The England men’s team has been playing football for 154 years, but it has never had a player quite like Harry Kane before.England have had some great moments in their history, winning the World Cup in 1966. But they have rarely won a game quite like this. Not with this same sense of being seized, being saved, of one man deciding to take control of a game that was slipping through English fingers.There was something about the simple individualism of this turnaround, the way the long complicated game was reduced to one tired man, his will, his execution, that gave it a comic-book hero feel. Watching a great player turn the course of a tournament like this is a reminder of why we all watch sport.With 15 minutes left here in Atlanta, England were 1-0 down to DR Congo. They were going out of the World Cup at the first knockout round, with two and a half weeks of football left to play. It would have been one of England’s most disappointing and deflating World Cup exits. Thomas Tuchel became England head coach in 2024 with a pledge to win the World Cup. It would have been almost impossible for him to stay in the job if they went out this early.And England had been desperately poor for long spells of the game, tense, panicked, shambolic in defence. Yoane Wissa nearly put DR Congo 2-0 up just before half-time. And in the second half, minute by painful minute, England were running out of time and running out of ideas.Then Declan Rice burst down the right and crossed to Anthony Gordon, on as a sub, out on the left. He hung the ball back into the box and Kane, evading his marker, darted away from goal, into space, and leaped high enough to meet it with his head. What really mattered though was the power in Kane’s neck, generating enough force to finally beat Lionel Mpasi into the bottom corner.Kane powers his header into the goal (Martin Rickett / PA Images via Getty Images)That moment alone felt important, as Kane kept England in the tournament. But what came 11 minutes later was another level of significance. Gordon again found Kane on the edge of the box, facing away from goal, with blue shirts all around him and DR Congo defender Chancel Mbemba breathing down the back of his neck. Kane did not want to pass, he wanted to find a route to goal. He just needed some space.So Kane knocked the ball away from Mbemba, chased it and met it with the full explosive force of his right boot. The power of the impact was enough to throw Kane to the ground. But it also sent the ball rocketing into the near top corner of the net. Mpasi, after almost 90 minutes of uncanny reflexes keeping England out, did not move a muscle. By the time he saw the ball it was rolling back out of the goal in the other direction.Kane, flying one way, sends the ball the other into the goal (Roberto Schmidt / AFP via Getty Images)When Bobby Thomson hit a walk-off home run to win the New York Giants the National League pennant in 1951, it was immortalised in history as ‘the shot heard ‘round the world’. This perhaps was the England football team’s own equivalent, for the decisiveness, for the individuality of it, and above all for the power. Kane’s shot was clocked at 94kph. You can watch football your whole life and never see a ball hit that cleanly again.Perhaps there is a deeper parallel in a different American sport. Everyone who knows of Harry Kane knows how close he is with Tom Brady, how he copied Brady’s mindset, his desperation to prove doubters wrong and get to the top of his sport. Another of his favourite things about Brady was his sense of responsibility. That knack that Brady had, when his team was in trouble, to just take the whole burden on himself, to stay calm, devise a plan to win, and to deliver it. That single-mindedness, that Brady drive, bailing out the rest of the team, was clearer than ever here.The England team had been talking about “hero moments” before the game, and of course it was the captain himself who delivered them.While the circumstances were remarkable, the one-man intervention saving England from disaster, in another sense this was nothing new. These were Kane’s 83rd and 84th goals for England, a record that puts him on another planet from everyone else who has ever worn this shirt. (The next highest, Wayne Rooney, has 53.) Kane has scored goals at a historic rate since his debut 11 years ago, and will keep going well into three figures. No one has ever done this for England before.The story of Kane’s career, since he defied the doubters to make it to the top of the game, is one of relentless accumulation. He has broken goalscoring records everywhere, for Tottenham Hotspur, for England, and is scoring now for Bayern Munich faster than ever before. Since he moved to Germany he has started to win major trophies too, with two Bundesliga titles to his name, and another criticism, another qualification of his brilliance, left in the dustbin of history.The only thing left for Kane to do, the only barrier to him being England’s unambiguous greatest, is to win a major tournament. Kane has been integral to England’s improvements in recent years. These were Kane’s 19th and 20th goals in major tournaments, another record in which he is far ahead of the field in this country. He is now 13 in World Cups too, joint sixth in history, only six behind Kylian Mbappe and seven behind Lionel Messi. He shares with those two the same capacity to win the biggest games, powers that could determine the next few weeks.But for all of Kane’s mountains of goals, his routine, consistent almost mechanical production, it always felt as if the one thing eluding him was a moment. One game or goal that people would remember him for for ever. Something that would be replayed and talked about and shared until it had burrowed deep into our national mind. Like Paul Gascoigne against Scotland in Euro ‘96, or David Beckham’s freekick against Greece. Two players who, for all their talent and profile, did not achieve a fraction of what Kane has done for England.Now, finally, Kane has his moment. Because of the high stakes, with England’s World Cup survival on the line. Because of the brilliance of that second winning goal, the ingenuity, the responsibility, the precision and the power. And because those qualities encapsulate Kane himself. Whatever happens in the next two weeks, this was one of England’s greatest World Cup moments.And it is this performance, even more than Kane’s numbers, that people will talk about decades from now, when Kane is long retired. Even those of us who have been watching Kane since he was a gangly teenager sent out on loan to Millwall and Norwich City were left struggling to process this, scrambling for words of our own.“This is the thing that will pulse in his brain come old age and double vision and dizzy spells … that bolt of noise and joy when the ball went in,” Don DeLillo wrote about the original 1951 ‘Shot heard round the world’ in his novel ‘Underworld’. “Fans at the Polo Grounds today will be able to tell their grandchildren — they’ll be the gassy old men leaning into the next century and trying to convince anyone willing to listen, pressing in with medicine breath, that they were here when it happened.”