The attacking genius of Harry Kane

Christian Bertrand / Shutterstock.com

DATE_FORMAT_LC5 1325

“I want the biggest rewards that football can offer. I want to win trophies, but we’re not really doing that right now,” Harry Kane said to Sky Sports after Tottenham lost to Manchester City in the Carabao Cup final at the end of April 2021.

“Individual awards are great, they’re fantastic achievements. When I look back at the end of my career, those are the things I’ll consider, and they’ll carry their weight.But right now, as a player, my goal is to win trophies with the team. The feeling is bittersweet. Individual awards are flattering, and I’m proud of them, but I’d rather win team trophies.”

Kane couldn’t compete for team trophies with Tottenham. The man was the club’s top scorer for nine consecutive seasons, and he was dominant over that time, scoring 113 more goals than the combined total of all other strikers in the team.

In fact, it’s hard to comprehend how efficient Kane was at Tottenham.

He and Michael Owen played roughly the same number of Premier League matches, but Kane has 63 more goals.

Owen isn’t exactly a slouch either; while his career’s painful ending might have clouded his star status, Owen scored slightly more frequently than Didier Drogba or Cristiano Ronaldo in the Premier League, despite his injuries and early retirement. Owen had 0.46 goals per game, Ronaldo 0.44, and Drogba 0.41.

Kane scored as much as Drogba, Ronaldo, and Owen combined, then added another half to that total, separating himself from them.

Mohamed Salah has been Liverpool's key player and incredible scorer for the last eight seasons. He’s so good that there’s a serious argument for him being the best player in the club's Premier League era, and he’s definitely the best striker of that period.

Given Kane’s longer journey to the top of English football, Salah has played only 22 fewer Premier League matches than him. In those remaining 22 games, he would need to score 28 goals to match Kane.

When you draw a line under Kane’s Premier League career, names like Wayne Rooney, Andy Cole, Sergio Agüero, Frank Lampard, and Thierry Henry will remain behind him.

So where are the trophies?

For all those years, Daniel Levy was so short-sighted that he failed to build a competitive team around him. Perhaps the best example of this is the 2020/21 season, where Kane was the Premier League’s top scorer in his boyhood club, but he was also the league's top assister.

He provided 14 assists to his teammates, two more than Bruno Fernandes and Kevin De Bruyne combined that season.

After such a season, where Kane demonstrated his power and quality, Tottenham’s biggest incoming transfer was Bryan Gil from Sevilla for €25 million.

Meanwhile, the competition was spending hundreds of millions bringing in reinforcements that completely changed the shape of their teams. And Kane, after dominating individually, got a helping hand in the form of a Spanish teenager who was competing for the same position as Heung-min Son, the only player who could help Kane at the highest level.

No matter how good Kane was — and he was exceptional, at times even the best in the league — he was in the wrong place.

Salah and De Bruyne had top-notch managers and coaches who knew how to make their jobs easier. Manchester United and Chelsea were spending billions, piling player after player in the hope of finding the right combination to replace their system.

Newcastle and Aston Villa followed their own visions. Tottenham had Kane, and Levy took him for granted.

In fact, Tottenham wasted Kane’s best years.

Levy had a player who could play all 38 league matches in a season, who could be counted on to score between 20 and 30 goals and provide another 10 assists.

Son was the perfect partner for Kane’s style of play, but the rest of the team wasn’t up to the task of competing for trophies in such a strong league.

The Englishman requested a transfer twice. Levy rejected two solid offers that matched what he had promised his star when he said he would let him go, only to eventually sell Kane to Bayern when he was approaching his 30th birthday.

Kane dominated in his first season in Germany. He played 32 Bundesliga matches and scored 36 goals, adding eight assists, which was enough to win the European Golden Boot. He reached 50 league goals in just 43 matches, breaking Erling Haaland’s record of 50 goals in 50 games. But even in Germany with Bayern, he still couldn’t win a trophy.

Now that has changed. Bayern has won the title, and Kane can finally add his first true team trophy to his career achievements. One of the best strikers in modern football had spent over a decade chasing his first major trophy, continuously improving, refining his skills, and elevating his game.

And now, he has finally captured it, filling the void that had been lingering.

But does that mean Kane is now a better player than he was last week or two years ago? Of course not.

This is a perfect example of how impossible it is to satisfy the critics. For years, pundits pointed out his lack of trophies, and now they belittle his triumph in Germany, dismissing it as expected.

All the while, they miss the essence of it, failing to appreciate the brilliance of a striker who is a true attacking genius.

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