Golden boots shine bright for Kane on winning night

He wore golden boots. And he has won them too of course. Three as the Premier League's top scorer, one for outscoring everyone else in a World Cup. It was a fitting way to mark Harry Kane's century of caps, though. Not the most fitting: that came after the presentations. England 2-0 Finland was Kane 2-0 Finland, a golden night for the golden boots.

- RICHARD JOLLY

Yet there is something unflashy to him. Kane has been defined by goals but he has also exuded a reliability. “I want to score goals,” he said; a bland enough statement but a motto for his career. It was unsurprising, then, on his 100th cap and with England requiring a goal, that Kane obliged. He took Trent Alexander-Arnold’s pass, turned away from Robert Ivanov in deft fashion and then delivered the brutal finish, rising as it flew past Lukas Hradecky. It was typical of a man whose hunger is rarely sated by one that he swept in another, with expert precision, from Noni Madueke’s pass.

And this, in a nutshell, is what Kane has turned himself into: a remarkable finisher, but a reliable one. One hundred caps may not prove his most meaningful century: not when he has voiced an ambition to take his tally of international goals into three figures. “The top players in the world have scored more than I have, so there’s targets there to try and achieve,” he added. The down-to-earth delivery can conceal an ambition. The normality of Kane scoring can generate abnormal statistics.

Kane is much more than the numbers but they amount to a formidable body of work: more than 400 goals for clubs and country, 68 in England’s colours. The most recent came with two of his daughters as mascots, with a presentation of a golden cap by Frank Lampard, who is well suited to such ambassadorial duties.