Former England goalkeeper Paul Robinson, at Wembley for BBC Radio 5 Live, said: “This is the exact situation no England fan wants. We’ve talked about it for over a season with this World Cup coming up. What do England do without Harry Kane?<\/p>\n
“This is what England and Thomas Tuchel do not want. He doesn’t have an answer to this question. Hence why we’re seeing this new formation again, with the interchange and false nine.<\/p>\n
“We’ve spoken about Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Dominic Solanke, Ollie Watkins. Nobody stuck their arm up and said, ‘I’ll be his replacement’. that’s why we’re seeing this.”<\/p>\n
Robinson added: “It was a very disappointing evening for Thomas Tuchel. The experiment that he tried in the first half with the front four clearly didn’t work.<\/p>\n
“It didn’t take him long in the second half to change it. You do give England credit because when those changes were made there was a lot more cohesion.<\/p>\n
“The one area that Thomas Tuchel has got a problem is if there is a problem with Harry Kane. If that happens, then England have a real problem after watching that.”<\/p>\n
Tuchel answered the question about an over-reliance on Kane, saying: “Well, why would Argentina not rely on Lionel Messi, or Portugal not rely on Cristiano Ronaldo? This is totally normal. Key figures left camp for us and we saw that a bit.<\/p>\n
“We lacked a punch in the last 20 metres in both matches. We encouraged the players. It was difficult for us.”<\/p>\n
Kane’s potential absence is an immediate concern, leaving Tuchel short of viable alternatives when he needs them most, especially given these two toothless performances without him.<\/p>\n
English strikers are suddenly a malaise.<\/p>\n
Only 10 English strikers have appeared in the Premier League in the current campaign, with Chelsea’s 22-year-old Liam Delap the only one aged under 26.<\/p>\n
Brighton’s Danny Welbeck, who turns 35 at the end of the month and might just have had a good international break by not being involved, and 33-year-old Callum Wilson from West Ham United, are the only English strikers who have scored more than one goal in a match in the Premier League this season.<\/p>\n
Welbeck and Calvert-Lewin are the only English strikers to have scored 10 or more Premier League goals this season \u2013 with 43 scored by English strikers.<\/p>\n
The cupboard is bare, underscoring just how indispensable Kane is.<\/p>\n
This was a sobering night for England and Tuchel. This performance demonstrated that they simple cannot live without Harry Kane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former England goalkeeper Paul Robinson, at Wembley for BBC Radio 5 Live, said: “This is the exact situation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-506216","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}