Harry Kane stood with his hands on his hips and looked at the grass. Around him the Atlanta stadium had split into two noises, one of which had nothing to do with him any more. Lionel Messi came over, took Kane’s head in both hands, and pulled it into his shoulder. Kane let it stay there. Then he straightened, turned towards the England end, walked the length of the pitch and slowly began to clap towards the English crowd. He found Jude Bellingham and held him. Bellingham, ten years his junior, was seen minutes later with his face in his hand. Anthony Gordon, who had scored the goal England could not keep, stood apart from all of it, hands on his hips, watching.
England had led since the 55th minute. Enzo Fernandez bent one in from distance in the 85th. Two minutes into stoppage time Messi crossed and Lautaro Martínez headed the winner. “It’s a similar story to what’s happened in previous tournaments,” Kane said afterwards. “We’d done so well for that 60 minutes. We scored. We deserved to be ahead. And then, for one reason or another, we struggled to keep the ball.”
He has said versions of this sentence in Moscow, at Wembley, in Al Khor, in Berlin. He is 32 and word perfect at it.
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In 1999, on his first day at Ridgeway Rovers in Chingford, a coach named Dave Bricknell asked his six-year-olds if anyone fancied going in goal. Kane’s hand went up. “I thought I’d found a goalkeeper,” Bricknell says. The parents on the touchline put him right. Arsenal took him, looked at him, decided he was too chubby, too unathletic, and let him go. Spurs took another look, then spent years lending him out, Leyton Orient, Millwall, a relegation battle, a forgotten Under-20 World Cup in Turkey. Peter Taylor, who coached that team, says he could not have predicted the career. “You couldn’t meet a nicer boy,” he said. That is not the same thing as a prediction.
“He didn’t really care if he missed, because he knew another chance would come along.”
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The chance came. It always came. That is the part the record books show and the part that tells the least of it.
What the books do not show is the 30th minute in Moscow in 2018, England leading Croatia in a World Cup semi-final and Kane two yards out with a rebound sitting up. He shot. Goalkeeper Danijel Subasic got a hand to it. The ball came back. He shot again. The ball hit the post and ricocheted off Subasic’s leg. Subasic had sprinted back from nowhere and thrown himself along the ground to divert it with his foot, from two yards, at a ball that had already beaten him once.