Cameron ready to help USA contain Kane

In his own words, Cameron Carter-Vickers is set for a “weird” night at Wembley on Thursday.

Our young defender, currently on loan at Swansea City and now a regular fixture in the USA men’s national team, faces the prospect of marking Harry Kane when the States come to London to take on England in a high-profile friendly, dubbed the Wayne Rooney Foundation International (8pm).

In fact, the 20-year-old could find himself face to face with several Spurs comrades, with Dele Alli, Eric Dier and fellow Academy graduate Harry Winks all joining Kane in the Three Lions’ squad.

And the fact that Wembley is currently serving as our home ground adds even more intrigue for the powerful centre-half, as he looks to put everything he’s learned in training up against Harry and co. at Hotspur Way over the last few years into practice in a top-level international showdown.

“It’s really exciting – it’s certainly going to be a weird feeling playing against all the Spurs lads at Wembley,” he said. “The likes of Harry Winks, Harry Kane, Dele, Eric Dier… I know first-hand from working with them at Spurs how good they are as players and I’m definitely looking forward to the test of going up against them and seeing what I can do.

“It should be a good game. It will be good to play at Wembley as well – a big, famous stadium that’s also obviously been our temporary home at Spurs lately. It could make it slightly harder for us on Thursday in that respect, but the experience in the previous games we’ve had has been great. We played France at Lyon’s new stadium in front of a full house just before the World Cup and drew 1-1 – those are the kinds of games we want to be in now, like playing England at Wembley. We want those challenging atmospheres and we want to become better from experiencing them.”

So how does Cameron plan to combat our home-grown hotshot Harry if the pair are selected by their respective nations on Thursday?

“It’ll definitely be difficult,” he said. “Everyone knows what Harry can do – his goalscoring stats speak for themselves. It’ll definitely be a challenge but it’s important to stay focused and hopefully as a defensive unit and as a team, we can keep him quiet for the night.

“From the USA perspective, it’s going to be a tough test for us against England as a whole because they’ve got loads of quality players, but we’re confident that we can put on a good performance.”

While Gareth Southgate has been praised for blooding some of the next generation of England stars this year, USA boss Dave Sarachan has adopted a similar approach. With that in mind, Cameron believes there’ll be an exciting array of talent on show under the arch.

“Our squad is still very young – there’s a lot of players my age, or of a similar age to me, but England have got some good young players as well so it’ll be an interesting match,” he added. “The young players that we’ve got are very good, they’re playing in good teams across Europe and in the MLS and getting regular game time with their clubs, so I really feel like we’re on the right path with the USA and it’s now about kicking on and continuing to improve.”