Can Harry Kane live up to Shearer tag?

Will the Spurs starlet prove the real deal for England?

Roy Hodgson will select Harry Kane in his next England squad.

Even if he hadn’t said as much last Thursday, you wouldn’t have needed to be Mystic Meg to work that one out. He can’t NOT pick him!

The Tottenham striker has scored 23 goals with a third of the season still to go and it seems that just about everyone believes that he’s the real deal.

He scores classic centre-forward headers, he scores close-range poacher’s goals and he scores with drives from the edge of the box.

Not since Alan Shearer ruled the Premier League scoring charts has there been an English striker with so much goal potential.

And it’s the former Newcastle and Blackburn man that analysts most often compare Kane to.

There are many similarities both robust, both possessing a single-mindedness in front of goal, both clean cut and quintessentially English.

With a name like Harry Kane he couldn’t really be anything but. He sounds like a character from an old spy film.

Kane also looks like a player from a bygone age. With his slicked down short-back-and-sides haircut, you could imagine him appearing on a 1930s cigarette card.

He’s also a throwback in another way. He’s a fan playing for the team he supports. At Premier League level, that’s as rare as rocking horse manure these days.

Tottenham fans sing about Kane being “one of our own.” There would have been a time when that description would have applied to almost the whole squad.

Just to get close to breaking through into the first team at the elite level in this country is enormously difficult for a home-grown player.

It will become even harder in the years to come as the new TV deal kicks in and allows clubs to trawl the world, not only for yet more ready-made superstars but also more of the Continent’s most-talented teenagers.

Kane has had to pay his dues to get his chance at White Hart Lane. Before he ever got to start a match for Spurs in the Premier League there were 18 games at Leyton Orient, 22 at Millwall, three at Norwich and 13 at Leicester.

Successive managers have preferred expensive signings like Emmanuel Adebayor or Roberto Soldado to lead the line.

It didn’t take Mauricio Pochettino long to decide which of the three was his best option. He simply went with the one who worked his socks off and scored the goals. No brainer!

Hodgson has been similarly impressed. He’s been looking for a striker who’s a bit more orthodox than Wayne Rooney, Daniel Sturridge or Danny Welbeck and Kane fits the bill better than the bench-sitting Rickie Lambert or the injury-prone Andy Carroll.

So when he announces his squad for the Euro 2016 qualifier against Lithuania and subsequent friendly in Italy next month, Kane will be in it.

He will also be named PFA Young Player of the Year, even though the nominations short list hasn’t been announced yet!

If he carries on the way he is, perhaps helping Spurs win the Capital One Cup and finish in the top four, he might even have a shout at winning the players’ main award or the writers’ Footballer of the Year.

Such talk smacks of short-termism, of course. Kane has only been showing how good he is for a few months. The words flash and pan come to mind.

We are forever guilty of building youngsters up too high and too quickly. Most will inevitably have a slump sooner rather than later.

Ross Barkley is one current example. Wilfried Zaha was last season’s disappointment. Even Raheem Sterling has suffered.

Kane, though, appears to have his head screwed on. Those loan deals have toughened him up. His history as a fan makes him respectful of what it means to be Spurs’ centre-forward.

He has just been rewarded with a new five-year contract, signed without the sort of fuss that has surrounded Sterling’s future and pegged around a relatively realistic £35,000 a week.

So of course Hodgson will pick him. More interesting, perhaps, is whether Kane will go back to the Under-21s in the summer for the European Championship Finals.

Hodgson’s position is that if Gareth Southgate wants him, he can have him.

Brendan Rodgers and Roberto Martinez may deem that level to be beneath Sterling and Barkley, but Pochettino will surely see the value of Kane’s involvement in tournament football.

So are we right to be so wild about Harry?

Absolutely! But of course we’ve been wrong before, haven’t we?