Newcastle United star Dan Burn's England call-up is a fairy tale - but that doesn't mean that he's good enough

The tale of Dan Burn’s ascent to the England squad is about as romantic as they come – the story of a local lad who overcame adversity and all the odds to go from pushing trolleys at a supermarket to non-league to the very top of the game. Nobody with a soul could begrudge him his chance at a cap… but is he good enough for the Three Lions?

You certainly won’t find many people in Newcastle who would criticise his credentials. He’s the hero of the hour on Tyneside, the towering presence at centre-back whose header helped Eddie Howe’s side to their first domestic trophy in 70 years. Now he’s about to be an England player and the Asda in his hometown of Blyth, where he worked as a 16-year-old, have retired the number 33 trolley porter jacket. It’s a deeply local fairy tale.

Still, you don’t get an England cap because it’s sweet, and Burn won’t keep his place in Thomas Tuchel’s plans if he doesn’t give him a good reason. Harry Maguire and John Stones are both injured, and there are much younger players pushing for a place. So is Burn up to the task?

Experience offers Burn a path into the England team

If there’s one thing that Tuchel’s first England squad has taught us about him as an international manager, it’s that he values experience within the squad. There is a reason the likes of Jordan Henderson and Kyle Walker have been called up despite the fact that they’re approaching the twilight of their career.

It also explains Burn’s inclusion, up to a point. Few players have had to go through more to get to the very highest level, after all – from being dropped by his boyhood club Newcastle at the age of 11 to losing a finger to a spiked railing at the age of 13, and from the National League with Darlington (where he was generously voted the club’s second-best young player) to Fulham, Wigan and Brighton, where he finally established himself as a Premier League player before earning his dream move back up to St. James’ Park.

With old heads like Maguire and Stones unavailable, Tuchel was looking at a very young group of centre-halves – at 33, Burn is more than a decade older than Levi Colwill or Jarell Quansah, for instance. His know-how was likely a factor in his being brought into the squad.

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Which doesn’t mean that he isn’t also there to play, of course. He is more than a tutor for the younger charges. He was immense in the League Cup final against Liverpool even outside of his crucial goal, and if his ageing legs are feeling any wear or tear then little sign of it has shown this season. Burn has been very good for months, now.

All that experience means that his positional sense is more or less immaculate and that long and winding route towards the top has imbued with him a never-say-die attitude which helps him, perhaps, to play at a level higher than his natural gifts might otherwise permit. He’s more than good enough for Newcastle, for a Champions League qualification campaign and for the League Cup final. But is he good enough to win a World Cup?

Why Burn may not be quite good enough for England

Winning the World Cup in 2026 isn’t just the obvious aim for England over the next two years, it’s Tuchel’s entire raison d’être. He has signed a two-year deal with The FA and has one, very simple aim. He won’t be doing anything that doesn’t move the needle towards that point.

That’s good news, perhaps, for England’s older players – while Burn, Henderson and Kyle Walker get call-ups, the likes of Adam Wharton, Rico Lewis and Jarrad Branthwaite have to content themselves with the Under-21s. Good news in the short term, at least – if, in a year’s time, their age is causing them to slow down any further, then those older players aren’t likely to get a long leash.

And Burn may well not be in the squad if Maguire and Stones were available, so he has to prove himself now – but the simple stats suggest that he may not quite be able to keep up with the very best.

Burn’s lack of pace is an overplayed criticism, and while it hurt him as a stand-in left-back last season, he’s proven more than capable of playing in a compact high press under Howe – but there are other deficiencies.

Burn is, for starters, not a technician. He may not lose the ball very often (he’s been dispossessed just twice in the Premier League this season), but his passing is short, simple and seldom sparks much going forward on its own – nor is he comfortable with the ball at his feet, rarely dribbling the ball out and preferring to get rid under pressure.

That isn’t a bad instinct, but at the very top level more is typically expected of defenders these days. Tuchel, in particular, has been keen on defenders who are press resistant and can play with vertical intent, getting the ball forward quickly out from under the high press – it’s that logic with underlined his decision to drop Matthijs de Ligt when he was Bayern Munich manager. Burn is not the kind of centre-half that Tuchel is normally all that interested in.

And while he is dominant in the air (at 6’7” he wins more aerial duels than almost anybody in the Premier League), his capacity to deal with players running at him is… decent. He has won 51% of his one-on-one ground duels this season, and made 51.6% of his tackles against ball-carriers. Neither number is bad, but it isn’t elite.

Burn ameliorates his deficiencies with a savvy grasp of where he’s needed, operating in such a way that he’s often in the right place at the right time to handle a ball into the box or a potential threatening through ball – but at the very top of the game, when a World Cup is on the line, that may not quite be enough.

Still, even if Burn falls short of becoming an England regular under Tuchel, even one cap would be a fitting cherry on top of a career path that’s more akin to a Roy of the Rovers comic than a regular playing career. Burn has come a long way and done it all the hard way, and perhaps nobody in the Premier League has earned their flowers to quite the same extent. To be in the squad that travels to North America in 15 months’ time, however, he’s going to need to step up a gear once more. At 33, it feels like a big ask. Then again, betting against Burn hasn’t been a winning proposition so far.