England head for the European Championship finals in the dizzying position of being the hottest shots on the continent.
The 7-0 win over Montenegro at Wembley took them to a tournament-high 33 goals in the qualifying campaign with the absence of Raheem Sterling, who will be reinstated for Sunday’s final group game in Kosovo, doing nothing to dam the flow.
They are averaging almost five goals a game, a strike rate leant extra credibility by the lack of a dead beat opponent like San Marino in their group.
The potency is most un-England-like and all the more exciting for it as Gareth Southgate’s side set their sights on what for them will effectively be a home event next summer.
“It’s going to be an incredible experience for the players, for our fans. We want to make Wembley somewhere that teams fear coming, that’s part of the message I gave to the players. So, yes, it’ll be a very, very special event to be a part of,” said Southgate.
“The players deserve it. They’ve played extremely well against opponents we should beat, in a group we should win but the quality of their play and the number of goals they’ve scored… I used to look at Germany in qualification and they were racking up sixes and sevens and we used to be struggling to break down teams who played with a low block. We’ve now managed to play in a way that’s been able to solve that problem.
“Now we’ve got to solve the different sorts of problems that come with the higher-ranked opponents, and that’s the challenge of the next few months.”
There are some gleaming engines in Southgate’s train set – the likes of Sterling, Jadon Sancho and Marcus Rashford, who was outstanding on Thursday night, amongst them – but as Rod Stewart will testify a railway layout isn’t a railway layout unless you lay the tracks right.
“In any team you can’t have ten Raheems and Jadons and Rashfords without having the glue to piece that team together and without having the right people to win the ball back and the leadership and the drive that teams need,” said Southgate.
“Liverpool benefit from that with the likes of (Jordan) Henderson and (James) Milner. We’ve got people like (Fabian) Delph who brings that for us, Henderson, too.
“You can’t just have a load of nice footballers. There’s got to be a grit to the team and that’s a part of the game we’ve still to improve upon when we’re playing the likes of France and Spain and Holland. The beautiful football we’ve played is one thing but we’ve got to get everything right.”
With that in mind, Harry Winks’s measured contribution in the rout of Montenegro pleased Southgate as much as Harry Kane’s hat-trick. The use of full-back Trent Alexander-Arnold as a defensively-minded midfielder in the second half was also an insight into his possible future thinking.
“I wanted to see Trent in there. It’s something we’ve been talking about. It’s not easy to put a player in a position he’s not played regularly for his club because he’s not in the groove of doing it but it was an experiment we definitely wanted,” said Southgate.
Give or take a late tweak – it is “when” not “if” for Phil Foden and Dele Alli remains in Southgate’s thinking – he has the players he wants for the Euros at hand.
As Thursday’s line-up was the youngest England team for 60 years it will be another test for the debunked theory that can’t win anything with kids.
“We’ve got to get the balance right with that but these, in most cases, are our best players we think,” said Southgate.
“Although next summer is going to be before a lot of them peak, we can still be hugely competitive and our challenge is to be able to compete, as we found a way to compete in Russia, with a squad that’s very exciting.”