Jermain Defoe shows he can still cut it for England – despite his advancing years
JERMAIN DEFOE has been around so long, he played 45 minutes of international football as a team-mate of Gareth Southgate.
Defoe’s England debut in a friendly against Sweden in March 2004 coincided with Southgate’s 57th and final cap.
Thirteen years later and here they were again. Southgate in his first competitive match in permanent charge — and a team who had seemed so well blessed for strikers heading into Euro 2016 now suddenly bereft.
Defoe scored, of course. It almost goes without saying.
It is what he has always done and he is unfortunate to have been around during an era in which the out-and-out poacher has become unfashionable.
If this turns out to be nothing more than a pleasing footnote to Defoe’s international career then he could be the subject of a decent trivia question — who scored his final England goal 3½ years after his penultimate cap?
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At the age of 34 years and five months, Defoe became England’s sixth oldest scorer — and he is in good company after Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Tom Finney, Teddy Sheringham, Frank Lampard and Jack Charlton.
But there is no reason why this should necessarily be Defoe’s final cap. Even when Harry Kane is fit, no manager would complain at having such a proven snaffler on the bench.
It is not as if Southgate is falling over top-notch goalscorers.
Defoe is the second-highest Englishman in the Premier League Golden Boot standings — despite playing for the worst team in the top flight.
And he is the only Englishman to have scored a winning goal at a World Cup finals in the last decade.
Here, Defoe needed just two opportunities to sniff out his 20th international goal.
Within the space of a minute, he latched on to Adam Lallana’s smart reverse pass and forced Ernestas Setkus to save with his legs.
Then he drilled home from a Raheem Sterling centre in a Lithuanian penalty area which so often resembled a sardine can.
Defoe had marched on to the pitch with Bradley Lowery, the terminally ill five-year-old Sunderland fan with whom he has forged a deep bond.
And after making way for Jamie Vardy early in the second half, he was afforded the official man-of- the-match award.
The fashion for retiring early from international football is so widespread that it can sometimes be easy to forget there are veterans out there who have never called time on their country.
Defoe fell into that category — along with Michael Carrick and Gareth Barry, either of whom could still be worth a place in an England set-up with an alarming lack of midfield options.
And Peter Crouch, for instance, might have merited more caps since his last one in 2010.
Sometimes, the obsession with youth and with looking to the future becomes so intense that you can forget about getting the job done in the here and now.
Defoe, of course, did himself no favours by moving to Toronto FC in Major League Soccer during the build-up to the 2014 World Cup, when he had still been in Roy Hodgson’s thoughts.
It is a decision he probably regrets, in hindsight. He is sharp, fit and in possession of a supreme degree of nous.
The idea he should have headed for transatlantic semi-retirement aged 31 looks even more ridiculous now he is still filling onion bags three years later.
With Kane, Daniel Sturridge and Wayne Rooney all out of the picture, Southgate preferred Defoe to Vardy and Marcus Rashford as his No 9 — and Defoe repaid his faith.
It is easy to assume that England would have won this with or without their cunning old fox in the box — after all they have not lost a meaningful qualifier since Steve McClaren’s Wally with the Brolly night almost a decade ago and this was their 12th straight competitive home win.
Yet with Lithuania employing at least six at the back and intent only on kicking their opponents, Defoe’s calmness, bought through experience, was a true asset for Southgate.
Oh, and if you were wondering what happened in that long- forgotten friendly in Sweden in 2004, well, Defoe’s England debut ended in a 1-0 defeat.
Southgate was pensioned off after being given a tough time marking a young striker, who netted the game’s only goal.
His name? Zlatan Ibrahimovic. A year older than Defoe and still going strong.
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