That is the best kane article I have ever read. FantasticNot sure I saw anyone post this Sebastian Stafford-Bloor piece on Kane in the Athletic that I found quite touching and a nice look back at some wonderful moments. I also appreciated the sentiment of it: everyone who got to see Kane play for Spurs got to see something incredible and that is joy that should be remembered.
I watched Harry Kane play for Spurs and I’ll talk about that forever
Nobody expected Harry Kane to become a legend. But he provided so many incredible moments. It's been a pleasure...theathletic.com
It is rare for a footballer to have a distinct before and after in their career. Harry Kane does. To every supporter it will be different, but to many it happened on New Year’s Day 2015, against Chelsea, inside White Hart Lane’s rickety old steel and under its tall tiers.
That was such a moment of clarity. Spurs’ 5-3 win announced that Mauricio Pochettino was constructing something worth watching. But the detail – the moments within that performance – described what Kane’s role within that journey was going to be.
And it was moments, plural.
First, his languid step infield and the rifled shot that whistled inside Thibaut Courtois’ near-post and pulled Tottenham level. Then, with the daze still clearing from the first half, that lovely roulette at the beginning of the second, and the flamboyant sidefoot to crumple Courtois to the floor. It humbled Chelsea and Jose Mourinho, but — at that point — it told the world that either you believed in the hype around Kane or you were about to be very, very wrong.
Before that game, he was Europa League-based theory. Fiction to some, even many within the Spurs fanbase itself. After, he was Premier League fact.
There was something indisputable about that performance. There was a quality to it with which even the deeply churlish couldn’t argue with and that, in retrospect, created a shared touchstone for Tottenham supporters that was rare before and would become so again.
Kane was real.
And he was never more real than in the north London derby.
Fourteen goals in it describe his worth, but his true value lay in the context – in how he performed in contrast to the inferiority with which Tottenham had meekly tiptoed into that fixture before. So many Spurs players had wilted in the derby’s heat – and still do now – and yet Kane often stood at his tallest. The looping header in 2015 that hung in the air above the far post and buckled David Ospina’s knees. The savage, whirling drive a year later, that castled Ospina and ripped into his top corner. The gorgeous pass that sent Dele Alli running away at the Emirates and a big, bullying header at Wembley that smashed Laurent Koscielny to the floor.
The mask, the celebrations, the look of uncontained and uninhibited joy. The way you never thought he’d miss from the penalty spot. The north London derby was so often where good Tottenham teams and players had gone to perish and yet that was the crucible that Kane relished. It was where he most directly challenged anyone who kept doubting him and where he did it most often.
Of course, nobody said anything about Jimmy Greaves for a long time. The notion that Kane could ever disturb the order of Tottenham’s immortals would have been ludicrous, but the changing expectation about what he could become and the perpetual re-evaluation of his true ability meant that this story was never just about the goals he scored.
Spurs fans love him because he’s a childhood fan. Because he’s one of their own. Absolutely right. But so much of the joy in watching Kane came from seeing how he evolved. In fact, that has been the privilege of watching his Tottenham career. He became better. And better and better and better still.
Almost two years after that Chelsea game, Spurs travelled to Swansea in the Premier League. The Liberty Stadium pitch was barely playable that night and the rain whipped into the press box all evening, clawing at cheeks and ruining laptops. Somehow, it is one of my favourite memories.
In the second half, with his team 1-0 up and just a few minutes to play, Kane received the ball on the near touchline, just over halfway. Swansea had rallied in front of their crowd and were showing some life. The game wasn’t won and so in that position, with barely anyone in support, it was a time to hold the ball, protect the points, and buy everyone’s heavy legs a few moments’ respite.
Instead, with two defenders closing, Kane shuffled his feet, punched a perfect, driven ball off the sodden turf, and landed it perfectly in Dele’s stride. In went Dele to score (at the second attempt), home Tottenham went with the points and an unremarkable game had a few seconds that nobody would forget.
With very few exceptions, the press box is a place of affected ennui. It is somewhere where everyone has seen everything before and where people try never to be impressed. It is football’s version of the album cover; be dour, be indifferent.
But after that? I think I clapped. How mortifying. Yes, someone likely frowned in my direction and said something snide, but then I’d never seen Kane do that before – and that was his charm, wasn’t it? You could set your watch to his goals, of course, but the rest of his game was always so wonderfully fluid and seemed to take whatever shape it needed to.
That crossfield pass was a joy. On that night, and on many other days.
He learned to play it so quickly and with such precision that it would nearly always catch the full-back out on the other side of the pitch and leave a Tottenham player arrowing into space. His heading improved, too. So, quietly, did his left foot. The way he used his body to protect the ball and guard his shooting angles also grew more educated in time. Piece by piece, he built himself into one of the very best footballers on the planet.
It enabled him to access a world in which most of the inhabitants — the truly special — have a hologram glaze. They have a gleam that makes them barely real and they possess abilities that are so magnificent they seem like they can have only been bestowed rather than earned.
Kane never had that otherworldly glint. He might have belonged alongside those players, but he was never really one of them. He was a bit awkward and unaffected and the Tottenham crowd loved him more for it. He was muscle-memory and grind. He represented the hard yards on the training ground and was an example of potential taken right to its absolute limit.
There was a defiance to his Spurs career. You could almost imagine him by himself, in the dusky shadows on some far corner of the training ground, honing those abilities hour after hour.
Thank goodness that he kept learning to do new things and kept finding different ways to influence a game. What few realised at the time was that much of that growth was compensating for what Tottenham as a team could no longer do. As their strengths waned, he enabled them to retain a convincing chemistry.
He became a better playmaker because he had to.
When Kyle Walker left and Danny Rose’s play declined, Spurs lost their thrust from full-back and were never the same. Mousa Dembele’s body failed him, Christian Eriksen was sold and Dele was fighting battles that none of us knew about. In every case, as their respective abilities were stolen away, Kane somehow – somehow – changed in a way that enabled the team to survive. He played deeper. He played slower. Or quicker. He could be nastier if he needed to be, too.
When the team’s ego deflated for good, after being shot through by the many frustrations of Mourinho and Antonio Conte, and the ludicrous chaos before, during and after their reigns, his standing in the game was undiminished. Tottenham’s defenders forgot how to defend. Nobody in the midfield could tackle or pass. And yet Kane kept scoring goals, and kept creating them for others.
Kane was Tottenham, but he was also immune to Tottenham.
Imagine what it would have been like without him.
Maybe it is better not to.
So, this departure has been coming. The saga around Kane’s future has been dragging charmlessly towards it for a very long time. Naturally, it is right to wonder how it got to this point. Of course it is right to rage about what he was never able to win.
But I saw him play. I’m not old enough to have watched Greaves or Dave Mackay. I’m too young to know the sound of Bill Nicholson’s voice. Older generations can hold that over me. But I watched Harry Kane play for Spurs, and I’ll talk about that for a very long time.
There is a lesson there and a reminder that football has probably become too literal and immediate. The game’s memory is short now and yet, somehow, at the same time, too legacy-obsessed and worried by what everything means. There is too much focus on the artefacts a player is able to collect during a career, and not nearly enough on the journey they undertake during it.
But what a joy it has been to watch Kane play for Tottenham.
What a pleasure it has been to watch him carve his legend into our walls.
Caroline.
Hardly needed Old Moore's Almanac to predict that one did they?
Screw them. Drown out the trolling. What goes around will come around and bite them on their arses.
Sky are a share of bastards whom I detest.
That's because social media fc are obsessed with spurs. Rent free.
I can't wait for the Premier league to move away. It will ruin their business model, which is to rip off British fans.
He will get two penalties then
The entire country will probably want Bayern to win. Is such a one-horse race.
Or Fabregas left at 24 because he wanted to win.
