The consensus at The Done Right Inn, a cozy dive bar on Queen Street West in Toronto, is that England has a first-rate, world-beating team and Harry Kane is a God-like figure. The Done Right Inn is, week in and week out, a little hotbed of support for Harry Kane’s employer, the English Premier League team Tottenham Hotspur.
Devotion to club teams and optimism about national teams at a World Cup is a lovely thing. Sunny ways and sunny days and all of that. And it is a terrible deed to demolish it. Terrible and evil. But demolition must be done.
England’s 6-1 thumping victory over Panama on Sunday was the worst possible development for England. An absolutely ghastly twist. It will make England delusional, you see. Dangerously delusional. The team, the media and the fans are already thinking about the easy route to the World Cup quarter-finals and beyond.
Mere minutes after the match ended, even the sensible corners of the English media were alive with talk of England winning the World Cup.
“Harry Kane ‘believes’ England can go all the way after scoring hat-trick in 6-1 win against Panama,” screamed The Independent online. Apparently the BBC had asked Kane, the England captain, if England can go all the way and lift the trophy. Trying to answer carefully, but not carefully enough, Kane answered, “You have to believe. There is a long way to go, a lot of hard work, but we just have to stick to our game plan.”
Thus there arrives now the forged myth that England expects to win the World Cup. This is simply a calamitous turn of events for a team this untested and callow.
Panama is probably the worst team at the tournament. What the team is doing there is something that can be put down only to the tangled and incomprehensible system of CONCACAF qualifying. Either that or Vladimir Putin arranged it, a small joke to insert into the Word Cup in Russia. Hey, stuff happens.
The only real resistance England faced was when it won corner kicks. At those times, in the penalty area, Panama’s players tried repeatedly to wrestle England players to the ground. It wasn’t a one-off thing. It was more of an attempted mass rugby tackle manoeuvre. Any England player within arms’ reach of a Panamanian was grabbed, jostled and pulled this way and that, often pulled to the ground in a heap. The highlight reel from an average day of action in the Panama League must be, essentially, top body-slamming of moves of the day.
England was winning 5-0 at half-time. Two of the goals were penalties scored by Kane; penalties awarded as the result of precisely the kind of body wrangling in which Panama so obviously specializes. Also, a pair of headed goals from John Stones and one gorgeous long-range goal from Jesse Lingard. Harry Kane’s hat-trick-completing goal came in the 63rd minute, although it was a goal he knew nothing about, really, since Ruben Loftus-Cheek struck from 20 yards out and the ball hit Kane’s heel to careen into the net.
The key takeaways from all the scoring are not kind to England. Only Lingard’s beauty was truly from open play. Just as in the game against Tunisia, England was relying heavily on scoring from set pieces, especially corner kicks, with Kane’s height, positioning and desire being the crucial factors. A team less awed and less out of their depth than Panama and more cunning than the Tunisia already defeated by England would, and will, see every weakness in England’s predictability. There is also the matter of that lone Panama goal. It resulted from horrible defending by England from a free kick.
Complacency is setting in now. That’s the gist. “Brilliant England reach knockout stage with 6-1 win,” said the BBC online. And a frenzy about the immediate future is taking hold. The winner of the England-Belgium match on Thursday will win Group G. In the event of a draw, the winner of the Group could come down to which team has fewer yellow cards.
And then what? If England finishes first, it will play the runner-up of Group H, which could be Colombia, Japan or Senegal. Already the British media, especially the type embraced and believed by England players, is talking about a quarter-final match-up against Brazil or Germany. Oh sunny days of the imagination.
As for Harry Kane, the consecration is already under way. The Daily Mail – a favourite of the England team, along with The Sun – has gushed that Kane is “at last a footballer we can be proud of.” His “unabashed patriotism” was praised based on his singing of God Save the Queen. He was also praised for marrying his childhood sweetheart and not, you know, some model-actress type.
This will end in tears. England will be done in as much by its weaknesses as by the expectations, the egotism and the praise. Done right in. The team is just not that good. It just looks good beating the worst team in the tournament.