One of the main things separating British sport from the American variant – with all its hype and razzmatazz – is our love of authenticity.

Which is why the award of the Ballon d’Or to Harry Kane has provoked such a warm and fuzzy glow.

Kane is not just a magnificent footballer. He is also a transparently decent man who has gone from representing Leyton Orient and Millwall to captaining England – without changing a bit.

In this, he feels like the spiritual brother of his fellow England captain Joe Root – an equally unaffected sort who comes across as the perfect son-in-law. Together, this golden pair could have walked out of the pages of Tom Brown’s School Days – the urtext for the whole Victorian sporting revolution.

If the original purpose of all that muddied oafing and flannelled fooling was to build character, then Root and Kane make excellent adverts for the programme.

Ignoring the blandishments and temptations of modern celebrity, they have kept their eyes firmly on the ball. We are not talking pop-star partners, pimped-up cars and flashy haircuts. Instead, Kane married his childhood sweetheart Kate, and lives quietly with their four children, while Root met his wife Carrie at Headingley, Yorkshire’s home ground.

It seems entirely plausible that Kane and Root will go down as the finest exponents of their respective disciplines that England has ever produced. And yet, you can equally imagine them turning out for a local scratch XI on any given Sunday. That is what I mean about being authentic: they still feel connected to the everyday sporting scenes from which they emerged.

Root’s nursery was the vibrant club-cricket scene in Sheffield, where he and his brother Billy (later a professional with Glamorgan) used to play mini-games on the boundary at Abbeydale Park while their father Matt was out in the middle.

Kane’s breeding ground was not quite Hackney Marshes – that proverbial stomping ground for football tragics of every stripe – but it was not far off. Apart from a single unsuccessful season with Arsenal’s academy as an eight-year-old, he spent most of his childhood hacking around for Ridgeway Rovers on his local park in nearby Chingford.

For both men, the game was the thing then, and so it remains now. Even if their gifts have made them wealthy, one senses they would be equally happy on the sort of subsistence wages doled out to their 1960s predecessors – just so long as they were able to play.

There is a timelessness here, to go with the everyman quality. Place Kane or Root in a dressing-room with Sir Alf Ramsey or Brian Close and they would still feel at home, because they speak the essential language of sport.

Kane captured part of his philosophy in a gnomic tweet, posted shortly after Monday night’s award: “Work hard in silence. Let success be your noise.” Like Root, he combines amateurism – in its original sense of doing something for love – with the most professional work ethic in the game.

Will we see their like again? British sport is moving ever closer to the American model. The Hundred is the primary focus of our domestic cricket season. The Premier League favours global talent over local heroes. Even rugby, a sport that used to shun show-offs, now turns to garrulous Henry Pollock as its new poster boy.

To borrow again from Tom Brown’s School Days, the age of Flashman is upon us. So we should enjoy the old-fashioned virtues of Kane and Root for as long as possible, especially the way they draw a thread from the bottom of the British sporting pyramid to its pointiest, most vertiginous tip.

Judging by their approachability and humility, these men seem miraculously unwearied by the years of never-ending training, performance and recovery. In this, they transmit a connection to the rest of us weekend wannabes kicking a ball or swinging a bat – even if they do those things with a technical purity we can only dream of.

The outcome is a happy one. Every time Root hits a hundred or Kane scores a goal – or wins the Ballon d’Or, for that matter – the pleasure is all the greater because we feel a tiny share in their success.