Reputations: Harry and Joe
Flip sides of the same coin, or saying something more complex about Englishness? Another in our occasional series...
It’s hard not to feel the true weight of football in England at the moment, and it’s measured in tons. L’affair de Stokes has receded to background murmur. The women’s World Cup final at Lord’s was – let’s be real here – a damp squib in part because of the scheduling. Even the debut of a 15 year old wonder-kid followed by a billion back home became nothing more than a throwaway down-pager for the sports sections. At Wimbledon, the organisers were leaning heavily on old-stagers Djokovic and Williams for a tiny bit of cut-through.
All else disappeared from view last Sunday night/Monday morning with the match at the Azteca. The pubs stayed open. The schools stayed closed. And England – oh boy, did they do the business. With a kick-off delayed until 2am, more than nine million watched the match live on BBC, while the next day saw 48 million requests for highlights on the iPlayer. When someone as eminent as friend of this Substack Jonathan Wilson calls the game one ‘that will be discussed as long as football exists,’ then you’re scrabbling around for a vaguely comparable moment in English cricket: 2005 maybe, or the final of 2019?
This, let’s not forget, was not even a quarter final (that comes on Saturday, so good luck to the England-India men’s T20 taking place a few hours of drinking time beforehand). The thought of the England football team contesting a World Cup final and even winning it, well… what would that involve? A national holiday, a countrywide open top bus tour, a rise in the birth rates, a feel-good windfall for the economy? Andy Burnham getting the three lions tattooed above his heart on a Kik livestream? Thomas Tuchel accepting accelerated British citizenship from Prince William? A vast unfolding of the law of unintended consequences will quickly take place should the impossible dream become real at last.
This football World Cup has the effect of compounding the errors in English cricket’s governorship, specifically the calendar and the mess over the men’s Test team. The Hundred begins two days after the World Cup final, and concludes as England try to cram in a Test series with Pakistan and some white ball cricket against Sri Lanka, while the women’s inaugural Test at Lord’s starts on Friday, just in time for the England v Norway build-up. At this point, the ECB’s prime marketing focus might be to see how many England footballers it can get on camera at a Hundred game, but then the Premier League kicks off on August 21, which is day three of the First Test against Pakistan, so there’s that, too… Can the sport afford an invisible summer beset by bad news and weird vibes?
Given the inequalities, there’s an odd similarity, almost a singularity, between the men that embody either side of the divide, Harry Kane and Joe Root. Kane is England’s greatest goal-scorer, Root its highest run-getter. Both come from ordinary backgrounds, both are husbands and dads with impeccable reputations built on their innate and obvious decency. They treat their followers well, and do so because they want to, not because they have to. There’s no downside to being a Harry Kane fan or a Joe Root fan.
On the field they are exemplars of a certain kind of talent. Root is more of a Tendulkar than a Lara, technically pure, consistent, reliable. Close your eyes and imagine a Joe Root innings and it’s a frictionless experience, the ball sent where it asks to go, a glide from start to finish. Cricket can be a violent game, but Root’s batting hides that violence away behind the sweetness of his skills. His numbers have ascribed an upward curve because he learned the lessons of his early career, when he found it harder to convert starts into proper scores. Now he bats like a wise Buddha, at peace with himself and the unequal game, not its biggest player but maybe its best.
You could say the same about Harry Kane, who in terms of star power and commercial grunt exists on the rung below Haaland, Messi and Ronaldo, just as Root lies below the Gods of India in fame, exposure and earnings. Like Root, Kane is elevated to their company by the numbers: he is Tottenham Hotspur’s all-time leading goalscorer, England’s all-time leading goalscorer, the all-time highest English goalscorer in the Champions League, a winner of multiple Golden Boots (hopefully he asks for alternate feet as he piles them up). He has 500 career goals, and is now the joint fifth highest goalscorer at World Cup Finals, which, given that those above him play for teams which actually win it from time to time, is not bad going. Like Root, there is the feeling of craftsmanship rather than unfathomable genius to what he does, an attention to detail applied with a natural intelligence and feel for the game. The first yard for Harry is always in the head.
As they grow older, both are almost superhumanly injury free and permanently available. Below the placid surface there is a rage to hold on, a fierce will to survive.
And what of those surfaces? What do they say? They are the traditional kind of English storybook hero: modest and unassuming, fair-haired and fresh-faced, a post-war timelessness that suggests they may have emerged from any era. There’s a Harry Potter quality to them, a kind of moral simplicity of the good guy. In public at least there is little complexity, no darkness shadowing their personalities in the way it has more ambiguous heroes like Gazza or Stokes or O’Sullivan, nor the vulnerability of the fallen giant that existed in Frank Bruno and Andrew Flintoff. They feel less at the whim of their emotions, as likely to do the business on a wet Wednesday night in Leicester or an empty arena in UAE as they are on the days of full houses and epic repercussions.
No doubt when the time comes there will be knighthoods and the long afterlife of the legend. There’s no sense that either yearns for the bigger post-game existence of a Beckham or a Flintoff, richer and more famous now than they were back then.
They are, in short, reassuring in so many ways, proof of some kind of natural justice that shows you get out what you put in. England can’t be too bad if Kane and Root are the avatars of its winter and summer sports.
But for all of Root’s greatness and approachability, the England cricket team still lacks the stories and the representation of Kane and his team-mates. For any ordinary kid, how appealing is being hoovered up by a public school or set on a talent pathway when football is available on the doorstep and geared up to find every player of ability and potential by the sheer force of competition. Jude Bellingham may be a minority shareholder in a Hundred franchise, but an athlete of his quality, or that of Saka, or Eze or Rice only really has one choice to make in terms of which sport to play.
Should Kane join Root as a World Cup winner, the weight of football will be doubled, cubed, multipliable by unknowable factors. Cricket may look on in envy, temporarily obliterated and in fear of its own mistakes.
If you want the ultimate companion to this World Cup, Jonathan Wilson’s The Power And The Glory has been deservedly crowned Sports Book of the Year at the Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards. It’s brilliant, and it’s out now in paperback here and here. Check it out!
And a friendly reminder that Vinciness is out now in paperback, yours for £10, and available here.
I really enjoyed this. The Kane-Root comparison works because neither of them has ever needed to shout about how good they are. They've just quietly turned up, year after year, and let the numbers do the talking. That's becoming rarer in modern sport.
At the start of the NZ series I mused that cricket would struggle to get much media interest as the behomoth of the World Cup encroached, turns out there was a lot of coverage of the proceedings of the three tests and the events surrounding them,though sadly there was limited space accorded to the feats of the winning and likeable victors. At first glance I thought this would be a piece about Rook and Brook, I really wonder how the career of the the latter will pan out.