Harry Kane’s speciality: not winning for England. So why is he captain?

Kane scores like a metronome, but his real speciality is not winning tournaments for England, and there’s a tournament coming up. England played Andorra last night and play Serbia on Tuesday in World Cup qualifiers, and Thomas Tuchel, the manager, has made it clear he wants Kane as captain and striker throughout.

So that’s it. The fix is in. What happens next is a lot of people call Kane a talisman and hope he leads the team to victory, and he doesn’t. If madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, this is madness on grass. Or Xanax. There’s a sense the whole English football operation is on meds.

Kane fans: but he’s scored 73 times for his country and 213 for Spurs and 55 goals in 50 games for Munich and did you see that one he scored from behind his own half-way line?

The rest of us: yeah, but. Most of those England goals were against San Marino and the Faroes. See these tooth marks? They’re from chewing our knuckles when he wasn’t moving or scoring in last year’s Euros final. See this acronym – WTF? Sixty-eight million people to choose from and still Kane?

To win a World Cup takes magic, and Kane doesn’t do magic. He does composure in the six-yard box. He seems to be a lovely guy with a lovely family, but he’s as inspirational as pesto pasta on a Sunday night. He’s the Tim Peake of planet Earth. He makes time stand still, and not in a good way.

If we’re stuck with Kane, we might as well be stuck in any of the even-numbered years of the past decade, not winning the Euros three times and the World Cup twice with Kane up front. It’s time for just about anyone else.

Photograph by Carl Recine/Getty Images