MR. INVISIBLE

Kane missed a crucial penalty in the World Cup quarter finals. You’d have bet your house on him scoring it, providing a lifeline for England to advance into a winnable semi-final, but very much like the supporters of his club, Tottenham Hotspur, England fans can’t have nice things, so obviously he uncharacteristically skied it over the bar. Interestingly, the subsequent media reporting didn’t meltdown about the penalty miss like it has in former decades following the nation’s unhealthy string of spot kick misses that have previously dumped them out of major tournaments. Instead they wisely chose to reflect on other contributing factors. However, social media is an entirely different beast and that beast set about chomping on the carcass of Kane’s reputation.

“He’s been in decline for years!” wrote Tom from Newcastle. “He should never have started that game”, declared Alan from Runcorn. “Harry Kane, the biggest bottler in football” arrived from an anonymous Liverpool fan. Even a ridiculous, doctored picture once used for a previous World Cup victim, David Beckham, had Harry hanging from a set of gallows. It all added to a general sense of unpopularity that’s been swelling around Kane among Twitter’s fuckwit fraternity, especially from fans of teams that rival Spurs.

But the hate isn’t exactly exclusive to rival supporters. As we edge towards the halfway mark of the Premier League season (currently 15 games in), you could propose a question to all Tottenham fans about who’d get their vote for Spurs’ ‘Player of the Season’ so far? They’d ponder Bentancur, before hovering over the idea of Kulusevski, but of course they’d all be wrong answers.

That is, of course, unless they said Harry Kane – and let’s be honest, plenty wouldn’t. But it begs the question; is Harry Kane the most underrated player in modern football, even by his own fans?

Harry Kane has continued to bang in regular goals, assisted teammates, provides plenty of key chances, has an incredible range of passes, is the man that has the bollocks to be our penalty taker and is by far Tottenham’s most talented talisman. Nobody else on the pitch is doing all this. Yet there’s a shameful, rather embarrassing blind spot that a lot of Spurs fans have for Harry Kane. You see, he’s so good, we take him for granted. So consistently brilliant has this man’s service been to our club, that we now act like he doesn’t exist, always looking for the player one down from Kane when considering our man of the match each week.

Well, here’s my latest opinion piece to explain why we should protest against this bypass, why this presbyopia of footballing history has to end, and why Harry Kane is the best player that you or I will ever see in a Spurs shirt for the remainder of our lives. Dang it, he may just turn out to be the best English player ever to grace the Premier League.

Just take a moment and consider where would we be without Kane’s contributions since he broke into the team in 2014? Would we have enjoyed the heights reached under Pochettino? Would we have established ourselves as Champions League regulars? Knowing what a top striker costs, has he saved Daniel Levy a large fortune? A life without Kane is a reality we can’t collectively fathom, but for a player that’s saved us on so many occasions, we are all too ready to point out any time that he misses the goal.

It should go without saying that even though the praise he deserves suffers a weird kind of invisibility cloak, he’s still adored by the majority of sensible fans at Spurs, besides being taken for granted, but when he’s debated at a level beyond the corridors of Tottenham the amaurosis grows worse still. Harry has never won the Premier League’s ‘Player Of The Year’ award. Or The Professional Football Association’s ‘Player Of The Year’. Or the Football Writers ‘Player Of The Year’. None of them. Not once.

Even if you take the opinion that Kane has pretty much been the best player in the Premier League for around nine straight years as my somewhat biased viewpoint, then you also need to consider that he’s been the league’s top scorer three times (2015/16, 2016/17 and 2020/21) – a feat only matched by generational goal-machines, Alan Shearer, Mohammed Salah and Theirry Henry. He even paired up that latter golden boot with being the league’s top assister, yet still didn’t win any ‘Player Of The Year’ gongs (incredibly, Kevin De Bruyne and Ruben Dias snapped those up in 2020/21). During Kane’s incredible 2016/17 season he scored 29 goals in just 30 games, the modern era’s highest ever goal scoring ratio (that works out to be 0.97 goals per game!) and still it doesn’t register.

Not to mention his winning of the 2018 World Cup’s golden boot, only the second Englishman to ever claim the award, the first since Gary Lineker in 1986. At the current Middle Eastern World Cup the knives came out with impressive speed too, with many non-Spurs fans quick to write him off after he failed to score in the opening three games – with calls for him to be dropped, even though he completed the opening rounds as the competition’s outright top assister. Question marks over his fitness swirled around. Conspiracies over an ankle injury (even though he didn’t actually injure his ankle) followed him around social media, perhaps as it’s known to be his weak point, his Achilles heel if you wish (see what I did there?). They’re desperate for a negative narrative. Kane’s the national side’s captain, has been for years, and is probably Southgate’s first name on the team sheet when fit, so it’s clearly a concern that isn’t shared by the national manager.

Additionally, accusations of stat-padding with penalties can and always should be crushed by asking any accuser to step up and try taking a penalty in any professional game, in front of a full stadium of abusive fans urging them to miss. There have been penalties so important, so late in games, and so key to taking home points for club and country, that often his spot kicks actually seem harder than scoring in the flow of a normal game. He is actually an unbelievably reliable penalty taker, impressive under pressure, showing us one of his most useful skills (a dead-eyed, laser-like consistency), alongside his hard-work (he’s often found practising long after training sessions have finished) and is a telling example of his mature strength of character. Angry fans still ask for more though, for perfection, for a robotic-like command, under all circumstances. Kane’s impossibly high standards almost dehumanises him. But he is human. He should be allowed to miss.

Those same expectant fans seem to never speak of Harry’s 10 goals in qualifying for the World Cup, or his equalling of Wayne Rooney’s England goal record (in 40 fewer games!), which, by the fucking way, was scored via the damn penalty spot. Things get even more astonishing when considering the longer-term records he is set to break. He will smash Rooney’s national record to bits in the coming years, he will also likely break Jimmy Greaves’ astonishing Tottenham goal tally, and he’s still in line to challenge Shearer’s Premier League record. To topple any one of these three seemingly impossible accolades would herald him as a legend of the game. To surpass all three is unique. It’s statue-worthy. It’s a hall-of-fame distinction. It’s GOAT-like. You only have to look at how long Greaves’ record stood for to recognise that there’s a chance Kane’s won’t ever be surpassed.

But yet he suffers this ongoing problem with respect. As if fans don’t want to acknowledge his titan-esque standing. He doesn’t do Ronaldinho-like tricks and flicks. He doesn’t rack up hattricks like Messi. He’s not a brand like Ronaldo (R7) with his own unique goal celebration. He’s not blessed with chiselled good looks like Beckham (like that should ever matter!). He’s never been seen with a model on his arm either, instead choosing to do the rather wholesome thing of marrying his childhood school sweetheart, Kate Goodland, but then that doesn’t particularly feed a celebrity-obsessed media. He’s not going to get a drink-driving ban from crashing his sports car, or be found getting kicked out of a nightclub any time soon, choosing to stay alcohol free most of the year. He’s about as clean cut as they get, even picking up an MBE for his services to football from the Queen. At least she acknowledged his impact on the game, even if some of his own fans do not.

But it wasn’t all record-breaking heroism from the outset. In fact, when he was first brought onto a Tottenham football pitch barely anyone considered that he could go on to greatness. Be honest, when he made his debut for Spurs, in August 2012, against Newcastle, nobody looked at him and thought “yeah that’s the next big thing at Spurs”. Even as we endured a troubled and blunt Soldado for the subsequent seasons few fans thought Kane was the solution. He’s a shining example of how to grow into a good player, with exemplary hard work, a solid attitude to development with patient loan periods at lower clubs, and a willingness to wait and learn. His time truly came two years later, as he established himself in the team in 2014, and he’s never really looked back.

But that’s all in the past. Roll forward to 2022 and he’s planted himself as one of Europe’s top strikers, of that there’s no doubt. He strikes fear into the heart of any defender. Yet, some fans are still waiting for him to fail. Perhaps it’s precisely because of what he’s done to the teams that he’s faced over the years (he’s scored against a long list of opposing teams, only adding further fresh Premier League sides when they’re promoted into the league), that he is so disliked – a regular target for their anger that creates a residual distaste. Their jealousy and fear bleeds into their view of him even when he steps up to represent them at a national level. Is there also a strange willingness to watch a talisman fall from grace, a kind of grim pleasure in uncovering a winner’s fallibility? Or perhaps we have a kind of national desire to support an underdog, to prop up and support the weak, so we reject an obvious hero?

This season, Kane has even found a new shadow hiding him from view, with Erling Haaland now racking up an unbelievable tally of goals in the Premier League to date, making Kane’s impressive 13 goal contributions (12 goals/1 assist) in just 15 league games even more invisible. In any other season, that tally would surely have him lined up for yet another golden boot. Just think of the plaudits given to Newcastle’s Miguel Almiron this season. As good as he’s been, he’s only scored 8 goals so far. Aleksandar Mitrovic, currently sitting on 9 goals, is thought to be having a blindingly good season, yet he’s also not reached double figures. Expensive new signing, Darwin Nunez (5), isn’t even the top scorer for Liverpool, with both Salah (6) and Firmino (7) ahead of the supposedly deadly front man. Gabriel Jesus has Arsenal fans waxing lyrical as they sit atop the league as things stand, yet he’s only scored 5 times, not even half that of Harry, and the Brazilian’s unable to start for his national team; a slot ironically occupied by Richarlison, the player supposedly sat on Spurs’ bench as an understudy to Kane.

So somewhat paradoxically, Kane seems adored and exalted yet doubted and doomed, revered yet reviled. In the grand scheme of things, there should be little negativity surrounding such a servant to club and country, yet just one glance at a Twitter search for his name will bring up a host of horrible ambiguity. Maybe those at the top are easiest to shoot down? Maybe once a player raises the bar so high the bar is prone to wobbling in the loftier winds found in online discourse. Maybe we simply can’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone. One glance at who is in line to replace him as England’s main striker in the years to come would have you reconsidering our countries prospects at major tournaments, unless you’re expecting more from Ivan Toney, Callum Wilson and Tammy Abraham?

Lastly, does his lack of silverware ultimately hold his reverence back? Can we consider him truly great if he’s spent his entire career failing to win any trophies at all? It’s the reason a team exists, right? But that’s the key factor – it’s a team game, so any lack of silverware must be put into the context of a wider squad that surrounds him. It’s not entirely Kane’s fault he hasn’t been able to add trophies to a home cupboard otherwise stacked with personal awards.

So this is a call for calm. A request for respect. This is a message to all the haters and disrespectful bandwagon bullies baulking at the next Kane blank. He may not be glamorous, he may not be perfect, he may not score every single game he plays, he is human after all, but note this: When Mr Invisible finally retires from club and country you’ll miss him when he’s really gone.