President Donald Trump accidentally took sides in the great debate over Harry Kane’s position. Is he right?

Donald Trump has become involved in one of English football’s endless debates.

Does Harry Kane, one of the great center forwards of his era, spend too much time outside the attacking areas?

Many people in England believe this and have blamed this trend for the team’s inability to fulfill their tournament potential. This argument now has a new member: the President of the United States.

“You have a great player in England that I played golf with. And that’s Harry (Kane) who was fantastic,” Trump said at a pre-final news conference alongside Gianni Infantino.

“I think maybe they made a mistake making him a defensive player. What do I know about football? They took the lead, they took their best player and put him on defense.

“We have to be a bit offensive, don’t we. But no, I’m not going to call it, what do I know about coaching? But it was a bit unusual.”

Trump was referring to England’s semi-final loss to Argentina. After taking the lead in the 55th minute, Thomas Tuchel’s side fell back, ceded possession and attempted to defend for the rest of the match.

In American football terms: this was a preventative defense and it proved extremely unpopular.

For Kane, the captain, this meant he had no offensive influence over the rest of the match. He made a few clearances, blocked a shot and helped England defend in the air. For most players this would be circumstantial – a consequence of a manager’s decision – and yet it was a theme of Kane’s entire match (during which he had just one shot and had no touches inside the Argentina penalty area) and was a dominant grievance for much of his 121-cap international career.

He plays deep. He gets involved from the first phases of possession. Instead of always being used at the forefront of the formation, where you would find a striker like Erling Haaland, Kane, 32, is often used as a receiving option in midfield or to move the attack through his long-range passing.

Before everything went wrong against Argentina, there was a good example. At the start of the move that led to Anthony Gordon’s goal, Kane received the ball from Reece James deep in his own half, as shown in the screenshot below.

He touched and whistled a long-range pass upfield, stretching the Argentine defense and forcing Nicolas Tagliafico (below) to make a sloppy clearance. Declan Rice (circled) then collected the ball, starting the second phase of a move from which England scored.

Kane is an exceptionally gifted player. He is both a world-class scorer and an outstanding playmaker. In the example above, his raked pass created a goal in what was originally a one-on-four situation in Argentina’s favor. None of Kane’s contemporaries would have been able to play this pass, or would have been able to if they had been. Not Erling Haaland, not Robert Lewandowski, Kylian Mbappe or Cristiano Ronaldo at his peak.

Its diversity therefore has considerable value, but it also tends to be the target of criticism when England fail.

According to President Trump’s comments as a “defensive player,” this has again proven to be the case. And as easy as it is to dismiss Trump’s views on football, there are many in England who agree, albeit with more compelling arguments.

Are they right?

A little context first. Kane has never been an orthodox striker. At no point in his career, from his breakthrough at Tottenham in 2014 to the present day, has he been a penalty scorer. This tendency to move away from his position and link up with his teammates has always been part of his game. This trait has become more pronounced over time, as he has aged, but every coach he has had, at club or international level, has used it in the same way.

This is currently the case at Bayern Munich, for whom he plays an even larger role than for England. It is common to see him receiving passes in the position shown above, or deeper, and creating chances in the same way. In the first leg of the Champions League semi-final first leg last season, Bayern lost 5-4 to Paris Saint-Germain; it was one of the games of the European season and it featured this Luis Diaz goal, created by – yes – Kane dropping deep and completing a pass over the top of the PSG defence.

Look through Bayern’s season and there are all sorts of attacking moves that depended, in the first place, on something he did away from goal. He’s also scored 50 times in a total of 44 appearances in the Bundesliga and Champions League, so that hasn’t come at an obvious cost either. In fact, Kane’s influence within his club was so profound that before the World Cup he was considered a candidate for the Ballon d’Or, football’s highest individual honor.

England’s elimination in the semi-finals will put him out of contention, but he is still considered one of the best players in the world precisely because of that stature. As such, condensing all of this value into a traditional advanced role seems like a poor allocation of resources. Bayern managed to beat Real Madrid with Kane playing the same way. They came very close to beating PSG, now double European champions.

England’s use of Kane is very much necessitated by the diversity of his attributes. In this and several previous tournaments, their attack has been built around dynamic attackers and a group of midfielders who, while talented, do not possess the widest range of passing abilities. Declan Rice, Elliot Anderson and Jude Bellingham are all excellent players, but Rice and Bellingham advance the ball by carrying it, and while Anderson’s passes can be incisive, they tend to come from short to medium range.

In this kind of team, Kane certainly needs to occupy positions that allow him to take the chances that should go to a center forward. His head against DR Congo, for example. However, he is one of the few players in this England team capable of completing passes with precision and efficiency over long distances. It is a key weapon in creating space, even if it only exists in theory. It’s an awkward comparison, for non-football fans, but consider an NFL quarterback who can’t throw a deep ball. If this option does not exist, it is very limiting and that, in essence, would be part of the problems that England would face.

Kane and England were knocked out by Argentina (Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images)

This means that the cost of positioning Kane exclusively in attack is to make the team more brutal and, quite possibly, reduce the impact of both the wide forwards (Anthony Gordon and Morgan Rogers) and the midfielders who benefit from running beyond Kane. It’s the same at Bayern, where the offensive mechanics simply don’t work without Kane’s involvement.

Yet this is a debate for a reason. Could Kane have played a modified form of that role at this World Cup, bowing less frequently and more often being a traditional physical outlet high up the pitch? Maybe. Having this usefulness against Argentina, which could have allowed England to progress on the pitch, certainly seems preferable in hindsight. And yet that ignores how valuable Kane is behind the ball, as a sturdy defender.

Round and round; it’s a problem without a proper solution. Especially since, whatever complaints are leveled at Kane’s positional tendencies, no one has scored more than his 85 goals for England. With years left in his career, no one probably ever will.

But it’s English football’s version of a conundrum that exists in all sports. Whenever there is an irregular talent, someone capable of breaking the conventions of their role, there are arguments about conformity to orthodoxy.

The attackers score goals. The attackers must be in the penalty area.

Given his age, Harry Kane may never appear at another World Cup, and his chance to end England’s 60-year quest for the trophy may be over. But this question, in which Donald Trump is now participating, will never be resolved.

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