BLANKENHAIN — One of the bizarre realities of a major tournament is how it plays with the space-time continuum. Or, in other words, how long ago does Iceland at Wembley feel (less than one month before England’s quarter-final against Switzerland , calendar fans)? We are older, greyer and this team is still damn difficult to get a handle on. That at least hasn’t changed.
Ah, 7 June, those sepia-tinted days of yore when everyone was frantically panicking that England’s defensive absentees and injuries might ruin things for a prodigious attacking corps. Now it’s which of our excellent stand-in centre-backs gets to keep their place and should we drop our record goalscorer. Welcome to the England headache whack-a-mole .
There are two trains of thought here. The first is that Harry Kane has been very bad in this tournament, or at least has been such a side actor that he has had no chance to be good. Kane, who had emphatic main character energy during major tournaments in 2018 and 2022 – for better and worse – has lost that mojo.
The evidence: watch the quarter-final back. Kane had nine touches of the ball during the first half. He completed eight passes in 109 minutes before being substituted, of which one was made within 30 yards of Switzerland’s goal.
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