England football produced many talented scorers – Alan Shearer, Wayne Rooney, Bobby Charlton, Micheal Owen, Frank Lampard and many more who stole the limelight and excelled at the Club football guiding their teams to many titles.
However, when it comes to their National duty only few managed to showcase and replicate their domestic form at the international level with Gary Lineker being one of them.
In the previous editions, The Three Lions suffered miserably upfront as their strikers failed to score much needed goals.
But now they finally found someone to bank on. In Harry Kane, England finally looks to find the most perfect prolific striker to lead the country at the World Cup.
They have a prolific striker who can score goals when it matters the most as the captain managed to score for every game he started for the Three Lions including his hat-trick against Panama and a brace against Tunisia.
His strike from the penalty spot took him to six goals in three matches taking the England’s goal tally to nine goals. This is the best goal scoring record England ever witnessed after their 1966 triumph where they pumped eleven goals.
Kane is leading the race for the golden followed by Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku (4) and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, who is already out of the tournament.
Despite scoring and winning games, the strange thing is that Kane’s team-mates have found it unusually difficult to provide him with chances from open play.
Out of the six, Kane scored three from the penalty spot, while two arrived from corners while the other came a surprise as the ball hit the back of his heel and entered the nets. In short, Kane is yet to score from open play. But dominance, possessions are just numbers and when the goals are coming, it doesn’t matter how they come. All that matters is a win.
Going back in time, country’s top goal scorers – Wayne Rooney with 53 goals — managed to score just once in his three World Cups while Bobby Charlton scored four in four World Cup appearances while Geoff Hurst scored four goals in 1966 World Cup.
Gary Lineker was the only English footballer to score 10 goals in the World Cup and he also bagged the golden boot award in the 1984 Cup scoring six goals beating Spains Emilio Butrageno (5), Brazil’s Careca (5) and Argentina’s Diego Maradona (4).
Kane scored 56 goals for club and country in 2017 and also became the first player outside of Ronaldo and Messi to finish the year top scorer in Europe since 2009.
Earlier, Kane also toppled Alan Shearer’s 22-year-old record for the most Premier League goals in a calendar year and became the first player to score six Premier League hat-tricks in a year.
With England breaking yet another World Cup jinx when they beat Columbia vie the penalty shootout, which they never did before. This tournament seems to be theirs. England can finally dream of the World Cup.
