Other club football

I see that top professionals at the peak of their powers missed an offside in la liga, to incorrectly award Barcelona (who have a history of paying referees for consultancy) a goal.

Don't you think it's important, when your argument is almost entirely numerical?

When coaches talk about creating chances, they mostly mean through movement and skill, that players contribute to. Rather than having teammates fall down in the box while you la di da loiter around the halfway line, or back post.

That's as much a part of being a striker, as a numerical count. You have to actually strike sometimes.

Why can't we take the last ten years?

Internationally Kane has scored around a third of his goals as penalties. He scores them at around the average for successful spot kicks, at around 85%. This drops to under 70% for international tournaments, and to around 50% for knockout games.

In the big moments, when you need your big players to step up, he's literally and metaphorically headed the wrong way.

Still. He plays every minute, of every game, for all that clever striking play. Doesn't he? Innit?

Not for me.

You play with what you have available to you. Which for England is better options. I don't really much care if totteningham or Bayern munching bratwurst aren't fussed about winning things.

Whatever you think about opinions, you can't challenge the numerical facts. Trophies won with Kane in the team is still zero. Nought. Nada.

I wouldn't think so. But the relative recent comparison of fortunes is interesting to those who have insisted that Kane is a massive asset, and not playing him would inevitably make a team worse. I would have thought.

Clearly the fewer data points, the less statistically significant any conclusions drawn from the data are. An individuals data record is rarely over a large number of data points, for penalties. I believe that Kane has taken in the order of twice the number of England penalties of any other player. So they are likely to be as significant as it gets.

The data would suggest that having someone like Saka take penalties, and someone who can run and do strikery things in place of Kane, would at least not significantly alter the contributions to goals from penalty kicks. It's not like he's a statistical freak who scores them all. Someone like sterling, who is more on the move, is likely to win more.