Harry Kane has been, from the earliest days of his top-level career, pretty skilled at talking a lot without really saying anything.
He will typically offer up party-line platitudes, bland positivities and vanilla soundbites. So when he says something that diverts from that, even slightly, you sit up a bit straighter.
Talking about the nine England players — Trent Alexander-Arnold, Levi Colwill, Phil Foden, Jack Grealish, Cole Palmer, Aaron Ramsdale, Declan Rice, Bukayo Saka and Jarrad Branthwaite — who have withdrawn from the squad to play Nations League matches tonight away to Greece and on Sunday against the Republic of Ireland at Wembley, Kane told ITV Sport on Wednesday: “It’s a shame this week. It’s a tough period of the season and maybe that’s been taken advantage of a little bit.
“I think England comes before anything. England comes before club. England is the most important thing you play as a professional footballer and Gareth (Southgate, the team’s previous manager who stood down in the summer) was hot on that and he wasn’t afraid to make decisions if, you know, that started to drift from certain players.
“I don’t really like it, if I’m totally honest. England comes before any club situation.”
Certainly from an England perspective, it’s not ideal. Seven of those nine players will have either started or been first call off the bench for interim manager Lee Carsley. But in a wider context, Kane’s comments feel unhelpful to his international colleagues.
Those at the top of the game have so much football on their schedules that players are talking about going on strike to protest against it.
Saka has already played 47 official games in 2024. Rice four more than that. Foden, Grealish and Palmer, because of their involvement in the new-look Club World Cup next June and July and assuming England qualify for the World Cup 12 months later, may not get a proper summer off until 2027. With Liverpool still in all four competitions at home and in Europe and an extra couple of Champions League first-phase games to take into consideration in that competition’s new format, Alexander-Arnold is looking down the barrel of a 60-plus-game season.
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Palmer is among the players who may not have a summer off until 2027 (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
Even if you felt that the nine could have played in these two matches if they really wanted to (and given Ramsdale has a broken finger, we can exclude him from that for starters), it is just sensible for them to look at the calendar, see what games are to come and prioritise the most important ones.
With that in mind, the last thing they need is their England captain lecturing them about duty to the national team.
Kane’s position seems to be based on the flawed premise that England is the most important thing to everyone, when we know it isn’t.
Alexander-Arnold caused much consternation when he told Sky Sports recently that he would rather win the Ballon d’Or, an individual award, than the World Cup: that wasn’t necessarily an outright snub to England, but it did show that priorities have shifted.
Why should the England team come before any club situation? Someone like Alexander-Arnold is almost universally adored as a Liverpool player, but for the national team he has been criticised for poor form, picked inconsistently in his usual position and hung out to dry by being used out of position at a major tournament. Maybe he does feel patriotism or allegiance to his national-team colleagues, but that’s his call, you wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t and he shouldn’t be guilt-tripped into thinking otherwise.
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It feels like we should have moved on from the idea that playing for your national team is an inherent duty and that those who aren’t especially enthusiastic about it are judged over it. It’s football, not military service.
There are caveats.
Firstly, without wishing to join the growing voices blaming Thomas Tuchel for the ills of the England team before he’s even started the job, the chances are that there would not have been nine pullouts had he been in charge now, rather than waiting for January to begin and leaving Carsley as a lame-duck manager for these November games.
Tuchel does not officially start in his role until January (Michael Regan – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
Also, Kane wasn’t just talking about the national team being a priority in a nationalistic, IN-GUR-LUND, shove-it-up-Johnny-Foreigner way. He is aware that one of the key strengths of the Southgate era was the club-like atmosphere that was created, the power of the collective and, for want of a better word, the culture that was engendered. The more the players are together, the greater their bond, then — in theory — the better their chances of being a coherent unit on the pitch when it matters.
With Southgate now gone, Kane will see one of his responsibilities as captain to be continuing that, especially in this weird interim period before another permanent manager is in place. Given that he is physically further away from his England colleagues these days following last year’s transfer to Bayern Munich, Kane might feel the need to be together more acutely than most.
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From that perspective, it would also be interesting to see a Venn diagram of those who were most strident in demanding Southgate should go back in the summer, and those now criticising the nine pullouts for shirking their national responsibility. Maybe Southgate was a bit cautious and slow to make substitutions, but one thing he was undeniably brilliant at was making people care about playing for England.
But even then, it would be easy to create the impression that nobody ever dropped out of Southgate’s squads with minor injuries. Seven withdrew from the squad for games against Albania and San Marino in November 2021. Six excused themselves the following March, before friendlies against Switzerland and Ivory Coast.
Kane is presumably doing what he thinks is his duty as England captain.
If his main priority is England, then that’s great — and perfectly understandable, given his status. But it feels extremely unhelpful for him to treat his preferences as the standard, and to imply that anyone who doesn’t feel the same is wrong.
(Top photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
