Harry Kane's Striking Brilliance Keeps England Alive
Thierry Henry has seen every kind of finish. He invented a few of them. So when he leant into the Fox cameras and broke down Harry Kane’s second goal against the Democratic Republic of the Congo, you listened.
“Striking with the inside of the foot, almost wrapping the ball while the body is off-balance, you have to maintain balance at the crucial moment to take the shot,” Henry said. “Do you know how hard it is to generate power then? At the end of the game? To redirect it like that? If I did that now, I’d break my back.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Kane’s strike was a piece of violent elegance: body rotating, arms whipping through the air, technique and raw power fused into one clean, ruthless movement. He didn’t care where he landed. The only thing that mattered was where the ball did.
An athlete at absolute full charge, at the tail end of a brutal game, deciding he was not ready to go home.
Kane keeps England – and Tuchel – alive
Strip it back and the story of England’s World Cup so far is simple: Harry Kane is the reason they are still in it, and the reason Thomas Tuchel is still in a job at Bayern Munich.
Against the DRC in Atlanta, England were drifting towards embarrassment. Kane dragged them out of it. First a clever, glancing header to level. Then that outrageous late winner, lashed in with a technique that had Henry purring and defenders spinning.
Those two goals were his 83rd and 84th for his country, in just 118 caps. Nobody else is close. Nobody else has scored like this, for this long. He now has five goals in England’s first four games at this World Cup, right in the hunt for another Golden Boot, and he has already gone past Gary Lineker’s record for World Cup goals.
This is no longer a debate about whether Kane belongs among England’s greats. It’s about how high up the list he sits.
On the Stick to Football podcast this week, Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Ian Wright and Jill Scott tossed his name into the same breath as Bobby Moore and Sir Bobby Charlton, speaking of him as a top-three English player of all time. Not a hot take. Just the logical conclusion to a decade of relentless excellence.
The missing piece
There is still one gap in the picture. Moore lifted the World Cup as captain in 1966. Charlton won the Ballon d’Or that same year. Kane has the numbers, the longevity, the all-round game. What he does not yet have is a defining performance at the sharpest end of a major tournament.
He has carried knocks into previous summers. He has faded when England needed a final surge. He was muted in the Euro 2020 final. In Qatar, he missed that late penalty against France in the quarter-final, a moment that has stalked him ever since. At Euro 2024, his substitution in the final against Spain was taken by some as a symbol of decline.
The narrative was clear: Kane was slowing. His peak had passed.
Look at this season and that story collapses. He has 72 goals for club and country. He is a serious Ballon d’Or contender. At this World Cup he has covered 43,433 metres, more than any other England player. The legs are not going. They are working overtime.
He has done it by design, not accident.
“It’s probably the best I’ve felt in my career,” Kane said. “I made a conscious effort at the start of this season to be even fitter, to take care of myself even more, looking at different ways to recover better. Also, you need a bit of luck to stay injury free.”
The winter break in Germany has helped. So has Bayern’s ability to rest him when the Bundesliga is already under control. He has invested in his body, and nights like the one against the DRC are the return.
“If you’ve got the leaders training and running like I do, it only helps,” he said. “You’ve seen that in the games. I’m willing to run more and do whatever it takes to help the team. I look at my stats after each game and it’s really pleasing.”
Layers on layers
Kane’s evolution has been gradual but ruthless. The penalty-box poacher is still there, but wrapped inside a playmaker’s brain. No striker drops off the front line to thread passes quite like him now. He can be a No 9 and a No 10 in the same move, sometimes in the same second.
The second goal against the DRC, the one that had Henry joking about his back, was a reminder that beneath the subtlety there is still a pure finisher. Timing, balance, violence. He has simply added layers on top.
He has also found the perfect partner in Jude Bellingham. The two of them have become England’s operating system. When everything else stutters – and plenty has – they keep the side moving.
The wingers have flickered rather than burned. The midfield has looked heavy-legged. The defence has shaken more than Southgate would like. At right-back, the injury list keeps growing.
Yet England are still here, preparing for Mexico in Mexico City, where the altitude, the heat and the Azteca Stadium’s roar will test every sinew and nerve they have.
Living with the altitude, living with the pressure
“There is not much we could do with altitude training,” Kane admitted. England went to Florida for 10 days of heat work, trying to acclimatise as best they could. But altitude is different. You either live in it or you don’t.
“The altitude was almost impossible to prepare for, unless we stayed in Mexico the whole time or based there for 10 days,” he said. “Logistically, that wouldn’t have been great for the rest of the tournament. It wouldn’t have been worth it.”
So they will have to cope. Simple as that.
“It’s a big talking point and will have a small difference but we’re professional athletes. We have to deal with adversity every now and then. We’re doing as much as we can with little tips to help us. We’ll have to deal with it. There is no other way around it. If we get through it then all of those things will make the win feel even more special.”
Kane talks about peaking at the right time. Tournament football rarely rewards the team that explodes out of the blocks and tries to sprint all the way to the tape.
“One hundred per cent,” he said when Kyle Walker, watching on as a former England right-back, suggested that sometimes there is nothing sweeter than winning after playing badly. “You very rarely see the team come out of the gates hot and then sustain that all the way through to the end. It happens but quite rarely. Tournament football is about getting used to each other. What you do learn in tournament football is that there’s not always a perfect way to win.”
Mexico will be at home, at altitude, playing for pride and for a place in the last eight of a World Cup. England may not get to play their way. They might have to suffer.
“We hope that we can play our style but we’re coming up against a team who are playing at home, playing for pride, playing for a place in the next round of the World Cup. You might need to grind it out. You might need to find a difficult way to win.”
Finding his voice
Kane sounds ready for that. Not just as a goalscorer, but as a captain who now feels comfortable showing his emotion in public.
After the final whistle against the DRC, he called his teammates into a huddle on the pitch and spoke. It was not something he would naturally choose to do, but he felt the moment demanded it.
“It’s something I don’t normally like to do in a public situation,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like it can look a little bit staged.
“It was more just to make sure we celebrated that moment. After the Panama game I felt like we didn’t really celebrate the moment as much as we probably should have. It’s easy as an England player sometimes to take things for granted and just say: ‘OK, we beat Panama, we’re top of the group, it is what it is.’ But that’s not always been the case for England.”
He wants this team to feel each step, to understand the weight of what they are doing and the rarity of these chances. He has lived the near-misses and the scars. He knows how quickly it can all disappear.
The penalty that never was
Even on a night when he ended up the hero, Kane had to swallow frustration. In the first half against the DRC he was denied what he is adamant was a clear penalty after a collision with goalkeeper Lionel Mpasi.
“It’s a clear penalty,” he said. “When you’re travelling at the speed we travel at on the pitch, and then you get a push in the back as well, in that situation I got to the ball first. You’ve got two options, you can try and jump over the keeper, and if you do you’re probably going to fall over anyway, and you don’t get a penalty. It’s not my problem that the keeper’s come rushing out. I don’t really know what the ref expected me to do.
“He’s initiated the contact, he’s hit me, I’m falling over, and I’ve tried to protect myself. If I keep my leg planted in the floor you risk serious, serious injury. It is a foul. If it wasn’t the keeper and was just a defender using his feet, it’s a foul. I was really surprised it wasn’t given, I was really surprised VAR didn’t intervene as well. In the end it doesn’t matter because we won.”
That last line tells you where his head is. The anger remains, but it is fuel now, not a distraction. He moved on, then he took over.
A legacy on the line
Kane talks about creating new memories. For himself, for this squad, for a country that has grown used to heartbreak with a ball at its feet. He has been doing it since he was a kid, always finding a way around whatever blocked his path.
Against the DRC he did it again: denied a penalty, denied space, denied time, and still he found the moments that changed everything.
He already stands alone as England’s greatest goalscorer. In Mexico City, in the thin air and the thick noise of the Azteca, he has the chance to take another step towards the only thing missing from his story: the night when nobody can argue that the modern great finally became the greatest.
