SlotBadger
({})?
- Jul 24, 2013
- 13,930
- 43,663
Harry Kane
- Thread starter RichSpur58
- Start date
TheWook
Here
- Jan 8, 2021
- 1,020
- 4,111
The video was from January 2015 and he signed for City in July 2015 so quite a few days in between
Edit: Unless there was another video to the one above
sausage
?
- May 17, 2018
- 11,872
- 47,993
I don't think you'd have much anonymity if you went on Match of the Day.
Unless, of course, you're hiding in plain sight
spurs mental
Well-Known Member
- Mar 10, 2007
- 25,338
- 50,011
A few gems this morning from BM. They're very bitter, and dare I say it, RAWKISH.
Also discovered they have thread called "Players that might improve us". The arrogance is astounding.
So he will win something?
Also discovered they have thread called "Players that might improve us". The arrogance is astounding.
So he will win something?
Rosco1984
Well-Known Member
- Aug 31, 2012
- 1,743
- 7,056
playing in the conference league is obviously as embarrassing as dropping from the premier league down to league 2... plastic fans or short memories either way embarrassing. Chelsea and CIty are both new clubs the original clubs ceased to exist when the sugar daddies rolled in.
- Jun 5, 2004
- 32,221
- 64,290
- Staff
- #47,767
Matt Law with his anti-Spurs chip on his shoulder.
I expect he's a lovely bloke, but he writes about a different reality.
Finchyid
Well-Known Member
- Jun 27, 2017
- 3,787
- 11,991
the last one was just priceless
robotsonic
Well-Known Member
- Aug 20, 2013
- 2,391
- 11,247
Typically excusing and blaming everyone but their own club. We have ourselves suffered chasing players for months on end and never getting it over the line, so I understand the need to try and square that away and not feel like a twat about hoping for something, but now that we know how the saga has ended it looks even more stupid by City than it did at any point during it, and I hope that a few of them wise up to that.
Apparently we actually didn't want to sell, which was our position from minute one, stuck to our valuation, and they have literally wasted their entire transfer window despite knowing every single fact up front, relying on Kane and the media to do the legwork and none of it made a fucks-worth of difference, as it was obvious that it wouldn't.
Bizarre mismanagement, but then I really do think that their recruitment is pretty suspect considering their financial clout. Always seemingly short in certain positions. Fielding the PL's most expensive 11 against us on the opening day and whining about how they're not at full strength. Embarassing.
Apparently we actually didn't want to sell, which was our position from minute one, stuck to our valuation, and they have literally wasted their entire transfer window despite knowing every single fact up front, relying on Kane and the media to do the legwork and none of it made a fucks-worth of difference, as it was obvious that it wouldn't.
Bizarre mismanagement, but then I really do think that their recruitment is pretty suspect considering their financial clout. Always seemingly short in certain positions. Fielding the PL's most expensive 11 against us on the opening day and whining about how they're not at full strength. Embarassing.
SpartanSpur
Well-Known Member
- Jan 27, 2011
- 12,552
- 43,063
As a Villa fan, us holding off Man City's interest in our best player must be a sore one for him. Especially when Kane has come out early and said he'll give 100% for the club (and I fully believe he will).
He seems to mostly cover us and Chelsea and tends to prefer them, they must put on a better spread or something...
MindOverMatter
Well-Known Member
- May 21, 2019
- 481
- 1,367
TheWook
Here
- Jan 8, 2021
- 1,020
- 4,111
I saw this earlier, the only problem is that we didn't officially come out and say if he wants to leave he can, on our terms, but the media have pushed their agendas throughout, and I'm glad we can stick 2 fingers up at them all! (well at least for this season)
easley91
Well-Known Member
- Jan 27, 2011
- 19,063
- 54,739
Blackcanary
Dame sans merci
- Jul 15, 2012
- 5,621
- 12,170
Give me a few minutes - i'll post it.
mark87
Well-Known Member
- Nov 29, 2004
- 36,255
- 115,231
Blackcanary
Dame sans merci
- Jul 15, 2012
- 5,621
- 12,170
Right, here we go:
It would have been the third-biggest transfer in football history, but there was something decidedly low-key about the way Harry Kane called it off. Kane tweeted that he would be staying at Tottenham shortly before Nuno Espirito Santo gave his press conference ahead of Spurs’ Europa Conference League qualification play-off second leg against Pacos de Ferreira. He had already told Nuno on Wednesday morning that he would stay, finally drawing a line under an interminable saga.
For all of the energy and attention that this story has commanded, no one should be too surprised by the result. And the situation we are left with is that things are almost precisely as they were at the end of last season: Kane still plays for Spurs and is still contracted until 2024. Manchester City are still without an experienced striker, following Sergio Aguero’s free-agent departure for Barcelona. Daniel Levy still calls the shots at Tottenham.
Months of talk have barely moved the situation at all. But the basic facts of the saga are as follows:
While Kane’s line-drawing Wednesday morning tweet referred gratefully to the reception he got from Spurs fans at their game with Wolves last Sunday, there is no avoiding the fact that the failure of this potential transfer represents a defeat for him. Kane had wanted to go to City all year. He made that abundantly clear from his interview with Gary Neville in May through to his delayed return to join Tottenham’s pre-season on August 7. If Kane had his way, he would be lining up in a blue shirt at the Etihad Stadium this Saturday lunchtime for a City debut against Arsenal. Instead, he has to pick up the pieces of his damaged relationship with Spurs and knuckle down for another long season.
If this was a defeat for Kane, it is also a win for Levy. He had been insistent all summer that Kane would not be sold, especially not to another Premier League club. Those close to Levy have always known that this was not a negotiating position, but a firm commitment.
Part of Levy’s position was coldly rational. He knew this would be a bad market in which to sell a top player, and that Tottenham would always be better off keeping Kane for at least one more year. By the end of next season, they would either have improved their situation enough to convince Kane to stay long-term, or they could sell him in a more buoyant market for at least as much as they were offered in 2021. The fact that City’s only cash bid for Kane was £75 million up front with another £25 million of add-ons has effectively proven Levy right. There was nothing to be gained from selling the striker this summer.
The other part of Levy’s insistence on keeping Kane was personal. He felt deeply affronted by the conduct of Kane and his family throughout this process, from the leaking of Kane’s desire to leave and that Neville interview right at the climax of Spurs’ season in late May, through to Kane’s unauthorised absence from pre-season training at the start of this month (which cost him two weeks’ wages). Levy saw this as a challenge to his authority, which made him even more keen not to get pushed around. Maybe with a more delicate approach, Kane might have succeeded, but Levy was insistent from early on that he would not be giving in.
Clearly, this summer has been handled poorly by the Kane camp, who failed to land the deal between City and Tottenham that they were relying on. But City have not got what they wanted either. All summer, they have needed an experienced replacement for Aguero, and while they have added Jack Grealish, they now have six days of the window left to sign a true striker. They have wasted months chasing a player Levy never had any intention of selling. For City and for Kane, the politics and the money never quite added up.
The roots of this long saga started last summer. City, trying to sharpen up their team to win back the Premier League title Liverpool had just claimed, made an enquiry about Kane, which Levy firmly rejected. But the player was interested in the prospect of a move to the Etihad and sought assurances from Levy that he would be allowed to leave in future.
While Kane believes he was promised he could leave after the 2020-21 season, especially if Tottenham did not get back into the Champions League, an alternative view at the north London club is that Levy merely said he would listen to offers for him. Not that he would be allowed to leave. The precise nature of this so-called ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between Levy and Kane has been one of the key themes of this summer.
There was some frustration with Kane at the start of last season, as he had to self-isolate for 14 days after returning from holiday in the Bahamas in line with COVID-19 protocols at the time. This meant he missed a large portion of a pandemic-curtailed pre-season. When Spurs opened with a dismal 1-0 home defeat to Everton, he looked undercooked, struggling to physically compete. Towards the end of the game, then-manager Jose Mourinho ran out of patience, barking out at the England captain, “Come on, let’s make a fucking effort?”
But it did not take long for Kane to get back up to speed. In Spurs’ next league game a week later, he delivered four assists for Son Heung-min in a 5-2 win at Southampton. And in those first few months of the season, when Tottenham flew to the top of the table, and it briefly felt as if the Mourinho appointment might be a masterstroke, Kane was integral to everything good that Spurs did.
While some team-mates had their doubts about Mourinho, his tactics and his methods, Kane was one of the most loyal players to Mourinho through his 17-month tenure.
He saw Mourinho as a like-minded figure, with a shared commitment to finally winning Tottenham a first trophy since February 2008 as soon as possible, by whatever means necessary. Right up until Mourinho’s sacking in April, he was described as being willing to “run through a wall” for his manager. (The full extent of Kane’s support is underlined by his comments in that Gary Neville interview released a month later, when his analysis of why the Mourinho era did not work out — “Jose expected us to be men… we didn’t have enough leadership” — was exactly what the now Roma coach himself would say.)
But as Tottenham’s season fell away, to finish now just out of the top four Champions League spots but out of the Europa League too, Kane’s intentions solidified. He wanted 2020-21 to be his final season at the club, ending a 17-year association with Spurs. And he believed that having given it his all last season, he was entitled to a departure on good terms. He wanted it wrapped up before the start of the European Championship in early June. And his England team-mates knew it, as Kane openly discussed life in Manchester with them during the March international break.
At that point, with a few weeks of the season left, it felt as if Manchester City and neighbours United could be equally likely destinations for Kane. He would rather stay in the Premier League than go abroad and was reluctant to go to Spurs’ London rivals Chelsea because he did not want to sabotage his legacy with his boyhood club’s fans. And before United turned their attention to Jadon Sancho, they might well have led the chase.
The view at Tottenham during those latter stages of last season was that the conditions were simply not there for Kane to get his wish of a move. He still had three years left on the six-year deal he signed in June 2018, meaning Levy had no real incentive to let him go this summer. Especially as it was unclear just what the market would be for Kane in this window, and whether any of the interested clubs would offer enough money to tempt him to sell.
A likelier outcome, it was assumed at this point, was that Levy would persuade Kane to give him one more year, and that if Tottenham were unsuccessful again, then he could be sold in the, presumably, more buoyant summer 2022 market instead. But Kane did not want to do one more year just to satisfy Levy. In his mind, by staying for 2020-21, he’d already done that.
The news that Kane wanted out was first broken in The Athletic on April 10, in the final week of Mourinho’s tenure, but it was not until May that his intentions were out in the open.
On May 17, Sky Sports News reported that Kane had asked to leave Tottenham, and three days later an interview with Gary Neville’s The Overlap strand was released online, in which Kane spoke with remarkable candour about his desire to leave Tottenham.
Kane told Neville he wanted to be involved in the “biggest games” again, which he no longer was, that he planned to have a “good, honest conversation” with Levy about his future, and speculated that the Spurs chairman might even want to sell him this summer for £100 million before his value started to drop as he neared 30. And Kane made a prediction: “Ultimately it’s going to be down to me, and how I feel, and what’s going to be the best for me and my career at this moment in time.”
The cold reality of this summer, however, has shown that Kane did not have as much power as he hoped. Ultimately, it was down to Levy, and how he felt.
As soon as the Neville interview came out, there could be no doubting how much Kane wanted to leave the club. When Spurs played their last home game of the season against Aston Villa — another miserable 2-1 defeat — the day before the interview’s release, Kane walked solemnly around the edge of the pitch at the end, waving goodbye to the fans he thought he would be seeing as “one of their own” for the final time.
In the final game of the season, four days later away to Leicester City, Kane scored in a 4-2 win that secured a third Premier League Golden Boot for him and a seventh-place finish for his club.
If Kane thought the events of that week had made it easier for him to get his move, and that his position had been set out clearly but respectfully, then the Tottenham hierarchy took the opposite view.
When the story broke on Sky Sports, the club took the very unusual step of issuing an on-the-record statement reminding Kane of his professional responsibilities for the week. “Our focus is on finishing the season as strongly as possible,” said a club spokesperson. “That’s what everyone should be focused on.”
Behind the scenes, Levy and the people who run Tottenham were furious, both with Kane’s challenge to their authority and his timing. The feeling was that he had blithely disrupted Spurs’ season at the worst possible moment. At this point, Tottenham were still meant to be fighting for European qualification. There was a sense among the hierarchy that Kane’s behaviour had undermined Ryan Mason, the interim head coach, forcing him to answer endless media questions about the striker’s future — questions that Kane was not facing himself. Kane and Mason were meant to be close friends, after all. (There was no sign of an issue between them during the subsequent Euros, when Mason was a guest of Kane’s for England games at Wembley.)
There was also a feeling at Tottenham that Kane’s tactics would do him more harm than good.
Levy has in the past been willing to sell some of their best players for big fees. But he only likes to sell them on his terms (£30.75 million for Dimitar Berbatov to Manchester United, £85 million for Gareth Bale to Real Madrid, £53 million for Kyle Walker to Manchester City), and he does not like to be pushed into anything.
So for the Kane camp to try to exert public pressure on him by talking about a ‘gentleman’s agreement’, the terms of which were seriously disputed, was seen as counter-productive in the extreme, and a product of the bad, inexperienced advice the player was getting. Levy was backed into a corner. And was in no mood to let Kane get his way.
The first time City reached out to Levy about signing Kane, it did not get very far. They said they would like to discuss Kane’s future with him, but that any discussion would have to involve them sending players to Spurs in part-exchange. Levy asked who, and the five names offered were Gabriel Jesus, Bernardo Silva, Raheem Sterling, Aymeric Laporte and Riyad Mahrez. Levy was not interested. There was also no indication that these players would have agreed to go to Tottenham.
Kane had wanted his future resolved by the time the Euros started on June 11, but by the end of May it was very clear that would not happen. Levy, remember, did not sanction the sales of Berbatov or Bale until the very end of those transfer windows, or of Walker until minutes before City and Spurs were due to depart on pre-season tours in the United States. In negotiations like this, time is leverage, and Levy had no incentive to strike a quick deal.
Off Kane went to captain his country, still very much a Tottenham player. And when he struggled to get into England’s first few games, not scoring in the tournament until the last-16 game against Germany, he faced questions about whether the transfer saga, still at this point only a few weeks old, was starting to distract him. Kane, one of life’s compartmentalisers, insisted he was “fully focused” on the job of trying to make England champions of Europe.
For all of the energy and attention that this story has commanded, no one should be too surprised by the result. And the situation we are left with is that things are almost precisely as they were at the end of last season: Kane still plays for Spurs and is still contracted until 2024. Manchester City are still without an experienced striker, following Sergio Aguero’s free-agent departure for Barcelona. Daniel Levy still calls the shots at Tottenham.
Months of talk have barely moved the situation at all. But the basic facts of the saga are as follows:
- Levy was furious with the way Kane tried to bounce him into the move at the end of last season
- City offered five players in May and £75 million plus £25million of add-ons in June, then made no further bids
- They were prepared to pay a fixed £100 million plus £20-or-so million in add-ons, but Levy refused to negotiate
- Spurs fined Kane two weeks’ wages for delaying his return to pre-season training
- With the two clubs not talking since late July, the move had been dead for weeks despite Kane’s hopes
While Kane’s line-drawing Wednesday morning tweet referred gratefully to the reception he got from Spurs fans at their game with Wolves last Sunday, there is no avoiding the fact that the failure of this potential transfer represents a defeat for him. Kane had wanted to go to City all year. He made that abundantly clear from his interview with Gary Neville in May through to his delayed return to join Tottenham’s pre-season on August 7. If Kane had his way, he would be lining up in a blue shirt at the Etihad Stadium this Saturday lunchtime for a City debut against Arsenal. Instead, he has to pick up the pieces of his damaged relationship with Spurs and knuckle down for another long season.
If this was a defeat for Kane, it is also a win for Levy. He had been insistent all summer that Kane would not be sold, especially not to another Premier League club. Those close to Levy have always known that this was not a negotiating position, but a firm commitment.
Part of Levy’s position was coldly rational. He knew this would be a bad market in which to sell a top player, and that Tottenham would always be better off keeping Kane for at least one more year. By the end of next season, they would either have improved their situation enough to convince Kane to stay long-term, or they could sell him in a more buoyant market for at least as much as they were offered in 2021. The fact that City’s only cash bid for Kane was £75 million up front with another £25 million of add-ons has effectively proven Levy right. There was nothing to be gained from selling the striker this summer.
The other part of Levy’s insistence on keeping Kane was personal. He felt deeply affronted by the conduct of Kane and his family throughout this process, from the leaking of Kane’s desire to leave and that Neville interview right at the climax of Spurs’ season in late May, through to Kane’s unauthorised absence from pre-season training at the start of this month (which cost him two weeks’ wages). Levy saw this as a challenge to his authority, which made him even more keen not to get pushed around. Maybe with a more delicate approach, Kane might have succeeded, but Levy was insistent from early on that he would not be giving in.
Clearly, this summer has been handled poorly by the Kane camp, who failed to land the deal between City and Tottenham that they were relying on. But City have not got what they wanted either. All summer, they have needed an experienced replacement for Aguero, and while they have added Jack Grealish, they now have six days of the window left to sign a true striker. They have wasted months chasing a player Levy never had any intention of selling. For City and for Kane, the politics and the money never quite added up.
The roots of this long saga started last summer. City, trying to sharpen up their team to win back the Premier League title Liverpool had just claimed, made an enquiry about Kane, which Levy firmly rejected. But the player was interested in the prospect of a move to the Etihad and sought assurances from Levy that he would be allowed to leave in future.
While Kane believes he was promised he could leave after the 2020-21 season, especially if Tottenham did not get back into the Champions League, an alternative view at the north London club is that Levy merely said he would listen to offers for him. Not that he would be allowed to leave. The precise nature of this so-called ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between Levy and Kane has been one of the key themes of this summer.
There was some frustration with Kane at the start of last season, as he had to self-isolate for 14 days after returning from holiday in the Bahamas in line with COVID-19 protocols at the time. This meant he missed a large portion of a pandemic-curtailed pre-season. When Spurs opened with a dismal 1-0 home defeat to Everton, he looked undercooked, struggling to physically compete. Towards the end of the game, then-manager Jose Mourinho ran out of patience, barking out at the England captain, “Come on, let’s make a fucking effort?”
But it did not take long for Kane to get back up to speed. In Spurs’ next league game a week later, he delivered four assists for Son Heung-min in a 5-2 win at Southampton. And in those first few months of the season, when Tottenham flew to the top of the table, and it briefly felt as if the Mourinho appointment might be a masterstroke, Kane was integral to everything good that Spurs did.
While some team-mates had their doubts about Mourinho, his tactics and his methods, Kane was one of the most loyal players to Mourinho through his 17-month tenure.
He saw Mourinho as a like-minded figure, with a shared commitment to finally winning Tottenham a first trophy since February 2008 as soon as possible, by whatever means necessary. Right up until Mourinho’s sacking in April, he was described as being willing to “run through a wall” for his manager. (The full extent of Kane’s support is underlined by his comments in that Gary Neville interview released a month later, when his analysis of why the Mourinho era did not work out — “Jose expected us to be men… we didn’t have enough leadership” — was exactly what the now Roma coach himself would say.)
But as Tottenham’s season fell away, to finish now just out of the top four Champions League spots but out of the Europa League too, Kane’s intentions solidified. He wanted 2020-21 to be his final season at the club, ending a 17-year association with Spurs. And he believed that having given it his all last season, he was entitled to a departure on good terms. He wanted it wrapped up before the start of the European Championship in early June. And his England team-mates knew it, as Kane openly discussed life in Manchester with them during the March international break.
At that point, with a few weeks of the season left, it felt as if Manchester City and neighbours United could be equally likely destinations for Kane. He would rather stay in the Premier League than go abroad and was reluctant to go to Spurs’ London rivals Chelsea because he did not want to sabotage his legacy with his boyhood club’s fans. And before United turned their attention to Jadon Sancho, they might well have led the chase.
The view at Tottenham during those latter stages of last season was that the conditions were simply not there for Kane to get his wish of a move. He still had three years left on the six-year deal he signed in June 2018, meaning Levy had no real incentive to let him go this summer. Especially as it was unclear just what the market would be for Kane in this window, and whether any of the interested clubs would offer enough money to tempt him to sell.
A likelier outcome, it was assumed at this point, was that Levy would persuade Kane to give him one more year, and that if Tottenham were unsuccessful again, then he could be sold in the, presumably, more buoyant summer 2022 market instead. But Kane did not want to do one more year just to satisfy Levy. In his mind, by staying for 2020-21, he’d already done that.
The news that Kane wanted out was first broken in The Athletic on April 10, in the final week of Mourinho’s tenure, but it was not until May that his intentions were out in the open.
On May 17, Sky Sports News reported that Kane had asked to leave Tottenham, and three days later an interview with Gary Neville’s The Overlap strand was released online, in which Kane spoke with remarkable candour about his desire to leave Tottenham.
Kane told Neville he wanted to be involved in the “biggest games” again, which he no longer was, that he planned to have a “good, honest conversation” with Levy about his future, and speculated that the Spurs chairman might even want to sell him this summer for £100 million before his value started to drop as he neared 30. And Kane made a prediction: “Ultimately it’s going to be down to me, and how I feel, and what’s going to be the best for me and my career at this moment in time.”
The cold reality of this summer, however, has shown that Kane did not have as much power as he hoped. Ultimately, it was down to Levy, and how he felt.
As soon as the Neville interview came out, there could be no doubting how much Kane wanted to leave the club. When Spurs played their last home game of the season against Aston Villa — another miserable 2-1 defeat — the day before the interview’s release, Kane walked solemnly around the edge of the pitch at the end, waving goodbye to the fans he thought he would be seeing as “one of their own” for the final time.
In the final game of the season, four days later away to Leicester City, Kane scored in a 4-2 win that secured a third Premier League Golden Boot for him and a seventh-place finish for his club.
If Kane thought the events of that week had made it easier for him to get his move, and that his position had been set out clearly but respectfully, then the Tottenham hierarchy took the opposite view.
When the story broke on Sky Sports, the club took the very unusual step of issuing an on-the-record statement reminding Kane of his professional responsibilities for the week. “Our focus is on finishing the season as strongly as possible,” said a club spokesperson. “That’s what everyone should be focused on.”
Behind the scenes, Levy and the people who run Tottenham were furious, both with Kane’s challenge to their authority and his timing. The feeling was that he had blithely disrupted Spurs’ season at the worst possible moment. At this point, Tottenham were still meant to be fighting for European qualification. There was a sense among the hierarchy that Kane’s behaviour had undermined Ryan Mason, the interim head coach, forcing him to answer endless media questions about the striker’s future — questions that Kane was not facing himself. Kane and Mason were meant to be close friends, after all. (There was no sign of an issue between them during the subsequent Euros, when Mason was a guest of Kane’s for England games at Wembley.)
There was also a feeling at Tottenham that Kane’s tactics would do him more harm than good.
Levy has in the past been willing to sell some of their best players for big fees. But he only likes to sell them on his terms (£30.75 million for Dimitar Berbatov to Manchester United, £85 million for Gareth Bale to Real Madrid, £53 million for Kyle Walker to Manchester City), and he does not like to be pushed into anything.
So for the Kane camp to try to exert public pressure on him by talking about a ‘gentleman’s agreement’, the terms of which were seriously disputed, was seen as counter-productive in the extreme, and a product of the bad, inexperienced advice the player was getting. Levy was backed into a corner. And was in no mood to let Kane get his way.
The first time City reached out to Levy about signing Kane, it did not get very far. They said they would like to discuss Kane’s future with him, but that any discussion would have to involve them sending players to Spurs in part-exchange. Levy asked who, and the five names offered were Gabriel Jesus, Bernardo Silva, Raheem Sterling, Aymeric Laporte and Riyad Mahrez. Levy was not interested. There was also no indication that these players would have agreed to go to Tottenham.
Kane had wanted his future resolved by the time the Euros started on June 11, but by the end of May it was very clear that would not happen. Levy, remember, did not sanction the sales of Berbatov or Bale until the very end of those transfer windows, or of Walker until minutes before City and Spurs were due to depart on pre-season tours in the United States. In negotiations like this, time is leverage, and Levy had no incentive to strike a quick deal.
Off Kane went to captain his country, still very much a Tottenham player. And when he struggled to get into England’s first few games, not scoring in the tournament until the last-16 game against Germany, he faced questions about whether the transfer saga, still at this point only a few weeks old, was starting to distract him. Kane, one of life’s compartmentalisers, insisted he was “fully focused” on the job of trying to make England champions of Europe.
