooney hit the post after three minutes and scored the opener after six, made by some excellent approach play from Welbeck, who nutmegged Tadas Kijanskas and shot straight at Giedrius Arluauskis. Rooney was there to nod in the rebound.
Welbeck needed a goal to complete a fine first half – this is Danny Welbeck: unless explicitly stated otherwise he always just needs a goal – and it arrived just before the break, Welbeck diving to head goalward and the ball deflected in at a grudging trickle off Kijanskas. With England dominating the second half Sterling scored the third, his first for England. At which point: enter you know who.
With Welbeck picking up an injury in the second half Kane has a fair chance of starting against Italy. It is a possibility that raises some difficult questions. Welbeck is a known quantity, a fine if not top-rank international striker. But at what point do you simply trust the obvious talent in front of you?
There is a case that the real risk for England lies in not promoting the current best striker in the Premier League to first choice centre-forward as early as possible. The chairman of the FA made headlines this week by criticising the Premier League’s failure to trust young English players, demanding to know how many other Kanes are out there “just waiting to play”.
Perhaps what English players need more than anything else is less fretting about nationality, more faith in pure talent in any form. Either way Kane’s chance to start alongside Rooney will surely come sooner rather than later for an England team suddenly blessed with striking vim.
