Luka Van der Bale
Well-Known Member
- Jan 29, 2011
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38 in Ligue 1 last year. 17 in PL this. Looks like he scored less to me.
Harry Kane
- Thread starter RichSpur58
- Start date
Shadydan
Well-Known Member
- Jul 7, 2012
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Don't you think Barca would score as much in La Liga as they would do in the Prem?
Luka Van der Bale
Well-Known Member
- Jan 29, 2011
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Genuinely, no. The smaller sides in la liga go to Barca and Real looking to play football, and get thrashed. The smaller sides in the PL sit back and defend with 10 men in their own box. Barca would cope as they're absolute quality. But they wouldn't score in the same volume.
Shadydan
Well-Known Member
- Jul 7, 2012
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That's a fair point however let's spin it this way...we scored 86 goals this season, we have an excellent attack however it's obvious that Barca have a better forward line then us and one of if not the best in Europe, therefore it isn't entirely inconceivable that that they wouldn't be able to score a few more than us therefore it isn't totally against the realms of possibility that Messi wouldn't be posting up similar numbers to what he's getting in La Liga.
smallsnc
Well-Known Member
- Mar 30, 2017
- 699
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They may score more than us if playing in the PL but I do not expect they would score 33% more as they did this year (116 to 86).
Shadydan
Well-Known Member
- Jul 7, 2012
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But they'd score more right?
Messi's record against English clubs is 17 in last 16 inducing hat tricks against Man City and Arsenal...pretty sure he'd be able to score a few goals against English teams including the ones who sit back and defend...I mean it's not as if we struggled against the likes of Leicester and West Brom who are notorious for playing deep.
- May 8, 2005
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Not saying they wouldn't still score goals, just think the Spanish league is particularly generous to good strikers. The Premier League is far more competitive than basically all the other leagues.
Shadydan
Well-Known Member
- Jul 7, 2012
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Agree on the competitiveness but come on Kane scored 7 against two bottom feeders, let's not try to act as if the Prem is some sort of uber league for defending, there are some suspect defences in the Premiership too, the goal differences of the bottom teams pay testament to that, we're talking about the best player in the world here.
Scored 17 in 28 as a 35 year old compared to 16 in 29 in his lone season at barcelona seven years ago
DJS
A hoonter must hoont
- Dec 9, 2006
- 31,271
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Not so sure about that as he's a wee chap and might find the league less suiting to him over here.
He may well be effective in a wide attacking role but not sure if he'd score as much as Kane has.
Would be interesting to see though if he fancied coming over and playing alongside Kane though lol (he can't have the number 10 shirt though as that's Kane's).
tobi
Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose
- Jun 10, 2003
- 17,545
- 11,749
Soldado looked amazing in La Liga
I wouldn't say amazing but he was very good plus his teammates looked for his runs but that's a tired topic now..
THFCSPURS19
The Speaker of the Transfer Rumours Forum
- Jan 6, 2013
- 37,891
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Don't tell me some of you are the weirdos who don't fully rate Messi because 'he's only done it in Spain'.
Gbspurs
Gatekeeper for debates, King of the plonkers
- Jan 27, 2011
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As far as I'm concerned it will always leave a question mark.
beats1
Well-Known Member
- Feb 22, 2010
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Where did anyone say that?
The argument is that barcelona including Messi wouldn't score as many in the premier league, which is valid imo
Its summed up perfectly by Bale
"Every game in the Premier League, you have to be at 100 per cent for 90 minutes or you will lose.
"In Spain, you can be up at half-time against the bottom club and take your foot off the gas.
"You can rest players and take people off. If you try for 45 minutes, you won't win a match in the Premier League.
This highlights imo that other teams do mentally give up in la liga when playing the big 2 teams
Shadydan
Well-Known Member
- Jul 7, 2012
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Yeah I think the bigger teams in La Liga have it easier over the small teams especially the relegation candidates because of the head to head ruling which basically means that the teams lower down the table will generally get up for a game against their closest rivals knowing that if they put more effort into those matches compared to a team at the top however I'm still not really buying that as a reason.
I reckon La liga isn't as competitive as the Prem but I think the top 3 teams over there are so far ahead of the competition domestically and they are amongst the best teams in Europe and thus better than our top teams that the gap between them and the rest of La Liga is massive however that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of La Liga is poor it just means the top teams are very good, I'd still say technically and tactically the majority of their middling and bottom teams are better than ours.
Like I said before Messi's record against English teams is exceptional, he's only ever really 'struggled' against Chelsea when they sit deep but Chelsea under Mourinho defensively were a different animal defensively to Tony Pulis' West Brom for example, he's made far better defences and defensive units look stupid, what makes anyone think he wouldn't be able to replicate that over in the Prem?
Last edited:
beats1
Well-Known Member
- Feb 22, 2010
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Its worth noting that we are talking about knockout football as well, so whilst english teams might set out to be defensive when they go behind against Barcelona they do go for it.
His record against premier league teams at their grounds, is actually bad, he has 3 goals in 11 games at away grounds and has 4 goals in 12 games in england. His goals in premier league grounds have all come at the Etihad, which is full of tourist fans as the tickets are dead cheap.
Messi's record is skewed slightly by two teams, he has scored 9 goals in 6 games against Arsenal and then Man City whom he has 6 goals in 6 games, both of these teams have tried to play open football.
Whereas against Man Utd, Chelsea and Liverpool, he has 2 goals in 14 games.
arunspurs
Well-Known Member
- Aug 31, 2012
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Kane Interview in Times...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/the-times-magazine/theyre-just-wild-about-harry-kane-6jf3rg6nn
They’re just wild about Harry Kane
He’s a nice, polite 23-year-old from Essex who loves his childhood sweetheart. He’s also one of the world’s best strikers. In an era of spoilt, superstar footballers, Harry Kane really is the odd man out
The Times, June 3 2017, 12:01am
It’s home time at Henry Maynard Primary School in Walthamstow, east London, and children stream out of the front gates, holding their parents’ hands. I’m moving against this tide, heading towards the school buildings and trying to keep my eyes peeled. Because somewhere around here is Harry Kane. I walk past the staff car park and spot a sleek Range Rover, incongruous among the Micras and Polos. The Tottenham Hotspur and England striker arrived at lunchtime to meet the pupils, sign autographs and talk about healthy eating, all the usual stuff. The plan is that, once the kids are gone, we can sit down and do an interview.
Or at least that had been the plan. Only, on the way to Walthamstow, I learn this may no longer be the case. The whole thing is suddenly up in the air. There is some last-minute skittishness from Kane’s camp. A fear that he has more to lose than to gain by opening himself up to scrutiny, by risking his words being misconstrued or misreported in a way that could somehow damage his image. Eventually, I run into a group of perhaps a dozen people all serving, collectively, as Kane’s gatekeepers. Some of them represent Lidl, for whom he is supporting a “Fuelling Your Footballer” campaign in partnership with the Football Association. Others are from the FA itself. His agent – a smart, polite man – is here, but stands to one side, arms folded. There is a general atmosphere of circumspection. One of the FA guys asks how long I’ve worked for The Times. Twelve years, I tell him. He says that I don’t seem old enough, which I’d normally take as a compliment. But the truth is, I quite want to do this interview and this isn’t necessarily a good sign.
If they are protective of Kane, then it is because he is incredibly valuable. And this value has been amassed in one simple currency: goals. Harry Kane scores goals. He started scoring them about two and a half years ago, and he has never really stopped. Since his unexpected breakthrough in the 2014/2015 season, he has scored 94 goals for Tottenham in 139 appearances. That’s a lot. Since making his international debut against Lithuania in March 2015, he has cemented himself as the focal point of England’s attack with 5 goals in 17 matches and, in the season just gone, he was averaging a Premier League goal every 87 minutes. This is more than a goal a game, a kind of statistical sound barrier very few modern strikers manage to break.
But perhaps the best way to explain Kane – and to understand his appeal – is this: in a league that boasts such ruthless and exotic striking talent as Sergio Aguero, Diego Costa, Alexis Sanchez and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, for the past two seasons the top scorer – the winner of back-to-back Premier League Golden Boots – has been a slightly gawky-looking 23-year-old from Chingford in Essex. Someone who, in a few years, went from “shy teenager” who wasn’t sure if he’d ever make it to the top, to one of the most feared forwards in world football.
Back at the primary school, Kane’s people form a semicircle around me while I try to persuade them that it would still be a good idea for us to do the interview. I feel a bit like I’m pitching them a time-share. Someone asks what my angle is going to be. I tell them that the “angle”, such as it is, is that Harry Kane scores loads of goals. Which makes him of interest. Eventually, I use the phrase “Harry Kane: the man behind the goals”, and that seems to go down quite well. Cautiously content that I’m not out to ruin their client’s life, we all move into an empty classroom and Kane is finally presented.
Footballers get stereotyped. They have tattoos, dodgy haircuts. The fact I was clean-cut… People took to that
He is tall – 6ft 2in – and is wearing an England training top. We sit at a low table on small plastic chairs designed for primary-school kids, who are the focus of an FA Lidl Skills programme he is supporting, alongside the Fuelling Your Footballer initiative that encourages children to eat healthy food. Our knees are around our chests. We look stupid. Some footballers would grumble. But Kane just sits there calmly, patiently, ready to talk.
The first thing to say about Kane is that he does not look like a footballer. Or at least, not a modern one. This is partly why it took so many people by surprise when, with very little fanfare, he started banging in goals for Tottenham and his country. “A lot of footballers get stereotyped now,” he says, his accent pure Essex. “A lot of them get tattoos; a lot of them get dodgy haircuts. The fact that I was clean-cut, an Englishman with slicked-back hair who was just going out and working hard? I think people kind of took to that. I think they could appreciate it.”
Kane – just to reiterate – does not have a dodgy haircut or any tattoos. He looks like someone you might actually know. A colleague or a cousin or a PE teacher at your child’s school. When he began his remarkable scoring run for Tottenham, the club he grew up supporting, it was often observed that he looked like a fan who had won a competition and was being allowed to play up front for his team. He would run around like mad. He would celebrate with the demented glee of somebody in the stands, rather than with the cool aloofness of many strikers. There was something incredibly attractive about the unfolding fairytale – it was always a “fairytale” – of Harry Kane. “When people saw me celebrating a goal, that pure emotion and happiness and joy, I think that’s what people enjoyed,” he says. “Like a fan on the pitch.”
This enthusiasm remains undimmed, even now he’s earning a reported £120,000 a week. I ask him what it feels like to score a goal. “There’s not many better feelings in the world,” he says, almost embarrassed. “My girlfriend probably won’t be too happy with me saying that. It’s an adrenaline rush. You feel like you could run ten miles a minute after you score.”
If he walks past a pair of balled-up socks at home, does he experience a compulsion to kick them into an imaginary goal and then celebrate wildly? Or do professional footballers not do that? “Nah, I’m kicking them,” he says flatly, without hesitation. “When I was a kid, I was kicking everything. Cans, things like that. My brother used to go mad.”
Kane had been on the books at Spurs since he was 11. But because he had never been a true prodigy – an elemental talent picked out for greatness from day one, a Wayne Rooney, say, or a Lionel Messi – it took him a while to find his feet as a professional. He was shipped out on loan to smaller clubs in lower divisions, and he did OK without doing anything to suggest he was ever going to win consecutive Premier League Golden Boots. This is why, however much of a fairytale his rise seemed to be, there was also an underlying sense that this was surely unsustainable – that at some point his luck would be up and the goals would stop and that he would have to trudge off the pitch and sit in the stands with the rest of us. The record books are littered with “one-season wonders”, flash-in-the-pan players who have their moment, then fade to obscurity. This spectre hung over Kane, and he knew it.
“I could definitely feel that around. You see things on Twitter, see things on social media,” he says. “People didn’t really expect me to do it, and I wanted to prove them wrong. I always believed in myself. I think people were perhaps just waiting for it. Because I was a bit of a surprise and a bit of a story, people just expected it to stop and for that to be that.”
I’m not too proud to admit that I was one of them. Everything about Kane’s initial rise – about him – seemed so unlikely. We tend to conceptualise modern strikers as menacing and mean; that’s how they’re sold to us. But visit Kane’s Twitter account and there he is, unselfconsciously showering his apple-cheeked girlfriend with loving emojis, or expressing his genuine excitement at being included in the Fifa video game’s “team of the week”, or extolling the virtues of the musical Jersey Boys. I mean, you don’t see Luis Suarez going on about which West End shows he loves. Nothing about Kane is cool. There is no edge or arrogance to him. One of his first commercial ventures was a sweet little range of toys designed to help young kids improve their football skills. He even apologises to his Twitter followers for spelling words wrong. You can see why he didn’t necessarily seem like someone destined to last long in the hard-nosed world of top-flight professional football.
“I just had to work hard and prove people wrong,” he says. “I’ve had that mentality my whole career. Trying to prove the people who doubted me wrong.”
Kane grew up in Chingford. Like many professional footballers, he had an older brother whom he’d play against in the park, a bigger, tougher opponent who forced him to hone his skills. “He would knock me off the ball, and it always used to anger me that I couldn’t be better than him,” he says. “It made me become more driven.”
If I was single now, you’d never know if they were with you for the money. I’m lucky I’ve got a childhood sweetheart
I ask what his parents did and he begins to answer. Only then his agent intervenes and says that Kane’s mum and dad had asked not to be the focus of any media attention, so could I ask something else please? Kane, though, doesn’t really see what the problem is. “I think it’s all right just to say what they do,” he tells his agent, and then explains that his dad ran a garage for 15 years before moving into property, and his mum was an assistant at a dental practice. Always brush your teeth? He nods solemnly. “Always brush my teeth.”
He describes his younger self. “I was quite a shy kid,” he says. “I was someone who just always wanted to play football. I wasn’t bothered about anything else.” It sounds like he was self-contained, but also self-possessed. “I had mates. When you play football, you play football with your mates. But I wasn’t someone who was loud in the classroom or who’d be the leader of the group or the one who was always joking. I was the calm one.”
In other words, he was sensible. Not the sexiest character trait when you’re young, but quietly useful if you’re planning a career as a sportsperson. “My dad was very much like that as well, and I think that helped me a lot in becoming a footballer. Because in my younger days, I had to be so patient to wait for my chance. A level head stood me in good stead.”
He explains that, for quite a while, he was far from the standout player in the Tottenham youth ranks. “I wasn’t the best player on my team from an early age. I had to work to get that.” At the age of 14, the Tottenham coaches had a meeting with his parents and explained that if he didn’t show signs of improvement within the next year, he would be released. Rather than panicking, his dad simply arranged for his son to have extra training sessions away from the club. “That was his mentality. ‘OK, we just have to work harder and prove them wrong.’ ” Over the next 12 months, this extra training helped Kane become “fitter, better, more confident”. It also helped that he “had a growth spurt and grew into my body a bit more”. He began to really stand out. He was awarded with another contract. He went on to figure in all the England youth teams, scoring eight goals in 14 matches for the Under 21s.
There is, you begin to discern, a stubbornness to Kane. “Not stubborn in a bad way,” he says. “But if I want to do something, I will try to do it my way. Say I’m just about to empty the dishwasher, and then my missus goes, ‘Can you empty the dishwasher?’ I’ll then not empty it for an hour, just because she told me to. Drives her mad.”
I suspect he didn’t like being told not to reveal to me what his mum and dad did. And in a funny way, all those little things that make him seem so nice – the endless kisses he tweets to his girlfriend, the wild-eyed goal celebrations – stem from a form of stubbornness, too. He simply, genuinely, does not care what other people think of him. “I remember putting something on Twitter about how I’m a Justin Bieber fan,” he says, grinning. “And everyone was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But that’s who I am. If I like something, I’ll express it. I’m not afraid to say what I think.”
He says he was like this even when he was a youth player training with the Tottenham first team, giving the senior players a piece of his mind if he felt he had to. It was this willingness to stand up for himself that probably saved his career. He describes a low period when he’d been sent out on loan to Leicester – then in the second tier of English football – but wasn’t even getting into the team. He was 19. “I remember thinking, if I can’t play for Leicester in the Championship, how am I going to make the step up of playing for Tottenham in the Premier League?”
But rather than angsting about it, or recalibrating his ambitions, he doubled down. “I went back to Tottenham at the start of the next season with the mindset that I was really going to break into the team.” And when the coaching staff told him he would be going back out on loan again, Kane refused. “I said to the manager, ‘I’m not going back out on loan. I’m going to prove to you that I should be playing week in, week out.’ ” He began to show glimpses of something, scoring a handful of goals, but it was the following season that would be pivotal.
Nothing about Kane is cool. ‘I’m a Justin Bieber fan,’ he says Coming off the bench against Aston Villa in November 2014, he scored a 90th-minute free kick to win the game for his side. Just like that, he was up and running. The goals started flowing. “I started the next 76 games after that. It was a pretty lucky free kick as well,” he says, a bit bashfully. He thinks about this for a moment. “If it hadn’t gone in, would I have ended up playing as much?”
Who knows? These are the moments on which entire careers turn. What he can say with certainty is that much of his success is down to his family – “a tight unit” – but also to his girlfriend, Kate Goodland. The pair were at primary and secondary school together. “When I was in school she was just my friend,” he says. But Kane left school after his GCSEs and, having not seen her so regularly, was one day suddenly struck by her. “It was like, she looks … she looks …” he says, then trails off. Basically, she looked like someone he now fancied. “We always spoke, but just got closer and closer, and it went from there.”
The fact that their relationship predates his rise to stardom is a source of comfort. “If I was single now and meeting people, you’d never know if they were with you for the right reasons. Is it the money? You’d never really know. So I’m lucky that I’ve got a childhood sweetheart,” he says. Goodland has a degree in sports science. That’s important to Kane. “From when we started going out, she always wanted to do her own thing. She went to uni and worked hard, because in any relationship you never know what will happen. She didn’t want to rely on me for the rest of her life.”
The couple have recently had a baby, Ivy, and he talks about her. “I want her to have a fantastic life. But I want her to have her own life as well. She’s her own person and I hope that as she grows up, she realises that,” he says, matter-of-factly. It’s an enlightened way for anybody to talk about a four-month-old. Plus, really, it’s just quite sensible. Which, given it’s Kane, shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Next Saturday, all things being well, Kane will lead the line for England in a World Cup qualifying match against Scotland. The first time he was called into the squad felt “like going to a new school” and, meeting many of his international team-mates for the first time, he reverted to his childhood shyness. “Wayne [Rooney] was very good with me, introducing me and getting me involved with stuff. But when I got there I just thought, ‘Get me on the football field. I’ll do my talking on the football field.’ ”
His wish was granted. Within 80 seconds of making his debut against Lithuania, he’d scored a header. Goals against San Marino, Switzerland, Germany and Turkey followed. “You put that shirt on for the first time and you look down and you’ve got the three lions. You think, ‘I used to wear this as a fan down the pub. Now I’m at Wembley in front of 80,000 people.’ It’s surreal,” he says. “For me, it didn’t really sink in until the end of the season. You look back and think, blimey, I played for England. I’ve been dreaming of that since I was five years old.”
So the fairytale continues. Only, of course, it’s not actually a fairytale. Really, it’s just a simple story about how passion, stubbornness, self-belief, the love of a childhood sweetheart and one slightly fluky free kick can, under the right circumstances, combine to produce the Premier League’s most lethal striker. Even after all the goals he’s scored, he still celebrates like someone down the pub. I’m glad this hasn’t changed and I’d be sad if it stopped, in the same way I’d be sad if he ceased going on about Jersey Boys or Justin Bieber or how much he loves his girlfriend. Thankfully, I can’t see that happening. More importantly, neither can he.
“Some strikers, when they’re scoring goals, can seem arrogant or confident. But because I just stayed who I was and didn’t turn into anything I wasn’t, I think people had to adapt to that and realise that’s who I am. I’m still going to score,” he says. “But I’m not going to change into anybody else.”
He peels himself out of the tiny plastic primary school chair and, before long, is walking across an empty playground in his England training top. He really could be a PE teacher. But he’s not. He’s Harry Kane. The man behind the goals.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/magazine/the-times-magazine/theyre-just-wild-about-harry-kane-6jf3rg6nn
They’re just wild about Harry Kane
He’s a nice, polite 23-year-old from Essex who loves his childhood sweetheart. He’s also one of the world’s best strikers. In an era of spoilt, superstar footballers, Harry Kane really is the odd man out
The Times, June 3 2017, 12:01am
It’s home time at Henry Maynard Primary School in Walthamstow, east London, and children stream out of the front gates, holding their parents’ hands. I’m moving against this tide, heading towards the school buildings and trying to keep my eyes peeled. Because somewhere around here is Harry Kane. I walk past the staff car park and spot a sleek Range Rover, incongruous among the Micras and Polos. The Tottenham Hotspur and England striker arrived at lunchtime to meet the pupils, sign autographs and talk about healthy eating, all the usual stuff. The plan is that, once the kids are gone, we can sit down and do an interview.
Or at least that had been the plan. Only, on the way to Walthamstow, I learn this may no longer be the case. The whole thing is suddenly up in the air. There is some last-minute skittishness from Kane’s camp. A fear that he has more to lose than to gain by opening himself up to scrutiny, by risking his words being misconstrued or misreported in a way that could somehow damage his image. Eventually, I run into a group of perhaps a dozen people all serving, collectively, as Kane’s gatekeepers. Some of them represent Lidl, for whom he is supporting a “Fuelling Your Footballer” campaign in partnership with the Football Association. Others are from the FA itself. His agent – a smart, polite man – is here, but stands to one side, arms folded. There is a general atmosphere of circumspection. One of the FA guys asks how long I’ve worked for The Times. Twelve years, I tell him. He says that I don’t seem old enough, which I’d normally take as a compliment. But the truth is, I quite want to do this interview and this isn’t necessarily a good sign.
If they are protective of Kane, then it is because he is incredibly valuable. And this value has been amassed in one simple currency: goals. Harry Kane scores goals. He started scoring them about two and a half years ago, and he has never really stopped. Since his unexpected breakthrough in the 2014/2015 season, he has scored 94 goals for Tottenham in 139 appearances. That’s a lot. Since making his international debut against Lithuania in March 2015, he has cemented himself as the focal point of England’s attack with 5 goals in 17 matches and, in the season just gone, he was averaging a Premier League goal every 87 minutes. This is more than a goal a game, a kind of statistical sound barrier very few modern strikers manage to break.
But perhaps the best way to explain Kane – and to understand his appeal – is this: in a league that boasts such ruthless and exotic striking talent as Sergio Aguero, Diego Costa, Alexis Sanchez and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, for the past two seasons the top scorer – the winner of back-to-back Premier League Golden Boots – has been a slightly gawky-looking 23-year-old from Chingford in Essex. Someone who, in a few years, went from “shy teenager” who wasn’t sure if he’d ever make it to the top, to one of the most feared forwards in world football.
Back at the primary school, Kane’s people form a semicircle around me while I try to persuade them that it would still be a good idea for us to do the interview. I feel a bit like I’m pitching them a time-share. Someone asks what my angle is going to be. I tell them that the “angle”, such as it is, is that Harry Kane scores loads of goals. Which makes him of interest. Eventually, I use the phrase “Harry Kane: the man behind the goals”, and that seems to go down quite well. Cautiously content that I’m not out to ruin their client’s life, we all move into an empty classroom and Kane is finally presented.
Footballers get stereotyped. They have tattoos, dodgy haircuts. The fact I was clean-cut… People took to that
He is tall – 6ft 2in – and is wearing an England training top. We sit at a low table on small plastic chairs designed for primary-school kids, who are the focus of an FA Lidl Skills programme he is supporting, alongside the Fuelling Your Footballer initiative that encourages children to eat healthy food. Our knees are around our chests. We look stupid. Some footballers would grumble. But Kane just sits there calmly, patiently, ready to talk.
The first thing to say about Kane is that he does not look like a footballer. Or at least, not a modern one. This is partly why it took so many people by surprise when, with very little fanfare, he started banging in goals for Tottenham and his country. “A lot of footballers get stereotyped now,” he says, his accent pure Essex. “A lot of them get tattoos; a lot of them get dodgy haircuts. The fact that I was clean-cut, an Englishman with slicked-back hair who was just going out and working hard? I think people kind of took to that. I think they could appreciate it.”
Kane – just to reiterate – does not have a dodgy haircut or any tattoos. He looks like someone you might actually know. A colleague or a cousin or a PE teacher at your child’s school. When he began his remarkable scoring run for Tottenham, the club he grew up supporting, it was often observed that he looked like a fan who had won a competition and was being allowed to play up front for his team. He would run around like mad. He would celebrate with the demented glee of somebody in the stands, rather than with the cool aloofness of many strikers. There was something incredibly attractive about the unfolding fairytale – it was always a “fairytale” – of Harry Kane. “When people saw me celebrating a goal, that pure emotion and happiness and joy, I think that’s what people enjoyed,” he says. “Like a fan on the pitch.”
This enthusiasm remains undimmed, even now he’s earning a reported £120,000 a week. I ask him what it feels like to score a goal. “There’s not many better feelings in the world,” he says, almost embarrassed. “My girlfriend probably won’t be too happy with me saying that. It’s an adrenaline rush. You feel like you could run ten miles a minute after you score.”
If he walks past a pair of balled-up socks at home, does he experience a compulsion to kick them into an imaginary goal and then celebrate wildly? Or do professional footballers not do that? “Nah, I’m kicking them,” he says flatly, without hesitation. “When I was a kid, I was kicking everything. Cans, things like that. My brother used to go mad.”
Kane had been on the books at Spurs since he was 11. But because he had never been a true prodigy – an elemental talent picked out for greatness from day one, a Wayne Rooney, say, or a Lionel Messi – it took him a while to find his feet as a professional. He was shipped out on loan to smaller clubs in lower divisions, and he did OK without doing anything to suggest he was ever going to win consecutive Premier League Golden Boots. This is why, however much of a fairytale his rise seemed to be, there was also an underlying sense that this was surely unsustainable – that at some point his luck would be up and the goals would stop and that he would have to trudge off the pitch and sit in the stands with the rest of us. The record books are littered with “one-season wonders”, flash-in-the-pan players who have their moment, then fade to obscurity. This spectre hung over Kane, and he knew it.
“I could definitely feel that around. You see things on Twitter, see things on social media,” he says. “People didn’t really expect me to do it, and I wanted to prove them wrong. I always believed in myself. I think people were perhaps just waiting for it. Because I was a bit of a surprise and a bit of a story, people just expected it to stop and for that to be that.”
I’m not too proud to admit that I was one of them. Everything about Kane’s initial rise – about him – seemed so unlikely. We tend to conceptualise modern strikers as menacing and mean; that’s how they’re sold to us. But visit Kane’s Twitter account and there he is, unselfconsciously showering his apple-cheeked girlfriend with loving emojis, or expressing his genuine excitement at being included in the Fifa video game’s “team of the week”, or extolling the virtues of the musical Jersey Boys. I mean, you don’t see Luis Suarez going on about which West End shows he loves. Nothing about Kane is cool. There is no edge or arrogance to him. One of his first commercial ventures was a sweet little range of toys designed to help young kids improve their football skills. He even apologises to his Twitter followers for spelling words wrong. You can see why he didn’t necessarily seem like someone destined to last long in the hard-nosed world of top-flight professional football.
“I just had to work hard and prove people wrong,” he says. “I’ve had that mentality my whole career. Trying to prove the people who doubted me wrong.”
Kane grew up in Chingford. Like many professional footballers, he had an older brother whom he’d play against in the park, a bigger, tougher opponent who forced him to hone his skills. “He would knock me off the ball, and it always used to anger me that I couldn’t be better than him,” he says. “It made me become more driven.”
If I was single now, you’d never know if they were with you for the money. I’m lucky I’ve got a childhood sweetheart
I ask what his parents did and he begins to answer. Only then his agent intervenes and says that Kane’s mum and dad had asked not to be the focus of any media attention, so could I ask something else please? Kane, though, doesn’t really see what the problem is. “I think it’s all right just to say what they do,” he tells his agent, and then explains that his dad ran a garage for 15 years before moving into property, and his mum was an assistant at a dental practice. Always brush your teeth? He nods solemnly. “Always brush my teeth.”
He describes his younger self. “I was quite a shy kid,” he says. “I was someone who just always wanted to play football. I wasn’t bothered about anything else.” It sounds like he was self-contained, but also self-possessed. “I had mates. When you play football, you play football with your mates. But I wasn’t someone who was loud in the classroom or who’d be the leader of the group or the one who was always joking. I was the calm one.”
In other words, he was sensible. Not the sexiest character trait when you’re young, but quietly useful if you’re planning a career as a sportsperson. “My dad was very much like that as well, and I think that helped me a lot in becoming a footballer. Because in my younger days, I had to be so patient to wait for my chance. A level head stood me in good stead.”
He explains that, for quite a while, he was far from the standout player in the Tottenham youth ranks. “I wasn’t the best player on my team from an early age. I had to work to get that.” At the age of 14, the Tottenham coaches had a meeting with his parents and explained that if he didn’t show signs of improvement within the next year, he would be released. Rather than panicking, his dad simply arranged for his son to have extra training sessions away from the club. “That was his mentality. ‘OK, we just have to work harder and prove them wrong.’ ” Over the next 12 months, this extra training helped Kane become “fitter, better, more confident”. It also helped that he “had a growth spurt and grew into my body a bit more”. He began to really stand out. He was awarded with another contract. He went on to figure in all the England youth teams, scoring eight goals in 14 matches for the Under 21s.
There is, you begin to discern, a stubbornness to Kane. “Not stubborn in a bad way,” he says. “But if I want to do something, I will try to do it my way. Say I’m just about to empty the dishwasher, and then my missus goes, ‘Can you empty the dishwasher?’ I’ll then not empty it for an hour, just because she told me to. Drives her mad.”
I suspect he didn’t like being told not to reveal to me what his mum and dad did. And in a funny way, all those little things that make him seem so nice – the endless kisses he tweets to his girlfriend, the wild-eyed goal celebrations – stem from a form of stubbornness, too. He simply, genuinely, does not care what other people think of him. “I remember putting something on Twitter about how I’m a Justin Bieber fan,” he says, grinning. “And everyone was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But that’s who I am. If I like something, I’ll express it. I’m not afraid to say what I think.”
He says he was like this even when he was a youth player training with the Tottenham first team, giving the senior players a piece of his mind if he felt he had to. It was this willingness to stand up for himself that probably saved his career. He describes a low period when he’d been sent out on loan to Leicester – then in the second tier of English football – but wasn’t even getting into the team. He was 19. “I remember thinking, if I can’t play for Leicester in the Championship, how am I going to make the step up of playing for Tottenham in the Premier League?”
But rather than angsting about it, or recalibrating his ambitions, he doubled down. “I went back to Tottenham at the start of the next season with the mindset that I was really going to break into the team.” And when the coaching staff told him he would be going back out on loan again, Kane refused. “I said to the manager, ‘I’m not going back out on loan. I’m going to prove to you that I should be playing week in, week out.’ ” He began to show glimpses of something, scoring a handful of goals, but it was the following season that would be pivotal.
Nothing about Kane is cool. ‘I’m a Justin Bieber fan,’ he says Coming off the bench against Aston Villa in November 2014, he scored a 90th-minute free kick to win the game for his side. Just like that, he was up and running. The goals started flowing. “I started the next 76 games after that. It was a pretty lucky free kick as well,” he says, a bit bashfully. He thinks about this for a moment. “If it hadn’t gone in, would I have ended up playing as much?”
Who knows? These are the moments on which entire careers turn. What he can say with certainty is that much of his success is down to his family – “a tight unit” – but also to his girlfriend, Kate Goodland. The pair were at primary and secondary school together. “When I was in school she was just my friend,” he says. But Kane left school after his GCSEs and, having not seen her so regularly, was one day suddenly struck by her. “It was like, she looks … she looks …” he says, then trails off. Basically, she looked like someone he now fancied. “We always spoke, but just got closer and closer, and it went from there.”
The fact that their relationship predates his rise to stardom is a source of comfort. “If I was single now and meeting people, you’d never know if they were with you for the right reasons. Is it the money? You’d never really know. So I’m lucky that I’ve got a childhood sweetheart,” he says. Goodland has a degree in sports science. That’s important to Kane. “From when we started going out, she always wanted to do her own thing. She went to uni and worked hard, because in any relationship you never know what will happen. She didn’t want to rely on me for the rest of her life.”
The couple have recently had a baby, Ivy, and he talks about her. “I want her to have a fantastic life. But I want her to have her own life as well. She’s her own person and I hope that as she grows up, she realises that,” he says, matter-of-factly. It’s an enlightened way for anybody to talk about a four-month-old. Plus, really, it’s just quite sensible. Which, given it’s Kane, shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Next Saturday, all things being well, Kane will lead the line for England in a World Cup qualifying match against Scotland. The first time he was called into the squad felt “like going to a new school” and, meeting many of his international team-mates for the first time, he reverted to his childhood shyness. “Wayne [Rooney] was very good with me, introducing me and getting me involved with stuff. But when I got there I just thought, ‘Get me on the football field. I’ll do my talking on the football field.’ ”
His wish was granted. Within 80 seconds of making his debut against Lithuania, he’d scored a header. Goals against San Marino, Switzerland, Germany and Turkey followed. “You put that shirt on for the first time and you look down and you’ve got the three lions. You think, ‘I used to wear this as a fan down the pub. Now I’m at Wembley in front of 80,000 people.’ It’s surreal,” he says. “For me, it didn’t really sink in until the end of the season. You look back and think, blimey, I played for England. I’ve been dreaming of that since I was five years old.”
So the fairytale continues. Only, of course, it’s not actually a fairytale. Really, it’s just a simple story about how passion, stubbornness, self-belief, the love of a childhood sweetheart and one slightly fluky free kick can, under the right circumstances, combine to produce the Premier League’s most lethal striker. Even after all the goals he’s scored, he still celebrates like someone down the pub. I’m glad this hasn’t changed and I’d be sad if it stopped, in the same way I’d be sad if he ceased going on about Jersey Boys or Justin Bieber or how much he loves his girlfriend. Thankfully, I can’t see that happening. More importantly, neither can he.
“Some strikers, when they’re scoring goals, can seem arrogant or confident. But because I just stayed who I was and didn’t turn into anything I wasn’t, I think people had to adapt to that and realise that’s who I am. I’m still going to score,” he says. “But I’m not going to change into anybody else.”
He peels himself out of the tiny plastic primary school chair and, before long, is walking across an empty playground in his England training top. He really could be a PE teacher. But he’s not. He’s Harry Kane. The man behind the goals.
