Kobbie Mainoo: England's Next Unexpected Hero?
Sixty years on from Geoff Hurst’s date with destiny at Wembley, England are once again searching for a new face to step out of the shadows and change a tournament.
Back in 1966, Hurst was not the headline act. He was the understudy. Jimmy Greaves, the great goalscorer, started that World Cup as the undisputed first-choice striker, the man everyone expected to fire England to glory on home soil. Injury intervened, the door opened, and Hurst walked through it with a hat-trick in the final against West Germany that turned him into a national immortal.
People were spilling onto the pitch before it was finally, definitively, “all over”. Hurst, the West Ham forward who began that summer behind Greaves in the pecking order, finished it as a symbol of England’s greatest footballing triumph. No England side has matched that achievement since. His story still hangs over every major tournament: the reminder that tournaments are not just won by the stars on the billboard, but by the player nobody saw coming.
That is the context in which Kobbie Mainoo’s name keeps surfacing.
England have lacked control in midfield at times, the kind of calm presence that can change the rhythm of a game rather than simply chase it. Michael Owen, speaking to GOAL in his role as UK ambassador for Casino.org, sees in Mainoo the potential for one of those unlikely World Cup storylines.
“I do a little bit,” Owen said when asked if he feels for the young midfielder. “Because I think he's definitely got the ability to play a role in the World Cup. And who knows? Things change, you get unlikely heroes.”
His mind goes straight back to 1966.
“Our greatest moment ever in this country, winning the World Cup, who would have thought Geoff Hurst would have been playing?” Owen recalled. “Jimmy Greaves was the best thing since sliced bread. My dad just raves about Jimmy Greaves. When anyone's talking about the best England XI and things like that, my dad's like, ‘Jimmy Greaves’ straight away. He was insanely good. Now, things happen, and all of a sudden, Geoff Hurst plays, and look what happens.”
That, for Owen, is the warning and the opportunity rolled into one. You cannot switch off. Not as a squad player. Not as a coach. Not as a country.
“There will be, or there could be, a surprise. And it could be Mainoo, you can't switch off,” he said.
England’s path to this point, in his eyes, has not been a heroic march through giants. It has been the minimum requirement.
“Really, what we've done so far, if we had been knocked out, there would have been a huge inquest,” Owen argued. “I mean, nobody should be really in our league.”
He bristles at the idea that earlier opponents represented some kind of monumental hurdle.
“We've built it up as if Mexico was the hardest game of all time, but come on,” he said. “Norway, if we played Norway at a neutral ground, let's say we play Norway in Spain tomorrow, people would expect us to beat them two or 3-0. So when you look back, we should be beating every single team.”
Now comes the shift. Now comes Argentina.
This is the fixture that changes the temperature of a tournament, the kind of game that can define a generation of players in 90 minutes. Owen knows the difference between obligation and jeopardy, and he places this one firmly in the second category.
“This [Argentina] is now the first game, this is a proper game, this is one that is a toss of a coin, this is one that's going to challenge us,” he said. “But everything so far has been what you would expect from England, surely.”
The stakes rise, the margin for error shrinks, and the space opens up for new heroes. That is how World Cups are written. Not in straight lines, but in swerves and shocks.
“We will see,” Owen said. “But if we're going to win it, there are going to be so many twists and turns and so many heroes that we won't even be thinking at the moment. And Mainoo could be one of them.”
Sixty years ago, England found their unexpected match-winner when an injury forced a change and a young striker seized his moment. The question now is simple: in a World Cup that will demand fresh courage from somewhere, is Kobbie Mainoo the next name nobody saw coming?
