England’s Walker ready for Mbappe World Cup battle thanks to Walcott

England train ahead of France clash

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Perhaps the sight of jet skis skimming across the deep blue Gulf waters which lap the shore by the team hotel. Certainly something has inspired England full-back Kyle Walker to believe he can stop the fastest man left in the World Cup. “You can’t be a speedboat without a driver,” he says of his forthcoming duel with France’s Kylian Mbappe.

“You have to use a little bit of nous. You need to use your brain when needed. I can’t get as tight to him as I would with other players – that’s just the nature of the game. I remember playing against Theo Walcott once and I was getting so close to him and then all of a sudden he gets behind you and that’s your lesson taught. You need to make sure the mistakes you make are not costly mistakes.

“Whoever plays at right back he’s going to get the better of you one, two, three occasions a game, he’s a great player. You need to make those occasions as few as possible and not costly.” A defiant Walker added: “We respect that he’s a good player and in good form at the minute but I’m not going to roll out the red carpet for him and tell him to go and score.

“I’m representing my country at a quarter-final of a World Cup. It’s do or die really. If we lose we go home. He’s not going to stand in my way and prevent me from hopefully winning a World Cup for my country. I understand what I need to do and that’s obviously to stop him.

“It’s probably easier said than done but I don’t underestimate myself. I’ve played him before and I’ve come up against great players before in my time playing with England, Manchester City and other clubs I’ve played for. I have to treat it as another game. I have to take extra care and give him the respect he deserves.

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“But not too much respect. He’s also playing England and we can also cause them problems. It’s going to be a tough game but no one player makes a team.” As the oldest man in the England squad, Gareth Southgate can expect the 32-year-old to draw on all his previous experiences to help keep quiet a striker who has taken the tournament by storm with his five goals thus far.

The good news is that at the same time, that age is showing no signs of going to his legs. When told that so far at the competition, FIFA had clocked him at 34.4 kph (21.4 mph) – 0.2 kph faster than Marcus Rashford or the other young whipper-snappers had managed – his response was euphoric. “My message is that FIFA does not lie,” he said.

The only trouble is that Mbappe has gone even faster – topping the dial at 35.3 kph in France’s previous game against Poland. Unfortunately, that missing 0.9 kph equates to 25cm – or nearly a foot – every second. In other words, one blink and Mbappe is gone.

And yet, from those previous encounters, Mbappe has described Walker as a player who has made him “suffer”. He said: “It’s nice to hear obviously from a good player that he’s had a tough game against me. But we are not playing tennis, it’s not a solo sport. It’s a team game and I’m sure you’re aware it takes a team to win a game of football.

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“One individual moment can win you a match but, from what we have seen here, it’s 90 minutes plus extra time, which has been a lot, so anything can happen in that.” Walker knows what is at stake having started both the semi-final four years ago and the Euro 2020 final last summer.

But this is a different England animal, he feels. “We have to back ourselves,” Walker said. “We have to be confident in the players we have got, the players that have been nurtured over the past four years reaching a semi-final in the World Cup, reaching a final in the Euros.

“Obviously we’ve now got to a quarter-final. Okay, we’re not there, we’ve not gone past what we achieved in the last World Cup or the Euros. But we are on the right path in the right direction. With the group and squad we have got the confidence is high, we are scoring goals, not conceding too many, so we have to be confident.

“But Saturday is going to be a very tough game against a very good team. They are the reigning world champions and we need to be right up to the mark and make sure we are all signing from the same hymn sheet to collectively win this game. Not just right up to speed.”

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