Harry Kane concern and calls for Jude Bellingham snub – are England in CRISIS?

The World Cup is but a few short weeks away, and that can mean only one thing: England must be in crisis.

And crisis they are in, make no mistake about that. There are very real doubts about the form of Harry Kane and equally real and not at all confected calls to snub Jude Bellingham.

Is it even worth Thomas Tuchel and the lads heading over to North America this summer at all given the chaos and crisis engulfing the squad? Answer, sadly, must be no.

Form and function

One thing Mediawatch thought we’d all moved on from now he spends his time winning trophies with a proper football club while still scoring simply millions of goals, was the absurd levels of disrespect aimed at England’s greatest ever striker.

Harry Kane’s success at Bayern Munich did seem to have put all that nonsense to bed, even if it did always seem a bit odd that it took him scoring loads of goals like he always had, but for a better team in a weaker league, to truly propel him to the top-tier status he has deserved for a decade.

But, with a major tournament a few weeks away, we’re back to the disrespect. And from BBC Sport, no less, who should definitely know better and be way above this kind of cack.

In better form than Kane – why Watkins is no longer being ‘written off’

We’ll just skate past the idea that anyone was ever writing Ollie Watkins off, rather than merely noting at the time he missed out on the March squad that with just eight Premier League goals to his name, he hadn’t exactly made the most compelling case.

Let’s focus instead on the real meat of that headline. ‘In better form than Kane’. Given that Kane has just finished the season with almost 60 goals for Bayern Munich, it’s quite the claim. Let’s see how they’ve justified it.

Watkins has scored 14 Premier League goals this season – not his greatest yield in a Villa shirt – but six of those have come since he was left out of the March international camp.

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Across all competitions, that number goes up to 10 – Kane has scored eight in the same period – with his form extending to Villa’s run to the Europa League final.

In a stunningly on-brand move, Kane has, of course, since that was written on Saturday casually helped himself to yet another hat-trick for Bayern Munich, taking his tally for the season to a mere 58 and his 2026 total to a worryingly meagre 28. So even by the BBC’s own crucial form window, the scoreline is now 11-10 in the favour of the big fraud.

But even when it was 10-8, was it ever really fair to say Watkins was the form man?

First of all, that ‘since he was left out’ is slightly sneaky because it allows a goal he scored against West Ham before the international break itself to count. Handy that.

In total, Watkins’ 10 goals in the BBC’s sneakily defined period have come in 879 Premier and Europa League minutes. That is very good, no question about it. Watkins has absolutely now made his case to be the first reserve back-up striker to Kane this summer in a race nobody previously seemed particularly eager to win.

But what about Kane’s numbers over that period? His eight goals came in 765 Bundesliga, Champions League and DFB Pokal minutes. It wasn’t exactly a slump, was it? Even before the season-ending hat-trick. That eight-goal run did also include scoring in each and every one of four Champions League knockout games against Real Madrid and PSG.

But, while Watkins may well be arguably England’s most in-form striker heading into the World Cup, realistically the spot everyone is vying for is the number one back-up position to captain Kane.

Rarely have the words ‘may well be arguably’ performed such superhuman feats of heavy lifting.

The Haunting of Chelsea

Mediawatch is once again forced here to go full Football Cliches in response to this Daily Mirror FA Cup final headline.

Antoine Semenyo comes back to haunt Chelsea and win Man City the FA Cup – 5 talking points

Talking point number one: Can a player really come back to haunt a club for which he has never, ever played? Mediawatch is adamant that the only answer here must be surely not.

So how do the Mirror possibly justify this?

The Bournemouth fans used to sing he was magic, y’know. And it’s been some season for Semenyo, whose stellar form for the Cherries effectively made a big mid-season move inevitable.

He was effectively left with his pick of the Premier League’s elite in January, too, including City and Chelsea, though the latter later withdrew from the race. In the end, it was City Semenyo picked. And it was City who profited from the Ghana star’s moment of genius on the biggest stage here.

What a cake-and-eat-it set-up this is for the tabloids if a player can now perform a ‘haunting’ upon any club to which they’ve ever bee linked in a sketchy and clunkily Google-translated report in Deportivo, even if said club ‘later withdrew from the race’.

The Bell tolls

You may remember last week we swore not to look at the results of a Daily Express readers’ poll about whether Jude Bellingham should be in the England squad.

As we said last week:

That… comes from a site-topping poll on the Express’ football page asking their readers to vote on whether they think Jude Bellingham should be in England’s World Cup squad.

Reader, we will not be looking at the results of that poll. There are limits to what even we are willing to put ourselves through for you.

Well, we’ve been hoodwinked into looking at it, because obviously the Express have now reported the results as if they were a news story containing viable content or value.

Jude Bellingham sparks divide as England field calls to snub star for World Cup

It’s a lovely bit of business, we must grudgingly concede, to sex up ‘some Express readers clicked an online poll’ into ‘England field calls to snub star’.

But what of the results themselves? To our pleasant surprise, even Express readers came down on the side of righteousness here, with a story full of rehashes of previous overblown Tuchel-Bellingham wars (see Mediawatches passim if you absolutely must) eventually getting round to grudgingly conceding that 53.4 per cent saying yes and only 46.6 per cent are lunatics. You can almost smell the disappointment coming off the page.

But fair play to the Express, they’ve not let getting the wrong result in their poll put them off stirring the pot as best they can. It’s all…

Our readers are divided…

And…

…our latest poll revealed that opinions were largely split…

Interesting, though, isn’t it? Surely this cannot be the Daily Express of all papers trying to go against the confirmed will of the people? Shouldn’t the 47 per cent just accept they lost, get over it and shut up forever? Or is that only for far more trivial matters than very important polls about a footballer the tabloids have decided they don’t much care for at all, thank you very much?

Meanwhile, there’s another poll now live on the Express site about Cole Palmer’s World Cup hopes.

So look forward to a story sometime before Friday’s squad announcement about England fielding calls and facing demands about him as well.

They’ve also worded this one as ‘Should England drop Cole Palmer’ rather than ‘Should England pick Cole Palmer’ so we’re also absolutely certain that a sufficient number of the yes votes will have meant to be nos and vice versa for the Palmexit result to carry even less statistical rigour than Bexit.

Dub step

Always exciting times at Mediawatch when news reaches us of a fresh dubbing. Of course, it’s always catastrophic for the player concerned. No good can come of a dubbing, least of all when the dubbee is a 16-year-old and the player he’s being compared to is literally the current holder of the Ballon d’Or.

The Daily Star are very, very excited.

Arsenal in for ‘English Ousmane Dembele’

Leicester City’s Jeremy Monga, if you were wondering. Now he does have powerful Arsenal young gun energy having made a Premier League debut at 15 for Leicester, and his potential is not in question despite the difficulties of trying to make his way as a precocious young talent in what has been a catastrophic Championship season for the Foxes.

He may well go on to be great, but we put it to you that this is just a deeply forlorn couple of sentences.

He has gone on to play 27 times in the Championship as the Foxes suffered back-to-back relegations to League One.

Given his style of play, Monga have been described as ‘England’s Ousmane Dembele’, despite only scoring once this season.

Makes it even worse that apparently there’s more than one of him.