Why forward-thinking Southgate will resist quick fixes for England | Simon Burnton

Resting Harry Kane makes England’s striking ranks look a little impoverished but the manager will stick to his principles of building for the future rather than a short-term goals solution

Harry Kane will not start for England against Switzerland on Tuesday evening because, in the words of Gareth Southgate, he is one of “several players where we have to watch how much they play”. Precisely the same could be said of Marcus Rashford and Danny Welbeck, the other strikers in this England squad, if for entirely different reasons.

Already in this Premier League season, only four games old, Kane has played more than 2.5 times as much football as those two put together. Until Rashford completed the match against Spain at Wembley on Saturday night neither he nor Welbeck had played an entire 90 minutes this season. Indeed, in the last 12 months the England captain has played more full first-team matches than Rashford has in his entire career, or that Welbeck has in the five years since the start of September 2013. Though youth, in Rashford’s case, and injury, in Welbeck’s, go some way to explaining that statistic it nevertheless illustrates their current status and a case of feast and famine in which neither extreme, as Southgate tacitly admitted, is particularly healthy.

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