Can England exploit Croatia’s lack of pace at the back?
5 min readJun 17, 2026 08:30 AM IST When Bayer Leverkusen beat Werder Bremen 5-0 on April 14, 2024, winning the Bundesliga title and ending Bayern Munich’s run of 11 successive league titles, the resulting online content included visuals of a crestfallen Harry Kane and talk of a curse attached to him. The striker had spent many a trophyless year at Tottenham Hotspur and in international football with England. A move to Bayern was supposed to be a sure-shot way of ending that rut by at least winning the Bundesliga. It was all nothing more than banter, of course. The floodgates opened next season and now, Kane has two league titles and a DFB Pokal. Now, he may not have changed teams at the international level but England are trying something different at the 2026 World Cup by going in with Thomas Tuchel, a German, as their manager. Could this be the year for Kane and England? It is a question that has come to haunt England fans. Ever since the “Golden Generation” made a …









