'Top of the list': Harry Kane in Ballon d’Or form as England leader sets sights on World Cup | OneFootball

Kane is in the form of his life ahead of what could be the biggest year of his career

Harry Kane was having a tease, luring you in. He’d already missed a presentable chance off his right foot, a decent opportunity off his left and failed to connect with a sumptuous ball into the box from Anthony Gordon.

The answer, of course, was: absolutely not.

Kane wriggled free of the close attention of one Latvian defender and, while slipping to the turf, curled with pace and precision into the bottom-left corner off his weaker left foot.

When he was manhandled in the box shortly after, 75 international goals swiftly became 76, a stutter at the last simply delaying the inevitable as he tucked his penalty into the same corner.

Kane scored twice as England sealed qualification to the World cup with a 5-0 win in Latvia on Tuesday

The FA via Getty Images

Two goals on the night only added to the quite extraordinary goalscoring numbers of Kane’s first few months of the new season. In just 13 matches for club and country, he has now scored 21 goals, as well as registering six assists.

He finished 13th in last month’s standings but that is Ballon d’Or form.

Kane, at 32, is still going strong. In fact, he admitted after helping to book England’s place at the World Cup on Tuesday that he is in the best form of his career.

“I'd say so,” he told ITV. “The numbers are there. It's the way I'm feeling on the pitch, the way I'm seeing the passes and the runs. Physically I'm in a good place, in a good moment.”

The statistics indicate that Kane is right, that the level he is operating at right now eclipses anything that has come before. He's involved in a goal every 39 minutes of play for Bayern Munich this season, obliterating what he has ever achieved before.

It feels an awfully long time ago now that the England captain’s performances at Euro 2024, where back pain meant he clearly wasn’t fit, were the subject of criticism across the nation. Ollie Watkins replaced him an hour in the European Championship final against Spain. You sense Kane might be kept on just a little longer if the same game were replayed tomorrow.

And that’s not least because of how adoring of Kane the England head coach Thomas Tuchel is. Tuchel has used Kane unsparingly in all but one of his matches in charges, the exception being the Wales win that his skipper missed through injury.

Kane has scored 21 goals in 13 matches for club and country this season

Bradley Collyer/PA Wire

Otherwise, Kane has proven exceedingly difficult to drop, just as Tuchel found when he coached Kane at Bayern.

Kane has won the Golden Boot in both of his two seasons in Bavaria already, and his start to the new campaign has been so dominant that despite the presence of Michael Olise, Serge Gnabry and Luis Diaz, he has netted 47 per cent of Bayern’s 38 goals so far this season.

He threatens to make one of the biggest clubs in the world seem like a one-man team. It was one thing at Spurs, quite another with six-time European champions Bayern.

So impressive is his goalscoring pomp right now that, if he kept up his current rate of return in the Bundesliga, he would end the season on 62 league goals. Nobody has ever scored that many in any of Europe's major leagues. In fact, the Bundesliga record, set by Robert Lewandowski in 2020-21, stands at 41. He is already 26.8 per cent of the way there, only 17.6 per cent through the season.

The three-time Premier League Golden Boot winner is not only England’s captain and leader but their chief leader by example, setting the standards for those around him by working tirelessly despite the fact that, as Tuchel put it, “no one will ever blame him if he doesn’t do it - but he does it anyway”.

England will head to Canada, Mexico and the United States next summer with one of the finest players in the world leading the line.

Tuchel was asked after Latvia where Kane ranks among players he’s worked with, noting his illustrious managerial career spans time coaching Kylian Mbappe, Neymar and N’Golo Kante.

He said of Kane: “He’s on top of the list.”