Reined-in Kane can thrive despite weird Euro 2024 for the alpha dogs in attack | Jonathan Liew
The most prolific No 9s have not been able to dominate – which suggests a restricted role for the captain can benefit England
Last week, after Portugal were eliminated by France, I wrote something about Cristiano Ronaldo which ended up getting a fair bit of pushback from his many charmingly devoted followers around the world. It actually took a few days for the abuse to materialise, along with the usual unsolicited direct messages and the Instagram follower requests. Presumably this is because it’s quite hard to type with your weaker hand. But the principal gist of the criticism went thus: hey, corrupt English media, CR7 is by no means the only big-name striker having an absolute stinker at Euro 2024. Why don’t you write about Kylian Mbappé? Why don’t you write about Harry Kane?
Well – for one thing – these situations are not all alike. Mbappé is demonstrably one of the world’s great forwards, assisted a goal against Spain on Tuesday night, and played most of his tournament with a grisly facial injury. Kane is the joint-top scorer and will probably win the Golden Boot if he scores in Sunday’s final. And yet, in their obliquely condescending way, the Ronaldo bot squadron had half a point. The alpha dogs have had a weird month. Robert Lewandowski barely left a footprint. Romelu Lukaku, the top scorer in qualifying, went four games without a goal. The hotly tipped Benjamin Sesko and Rasmus Højlund, both coming off a strong vein of club form, also blanked.
