England boss Thomas Tuchel says it will be impossible to find “another Harry Kane” as his free-scoring captain continues to break new ground. <\/p>\n
Kane scored a record-extending 87th goal for the Three Lions against the Czech Republic on Tuesday. <\/p>\n
And he is now just two appearances away from equalling Peter Shilton’s mark of 125 international appearances as he hones in on becoming England’s most capped player ever. <\/p>\n
However, while the 33-year-old Bayern Munich forward is in the form of his life, with his 73 goals for club and country last term putting him well into the conversation as a possible Ballon d’Or winner, he cannot go on forever and Tuchel admitted that there is no obvious successor.<\/p>\n
“You will not get another Harry Kane, first of all,” Tuchel said.<\/p>\n
“He is the first one to push everyone and that is his mindset and he became a very, very hardworking forward on top of his finishing skills. He is a complete package.<\/p>\n
“We look for different options and solutions. We finished the game with Jude [Bellingham] up front as a number nine.<\/p>\n
“There will be someone else, but it will not be Harry or a copy of Harry. We will find a solution when it comes to it but maybe not me. It might be another 10 years.”<\/p>\n
Kane is one of the leading strikers of his generation, but finding a suitable back-up has been a long-standing problem for England.<\/p>\n
Ollie Watkins and Ivan Toney utilised that role at the past two major tournaments but the Saudi Arabia-based pair are also in their thirties and were overlooked for the current batch of Nations League fixtures.<\/p>\n
While Dominic Calvert-Lewin is in the squad, he is also approaching his 30th birthday and Liam Delap is currently the only English centre forward under the age of 27 to have scored a Champions League goal.<\/p>\n
And that means Tuchel supplemented his striking options in Prague by deploying Real Madrid star Bellingham in a more advanced role than his normal midfield position after bringing him on for Kane.<\/p>\n
“I like him as a nine,” Tuchel added. “Then he can contribute to both sides and overload the sides and doesn’t affect so much of the balance.<\/p>\n
“We found a bit of a new role for him in the last match, as a central 10, so he can go to both sides and it is more of a 4-2-3-1 than a 4-3-3 to have Harry and Jude closer together and to give them a chance to overload both sides. We are working on that.<\/p>\n
“He is a natural goalscorer and he has the hunger to be on the scoreboard. He wants to be there and have the decisive action, so it makes not a huge difference if he plays as a nine or a 10.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England boss Thomas Tuchel says it will be impossible to find “another Harry Kane” as his free-scoring captain…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788129,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-788128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788128","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=788128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}