AFTER a remarkable season that has seen him score 29 goals and emerge as the hottest property in English football, Harry Kane will achieve another notable landmark tonight when he makes his senior England debut at Wembley.

The 21-year-old Spurs striker looks likely to start alongside Wayne Rooney as Lithuania provide the opposition in a Euro 2016 qualifier, but even if Roy Hodgson opts to restrict him to the bench, he will surely appear at some stage to mark his transition to the senior ranks.

It will be deserved recognition for a wonderful talent, whose sudden emergence evokes obvious comparisons to the way in which Rooney burst onto the scene in the build up to the 2004 European Championships in Portugal.

Kane is four years older than Rooney was when he earned an impromptu round of applause after impudently chipping David James during his first training session with England’s senior squad, but the speed of his progress and the confidence he has displayed as he has been thrust into the spotlight this season mark him out as an equally special talent.

He will surely be involved again when England take on Italy in a friendly on Tuesday, before returning to White Hart Lane to help Tottenham complete a season that could yet end with them in the Champions League. Then, the controversy will start.

At the end of the season, England travel to Dublin for a friendly against the Republic of Ireland before heading to Ljubljana for a qualifier with Slovenia on June 14.Three days later, and the European Under-21 Championships begin in the Czech Republic.

Kane is eligible for both the seniors and juniors this summer, but will not be involved in both spheres. His club manager, Mauricio Pochettino, has suggested he should be excused from all international action and given the whole of the summer off to enable him to recharge his batteries, but then self-interest has always dominated the club side of the club-versus-country debate.

Kane will either play for Hodgson or Gareth Southgate this summer, and by the end of tonight’s game, there will be an inevitable clamour for him to remain in the senior side. Dropping back to under-21 level, it will be argued, would be a retrograde step.

‘Once a senior, always a senior’, is the mantra that has tended to hold sway in the past, but look at where that has taken England in the last three decades. I strongly believe that Kane would gain more from spearheading England’s attempts to win a European title at under-21 level than playing in a meaningless summer friendly and a qualifier that, while significant, is likely to have very little impact on England’s finishing position in a group they have already pretty much put to bed.

The Northern Echo:

Too often in the past, successive England managers and FA chief executives have dismissed under-21 tournaments as an unwelcome distraction to the perceived real business of fast-tracking talented young players into the senior side. It is time to abandon such notions, and selecting Kane for this summer’s European Championships would deliver a powerful message that England mean business in the Czech Republic.

It would also enable the 21-year-old to experience the unique pressures of being the talisman at a major tournament setting, and expose him to some of the challenges inherent in the international game.

For all that he has come on in leaps and bounds, Kane remains extremely inexperienced outside of the hurly-burly of life in the Premier League. He has never played in the Champions League, and boasts just six starts in the Europa League this season.

His development would benefit immeasurably from some exposure to alternative playing styles, with the tactical intricacies of tournament football representing a marked shift away from the blood-and-thunder style of the domestic game.

All too often, English players appear to be completely out of their comfort zone when confronted with opponents who do not conform to the tactical approach they encounter every week, but that is only to be expected when their experience of handling such challenges is rare.

Kane is not going to learn much from a helter-skelter friendly in Dublin, but he might benefit massively from competitive group games against Italy, Portugal and Sweden with the under-21s. And that’s before we even get to the value of spending the best part of a month in a tournament setting, with all the mental challenges that entails. 

The Northern Echo:

The Germany side that thrashed England in the final of 2009’s European Under-21 Championships might have been exceptional in terms of the depth of talent that was available, but it is still instructive to look at what happened to the side that cruised past an England line-up that featured the likes of Lee Cattermole, Fabrice Muamba and Mark Noble because more experienced alternatives were unavailable.

Five members of the team that won the under-21 title in 2009 – Manuel Neuer, Benedikt Howedes, Mats Hummels, Jerome Boateng and Mezut Ozil – went on to start last summer’s World Cup final, which ended with Germany crowned world champions. A sixth, Sami Khedira, might well have started against Argentina had he not sustained an injury earlier in the competition.

Joachim Low is convinced the prior experience of tournament success was a major factor in his side’s ability to cope with the pressures that built in Brazil, and the Germany boss has already pledged to ensure his nation fields as strong a side as possible at under-21 level this summer.

Hodgson has made similar noises, tentatively suggesting that Southgate will be free to select whoever he wants for the Czech Republic, and as well as Kane, the likes of John Stones, Jack Wilshere, Ross Barkley and Raheem Sterling are also still eligible for the under-21s despite having played for England’s senior team.

Clearly, Southgate has to display a semblance of loyalty to the players who enabled his side to qualify in the first place, but his primary role as under-21 boss is to take the best young players in the country and try to develop them into fully-fledged internationals capable of helping England achieve major tournament success.

That means pushing as hard as he can in order to field the strongest team possible this summer, and Kane should be an integral part of that.