Ollie Watkins

[cdbearsfan]

Yeah, Bowen ahead of Kane is a wild take even by bronte's standards.

[DB]

Jarrod is class.

He would be great at the Villa.

[Pat Mustard]

Jarrod is class.

He would be great at the Villa.

I suspect this is his last season at West Ham, might be an option in the summer

[Exeter 77]

How old is Bowen now? I know he was older than I thought but can't remember exactly.

Edit: Ignore me . He 28 - 29 the week before Christmas which is older than I thought.

[Dante Lavelli]

Jarrod is class.

He is, but surely not as a striker down the middle?

[Skipper_The_Eyechild]

Also, Kane easily can play the 'false 9' that has been mentioned. If anything, he does it a lot.

[brontebilly]

Also, Kane easily can play the 'false 9' that has been mentioned. If anything, he does it a lot.

When has he performed in an international tournament for England? Has a dose of the Rooney's if anything, maybe one very good tournament and the rest rubbish. Pads out the stats in qualifiers and friendlies that England would win anyway. Tournament football is a different vibe completely. England looked a far better team when Southgate finally gave Watkins a chance in the Euros. Gave more space to their most talented players.

[Dante Lavelli]

Also, Kane easily can play the 'false 9' that has been mentioned. If anything, he does it a lot.

I think that’s been England’s downfall.  False 9 kane work best when the wide players bomb forward into the gap. We had Grealish, Saka and Foden, who prefer the ball at their feet, not played in behind.

[eamonn]

Jarrod is class.

He would be great at the Villa.

His old man is Villa. Was hoping we'd get Bowen Jr under Deano when he was impressing at Hull but Wham were a more attractive proposition at the time even if we had been in for him. Now his Dad-in-law is one of the more famous, unhinged Hammers and I imagine Jarrod is too scared to upset him.

[Skipper_The_Eyechild]

Also, Kane easily can play the 'false 9' that has been mentioned. If anything, he does it a lot.

When has he performed in an international tournament for England? Has a dose of the Rooney's if anything, maybe one very good tournament and the rest rubbish. Pads out the stats in qualifiers and friendlies that England would win anyway. Tournament football is a different vibe completely. England looked a far better team when Southgate finally gave Watkins a chance in the Euros. Gave more space to their most talented players.

I haven't said anything about how he performs. You suggested Bowen because he could play a false 9, implying that we may not have that with Kane, but we do. I didn’t say it was a good thing, although it couldn't have been too bad considering we got to two finals.

[Dave]

Also, Kane easily can play the 'false 9' that has been mentioned. If anything, he does it a lot.

When has he performed in an international tournament for England? Has a dose of the Rooney's if anything, maybe one very good tournament and the rest rubbish.

In four tournaments he's got six goals, four goals, two goals, three goals.

And given he'll probably have at least another four or five matches I imagine that he'll end with a (individual) tournament record that stands up against pretty much anyone in history.

[PeterWithesShin]

Everyone scores more in qualifiers than they do in the finals. Ronaldo, Messi, Mbappe, Kane, Shearer etc. You will rarely play weaker sides like San Marino, Lux, Ireland etc in the finals. Kane's record of 15 goals in 28 matches at finals is more than decent and is far superior to Rooney with his 1 WC finals goal. And Kane's strike rate at finals is better than in friendlies.

[eamonn]

How many were pens? Obviously they count but hasn't there been a few major tournaments where the talk has been of Kane  being invisible and offering as much to a team as Darren Bent etc.

[Dave]

How many were pens? Obviously they count but hasn't there been a few major tournaments where the talk has been of Kane  being invisible and offering as much to a team as Darren Bent etc.

He clearly wasn't fit enough in the last Euros and was generally a bit rubbish. But he still won the Golden Boot while captaining his team to the final. And that's what history will judge, rather than "did he look a bit shit as England failed to break down Slovenia?".

Nobody goes back and complains that when Miroslav Klose won the Golden Boot he was actually rubbish because he scored four of his five goals in his first two matches against Costa Rica and Ecuador and did virtually nothing else for the rest of the tournament. He just won the Golden Boot and Germany finished third.

[paul_e]

I can see some of the argument Bronte is making but as he so often does it's really heavy-handed and biased and has completely the wrong conclusion. We don't need a false 9, our biggest problem for years has been that all of our best players want to play in the same 'half-spaces' where they're not quite a winger or a 10 or a striker but sort of do a bit of everything. Grealish, Foden, Saka, Bellingham, Palmer and more recently Rogers and Gordon all do their best work in those gaps.

For that to work you need a striker who is moving defenders away from those spaces but Kane was allowed to drift into them, which is why so many teams managed to stifle us and we ended up relying on set pieces or individual bits of magic too often. Watkins fixes that because he gets right up onto the shoulder of defenders and runs them into areas they don't want to be (it's the same reason he's so important to how we play) but Bowen wouldn't do that.

This isn't to say that Kane isn't a top striker with a great tournament record though, just that I think we'd have benefitted from him more if Southgate had been able to get him to stop drifting so deep where he wasn't needed.