When Harry Kane sat out March’s international friendlies, Gareth Southgate made no bones about the scarcity of the chance on offer to Ivan Toney and Ollie Watkins, who were handed one game apiece, along with a challenge to make the understudy job their own.
“With England, that’s the landscape,” Southgate had said. “You don’t get hundreds of opportunities.”
The assumption then was that the Brentford strikers past and present were in head-to-head competition for one place in England’s Euro plans. Even with squad sizes since swelled to 26, precedent suggested Southgate would find room only for Kane and one other specialist No9.
At the last World Cup, in Qatar, it was Callum Wilson and, before that, Dominic Calvert-Lewin at Euro 2020. Danny Welbeck and Jamie Vardy both went to the 2018 World Cup, but England played a different system then, with Kane and Raheem Sterling as a front-two.
True, in all three cases Marcus Rashford was around as an emergency striking option, and is not this time around.
But Jarrod Bowen has similar qualities, having just scored 20 goals for West Ham during a season in which his time was split fairly evenly between centre-forward and the right wing. So why now?
Why break with a formula that has never left England exposed and, by contrast, in banking on Kane’s ever-presence, allowed Southgate more flexibility in areas of greater need?
The obvious answer is that perhaps confidence in Kane’s fitness is not quite as strong as billed. Against Iceland tonight, he will start a match for the first time in a month, having sat out Bayern Munich’s damp end to the Bundesliga season with back trouble.
“No,” Southgate said yesterday, when asked whether he was worried about his captain’s durability, before admitting: “We’re conscious that, with 26, if you had a problem with Harry, to only have one alternative you could run into trouble.”
The decision to take two explicitly squad players, each only capable of playing in the same place, while more versatile options such as Jack Grealish and James Maddison were overlooked might not make immediate sense.
But given the debate over which would be the better deputy to Kane had reached no definitive conclusion, it figures that, were the worst to happen, Southgate would quite like both options on hand.
Why break with a formula that has never left England exposed?
Watkins has had by far the more prolific club campaign, but Toney, in his one start against Belgium in March, looked more at home in an England shirt. Toney is more like Kane in style, but Watkins offers something different with his game-stretching runs in behind.
“The two guys give very different styles of play, different attributes,” Southgate said. “We wanted different profiles, we had the opportunity to take the numbers to do that.”
