It’s not hard to figure out how Cristiano Ronaldo became one of the world’s top athletes. He’s tall, lightning fast and has a sculpted physique that he loves to show off at every opportunity. It’s like he was biologically engineered to be a soccer player.

But when it comes to the England striker Harry Kane, things aren’t quite so obvious. Kane is listed at 6-feet-1, but has a hunched frame that makes him appear shorter. He’s not particularly quick or strong, he doesn’t move with any grace or display some uncommon agility, and he wears the vacant expression of someone struggling to remember something mildly important.

In short, nothing about Kane suggests he should be a soccer superstar.

And yet, at the age of 24, that is exactly what Kane is. He looks like Clark Kent, but plays like Superman. As he leads England at the World Cup, Kane is one of the game’s most feared scorers, captain of the national team, and even more improbably, a world-class English player playing in a major tournament in his prime. With five goals through two games, including a hat-trick in England’s 6-1 rout of Panama on Sunday, Kane is the World Cup’s leading scorer so far.

How Kane has emerged as an elite performer is mostly down to his remarkable knack for putting the ball in the net. He has scored 116 goals across the last three seasons for his club, Tottenham Hotspur, and his country. But what makes him a perfect forward for the modern game is how effectively he carries out the unseen and overlooked parts of a striker’s role.