Harry Kane has scored more goals than any England player in history. The English press still cannot decide whether he is the reason England will win something or the reason they have not.

Thomas Tuchel arrived in Tampa this week and put the question on the record before anyone could ask. Kane is at the top of his form. Kane is sharp. Kane is the key player. The framing was deliberate. A manager who has spent his first cycle in charge being read as a foreign appointment by an English press that mostly does not want one chose his first World Cup press conference to put his captain inside a sentence with no qualifiers in it.

This is the consistent line on Kane across the cycle. Brilliant but. Prolific but. Captain but. The qualifier is doing most of the work. Jules Breach, writing this week for FourFourTwo, called him the most consistent striker in world football. The BBC asked whether this is Kane's time for England and for the Ballon d'Or. Both pieces present the case for Kane as one that still requires making, because the claim is treated as contestable in a way the equivalent claim about a German or French or Argentine forward would not be.

Look at the record without the framing.

He is England's all-time top scorer. He has played at the highest level in Germany as well as England. He has played in World Cup knockout rounds, with the missed penalty against France the moment most English readers can recite from memory. The goals tend not to be. The cycle is itself the story.

The useful thing about Tuchel's intervention is that it refuses the cycle. A German coach with no domestic-press loyalty and no career investment in the Kane-as-luxury reading simply describes the player he has. Top form. Ready. Determined. Key. There is no ambivalence in the sentence because there is no reason for ambivalence in the player. Tuchel has been around enough strikers, at PSG and Chelsea and Bayern, to know what one of the consistent ones looks like.

The BBC piece raises the Ballon d'Or as a question. This is the part that the English press finds genuinely hard to write. The Ballon d'Or as a frame requires you to argue that an English player is the best in the world at the thing he does, and English football writing has not built the vocabulary for that since the Lineker years. The vocabulary it has built instead is the vocabulary of qualified praise. Talented but inconsistent. World-class on his day. Capable of carrying a side, with the right service. These are the same words the press once used about Mahrez. They are the words it uses about almost any forward whose game is not built on speed and noise.

Kane's game is not built on speed and noise. It is built on the things that take longer to see and longer to write about. Positioning inside the box. The drop into the ten to start the move that finishes with someone else's name on the goal. The penalty taken the same way every time. These are not the things that produce a highlight reel that travels. They are the things that produce a career, and the career is long and in strong form.

There is a separate argument about whether England are good enough around him. It is a real argument. The defensive selection is still being negotiated in public. Questions remain about the squad and preparation. The transfer window is going to pull at concentration through the group stage. None of this is Kane's argument to win. He is the part of the team that is already solved.

What the English press has not done, and probably will not do until after a result forces it to, is write about Kane the way the German press wrote about Klose, or the way the French press wrote about Giroud at the end. Not as a star in waiting. Not as a player who needs to prove something. As a finished, structural footballer whose presence in the team is the reason a tournament is winnable, and whose absence would be the reason it was not.

Tuchel has written that sentence already. He wrote it this week in Tampa.

The press will catch up if England win. That is the only condition under which it ever does.