Picking England’s Number 9 used to be a piece of cake. The nation wouldn’t give it a moment’s thought, and rightly so, not when there was the daunting task of who to shoehorn into that tricky left-midfield berth.
Gary Lineker got the nod for seemingly decades. Then Alan Shearer took over. After that, Michael Owen, and then Wayne Rooney. You could set your official England Supporters Club watch by the presence of these men.
But who now, though? As if 2016 didn’t cast enough uncertainty into the world; the last thing we needed to start 2017 was a debate on who England’s main striker should be. And yet here we are.
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There are options, of course. Go back a couple of years, and who could have predicted Harry Kane and Jamie Vardy would be two of the main contenders? Yet their infectious running and endless harrying have brought joy to a divided nation. Neither is exactly Leo Messi, but the pair’s sheer level of industry is up there with two Christians in a national park who’ve been told there’s an image of Christ in one of the puddles.
Kane and Vardy are romantic options for leading the line. Players whose underdog background and style of play stir the loins.
With Vardy, there’s something genuinely intoxicating about his straight-line velocity brand of football. You can sense the electricity as he tears towards the ball like a fiver-clutching vegetarian making a beeline for the victim economy. It’s hard not to enjoy watching Jamie Vardy when he’s on song. And he’s been on one helluva song.
Vardy’s debut premier league season finished with a measly 5 goals. Difficult, then, not to smile when he scored on 29 August 2015 against Bournemouth and didn’t fail to score again in a league game until the Christmas lights were up. Vardy’s off-field antics mean he’s unlikely to be given a UN ambassadorial role any time soon. But if Bank Ki-moon ever needs an injection of pace up top, he knows where to look.
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While it might be a struggle to reconcile liking Jamie Vardy with your broader world view, Harry Kane is nothing short of a charm. Big trusting eyes and warm of interview. Physically cherubic, with those lovely red cheeks, if in a slightly might-have-struggled-with-algebra kind of way. A real Best Case Scenario for dating your daughter.
As with Vardy, Kane is already twenty-five past any level of expectation. Farmed out in his formative years to team after team further down the footballing pyramid, Kane developed a classic case of McEachran-itis; destined to appear in squad photos at the start of every season, only to vanish into the ether of Manish Bhasin’s witching hour highlight reel. Leyton Orient. Millwall. It didn’t matter how shit the team was, so long as they were within touching distance of the M25 and on late.
But then, all of a sudden, as though a North London genie had appeared from a lamp, piping up with something unintelligible in faux Cockney-ese, in a tone suggesting that the genie probably thought he was more of a geezer than he actually was, Kane was granted his wish of a shot at the big time.
And by crikey he grasped it. Game after game, Kane dared the nation to say it was just a run of form. Teased us all with the prospect that he would be back being analysed by Steve Claridge and Leroy Rosenior in next to no time. The disbelief continued right up until Kane finished runner-up in the scoring charts; this despite not even opening his account until November. As an encore, Kane won the golden boot outright the following year. The nation had found a bona fide centre-forward.
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Just as Kane was tickling everyone’s wholesome fancy, along came a striker who was even lovelier, even younger and even more of a throwback. Marcus Rashford is a dream within a dream.
A brace on his European debut, another brace on his league debut, the winner in his first Manchester derby and the youngest English player to score in his first senior international game. Not bad for a four month period in the midst of his A-levels.
All being well, Rashford could conceivably become England’s Number 9 until 2030. Young strikers are rightly approached with caution, though. They burst onto the scene with all the lustre of a young Harrison Ford, only for many to drift off into the lower leagues or even, God forbid, Sunderland. Sometimes you’ve got a genuine unicorn on your hands. Sometimes all you’ve got is a horse with a dildo strapped to its head, and you’re left feeling thoroughly duped by the cheeky bugger. Rashford looks likely to be the former, but it’s still early days.
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All these romantic options. Warms the cockles of your heart, doesn’t it? Well not mine, mate. The romantic option is what made Michael Jordan give up basketball and play baseball for two years. Badly. The romantic option is why Jeremy Corbyn is currently denying the UK government an effective opposition. It’s the reason kitchens up and down the country are littered with bread-making machines.
The Swedish press summed up romance perfectly when 17 year-old Theo Walcott was taken to the 2006 World Cup. They likened Sven’s decision in picking Theo to being locked out of your house with only €1 and choosing to spend it on a lottery ticket. It might work, but the better option would have been to buy a phone card.
Daniel Sturridge is England’s phone card. He’s the head not the heart. He’s got something better than romance: pedigree. Born into a footballing family and with clubs fighting over him as a teenager, there’s no rags to riches story with Sturridge because there never needed to be; he was always going to be really good. This doesn’t make him the populist choice for headline-hunting journalists, but I would ask you to look beyond the loudest and most obvious, just as Sturridge himself does on the field of play.
People remember the colossal balls up against Iceland in the summer, forgetting that there was very nearly a colossal balls up in the group stages against Wales. England couldn’t seem to unlock the massed ranks of the Welsh defence for all the call centres in Swansea. It took a moment of guile from Sturridge and – crucially – the willingness to take a chance, to do something different, that got England the crucial goal. While Kane was busy hitting free-kicks the wrong side of the goal-line official and corners into neighbouring stadiums, Sturridge was one of the few that emerged from Euro 2016 with any credit.
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In short, Sturridge has the ability to peer over the horizon when Kane and Vardy can only see hills and ocean. And while you would happily back either of the latter two to run riot against many of the punch-bags in international football, when it comes down to it, when it really matters, my money would be on Sturridge to find a way through against one of the big beasts.
Sturridge’s career has been somewhat chequered to date. Partly due to a poor decision to go to Chelsea at an early age, but mostly because of injury problems. His fragile nature should not count against him when considering options for England. If he’s fit, he should play. He can at least last the length of a major tournament; and certainly for the duration that England tend to remain in for.
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