England’s identity crisis is real. We are a nation that invented football, then spent sixty years apologising for how we play it. We have won one World Cup — in 1966, a year so distant it might as well be mythology — and we have spent every tournament since convinced that this time we’ve finally cracked it. We haven’t. We crack it, then we break it, then we blame the referee.
Enter Harry Kane. Irreplaceable, they say. Best in the world, maybe. The Ballon d’Or is apparently his to lose, which in football-speak means he will probably finish fourth and we will all pretend that was the plan.
But here is the surreal bit: Kane is being positioned as the answer to something deeper than just “scoring goals.” He is being offered as the solution to whether England can stop being a country that watches football and start being a country that wins at football. As if one striker, no matter how clinical, can rewire an entire nation’s relationship with itself.
The World Cup will not solve this. Kane could score fifteen goals and we would still find something to worry about. The midfield balance. The left-back’s positioning. Whether the manager’s tactical setup reflects our post-Brexit identity. (It doesn’t. Nothing does.)
What Kane can do is make the next few months less painful. He can score when it matters. He can carry the weight of expectation that would crush most players. And if England stumbles — which, let’s be honest, is the more probable outcome — at least we will have had one genuinely world-class player to point at and say: “Well, it wasn’t his fault.”
That is not solving an identity crisis. That is just making the disappointment more bearable. Which, for England, might be the same thing.