Thomas Tuchel faces an attacking conundrum. England have to extract the maximum output from Harry Kane while getting other players to contribute more. Jude Bellingham’s performance against Panama showed how both sides of this equation can be solved.
Kane has scored 13 goals in Tuchel’s 17 England matches, with no other player contributing more than three. He scored a penalty and a header from a corner against Croatia, then blazed over the bar from a rebound in the Ghana match. There was little of note created for him in open play.
A centre-forward usually receives fewer passes than their teammates (though Kane often tries to correct this by dropping deep), but the issue for England has been which of their players have been delivering the ball to their No 9 in this tournament. It has too rarely been who they would have hoped.
Jordan Pickford played the joint-most passes to Kane in the opening match, with three, before Marc Guéhi led the way with the same tally in the second game. Three players played four to him against Panama, though Bellingham needed just two to prove quality trumps quantity.
It feels surprising that the Real Madrid midfielder and Kane have not linked up more for the national team. Opta’s data shows that leading into the Panama game, Bellingham had created only three chances for England’s record goalscorer in their 1,154 minutes of shared pitch time at major tournaments.
The only goal they had combined for in an international match prior to this World Cup occurred in a friendly win at Hampden Park in 2023. A very similar pass to the one which unlocked the Scotland defence that night did likewise against Panama.
England had generated only 0.54 expected goals in the opening 56 minutes of the match against Panama before a Bellingham through ball set up Kane for their side’s first Opta-defined big chance of the contest. Within the next 10 minutes, the midfielder won a corner, scored from it and assisted Kane for England’s second goal.
Opta have a metric called expected assists, which measures the likelihood that completed passes become goal assists. Bellingham’s passes against Panama were valued at 0.57, the most by any England player in a group game. Noni Madueke (with 0.66) was the only other squad member to hit that mark in total across the three games.
Bellingham’s passes to Kane were a huge part of this tally. In expected goal terms, the chances he created were the second and joint-fourth highest value opportunities any England player set up for another in the group stage.
The challenge for Tuchel is to make such moments a regular occurrence, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo likely to employ a low block on Wednesday.
