Kane and Able

This season has been a particularly difficult mess for Spurs fans to endure. What with the outdated football, the depressed gaffer, the lamentable injuries, our Director of Football getting chased up the High Road by Italian police, and ultimately watching our Manager getting dismissed from his duties; we’ve all been face-palming our way through this campaign. However, just as you think we’ve hit rock bottom, just as you think the only way to go from this disturbing low point is upwards, just as you think we’re finished with explosive disasters shattering what remains of your thread-like belief in our club, I suggest you think again.

There still remains one more bomb set to explode, like some sort of firework-laden finale to this calamitous season. We are about to lose our unique, irreplaceable, talismanic, generational player; Harry Kane. If you’re worried about whether the toxic, doom-mongering exchanges found on Spurs Twitter can survive this, then I suggest you consider the more important question; can the club survive losing Kane?
 
The majority of Spurs fans alive today haven’t experienced a striker as valuable as Harry Kane. He’s not just a generational player, he’s a once-in-a-century player. Even those that can speak of watching Jimmy Greaves on a regular basis sixty years ago could argue that Kane is the more important player. The fact that this team is still in contention for a top 4 place is almost entirely down to our man up top. The £60m Richarlison, last year’s golden boot winner, Son, and our other regular forward, Kulusevski, have a grand total of 8 league goals between them. Kane has 21 and counting.

Just the other day there was a version of the Premier League table doing the rounds that showed where clubs would be if every side had their top scorer taken out. We’d have dropped way out of contention, all the way down to 8th, with a loss of 10 points and that didn’t take into account Kane’s assists. We’d be absolutely fucked without him.

It almost doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet with all the drama swirling around our club throughout this season, the Kane issue is hovering just over the horizon. Deep down, just like with Sarah Connor sat in her jeep on the dusty Mexican border, sliding on her sunglasses having endured the horrors of The Terminator, we too know that the storm is coming. José may not have quite killed us off and his sequel, Conté, may have gotten closer to strangling our club to death, yet it’s ‘The Hurricane’ that really threatens to eradicate all hope for next season.

Any club’s chief Director is constantly fire-fighting, constantly spinning various plates, but as Levy currently looks out upon a floor full of burning, broken crockery, there are several colossal decisions at the top of his mountain-sized to-do list. It’s hard to know which problem he should solve first. His number one priority is surely to find us a new Director of Football, who in turn needs to then find us a new manager, so that the new boss can set about creating a side that will be able to compete in the post-Kane era. It feels as though we say this after every clumsy, Levy-shaped misstep that bites us on the ass, but this time it seems as though every key decision he takes over the coming months will define the club’s next few years.

There are reasonable question marks over our owner’s choices and although Levy hasn’t got every move wrong over the decades, he’s not exactly renowned for getting the key decisions right over his tenure at Tottenham. Inexplicably, our Director of Football, our Manager and our key source of goals, our beloved striker, are all up for renewal. The plates have never been so wobbly. It’s not so much a ‘changing of the guard’, more like a risky, turbulent revolution in staff and Levy simply cannot afford to botch this one up quite as royally as he has in the past.

To quote Roman Roy, is there a way out of this “shit show at the fuck factory”? Is there any hope for onlooking fans, as they peer through their fingers at the shambolic disorder unfolding week by week at Spurs? How can we possibly solve such a multitude of issues all coming for us at once? Ultimately, how can we possibly survive without Kane?

Well, I was just watching this weekend’s match between Manchester City and Liverpool, in which the home side cruised to a 4-1 win, and I had something of an epiphanic moment. The best teams not only win with a completely different style to that seen at the Tottenham Stadium, they do it without the need for a striker.

There I was, watching one of the best sides in the league, the current League Champions and serial trophy winners and it looked somewhat unfamiliar to a fan that’s more used to observing Spurs. As much as the style and tactics of both Mourinho and Conté has been uncomfortable and difficult to endure, all three of them came to our club adorned with trophies, yet there was an obvious chasm between their methods and that of Guardiola’s.

The Spaniard’s approach to games has become the defining winning formula of the modern game. It’s far surpassed those found in previous eras. It’s a game with a clear methodology, so crystallised in the club’s culture, from youth and reserve teams to the starting eleven, that any and every player that comes into the matchday squad knows exactly what they’re supposed to do.

Changes in personnel, whether enforced through injury, whether they need to rest players, or whether they want to rotate in players to keep them feeling loved and useful; there’s very little drop off in performance levels. It’s worth noting at this stage that the ability to rotate players whilst maintaining standards goes a long way to helping them in the ‘lesser’ cups too. Competitions that City have won in abundance during the Guardiola era and something Spurs are somewhat starved of. When Tottenham rotate for these competitions we put in rusty players that feel side-lined and unappreciated. It’s no wonder we can’t get past a plucky Sheffield United.

The Guardiola method is one born at Barcelona, but it has undeniably evolved and morphed into something fresher in Manchester. City move the ball so well because their players move so well. When in possession there’s a flurry of movement within thirty yards around the man with the ball, as others give him at least 2 or 3 passing options, often with 1 other player giving them a longer range option on the other side of the pitch. They don’t care if the receiving player is closely marked, as they’re technically gifted, confident players happy to take a good first touch, or pass it off first time if under pressure. Everyone relies assuredly on everyone else. Technical players allow for more passing options, as they don’t have to always look for the player in the most space (which for us is often backwards).

They adopt the mantra drilled into the youth of Barcelona’s La Masia De Can Plane Academy, the prioritised instruction of ‘Pass, Move, Request, Receive’ that produces the passing triangles, the possession-based game that controls matches and progresses a team up towards the opposition’s goal. Ground passes are always preferred over floated ones, even when down the wings, as they slot it into a forward’s feet for the final killer pass into the 18-yard box, as opposed to crossing it in for a low-percentage chance.

Without the ball they constantly press collectively, set traps and overloads, leaving large gaps on the other side of the pitch, knowing it’d take a miracle pass for the opposition to find those far away spaces under pressure. When they eventually and somewhat inevitably win the ball back there’s a restart pass that goes back to their keeper. 5 or 6 players are then responsible for surrounding the box to give the goalkeeper passing options. There’s also notably a period of slowing things down momentarily in order to allow their attackers a breather, before they begin triangulating their way up the pitch once again.

There’s so much on show that hasn’t been seen at Spurs in recent years. We have become predictable and repetitive, City are unpredictable and dynamic. We are often slow and lifeless, City are fast and vibrant. So it seems as though the obvious thing for Levy to do is to go out and source the next Guardiola. That’s easier said than done, but whisper it, that’s exactly what Arsenal did a few years ago when employing and believing in Arteta. It requires patience from the board and fans in equal measure, it requires a large injection of cash and it requires a progressive, long-term mindset from the owners.

To steal a point that Lloyd Stiles correctly stated on a recent Cheeseroom podcast, we cannot afford to go for another ‘win-now’ short-term manager. They simply do not work at our club, mainly because the only thing that we can offer the type of players those managers require, (in order to work their magic), is money, not trophies. Top players in their prime will always prefer to go to a PSG or a Madrid, where they get the silverware alongside the paycheck. Until we either get an Abramovic takeover, or a bottomless Middle Eastern fund, or alternatively a transformational manager – our version of a Guardiola, or a Wenger, or a Ferguson – we will struggle to attain the levels of the wealthier clubs around us.

And let’s face it, a mysterious trillionaire isn’t imminent and our owners don’t seem to be going anywhere, so that means Levy needs to hunt out the next big thing in (‘project’) management. Not Pochettino, but ‘the next Pochettino’.

Nagelsmann is an attack-minded manager that is available right now, in an almost perfect serendipitous, box-ticking opportunity, but although I wouldn’t be offended by his arrival there’s something of the Villa-Boas about him; only in his thirties, unusual in his methods and somewhat weirdly seen skateboarding into work. Frank and Postecoglou feel like a good fit too, doing positive things at lower level clubs, always decent in pressers and ripe for the step up to Spurs, but are they this year’s Fonseca? They certainly don’t feel like the next Guardiola. Arne Slot has turned around Feyenoord but there’s no doubt the Dutch league is a significant level below the Premier League. For every Ten Hag that tries that step up, there’s a De Boer flop.

So who can deliver modern, dynamic football at Spurs? Enrique? Even though he’s seemingly ruled himself out in recent media interviews, making him as likely to join us his compatriot Iglesias, he is available, but although he plays the Barcelona way, winning the treble with them, he did have Messi in his side and he’s not exactly ripped up trees with teams without the mercurial Argentinian.

Talking of talented Argentinians, River Plate’s Gallardo feels ideal in many ways; a serial winner, touted as the best manager from South America in years and currently available, he’d definitely be a great wild card option. Although yet another exciting, talented Argentinian arriving on the back of a growing reputation really whets the appetite, he’d be a sizable gamble, perhaps too big seeing as Levy cannot afford any more failures.

The final piece of the puzzle and the man I think I’m more inclined to bend towards is Burnley’s Vincent Kompany. A true disciple of Guardiola, who is tearing up the Championship, playing a modern, forward-thinking style and a solid man manager. Again, he’s young and it’s early in his managerial trajectory, but he’d fit a project. Spurs would seem a solid 5-year stepping stone between Burnley and Manchester City. He’d inject fresh ideas and most importantly he could develop a side that might just bypass the loss of Kane.

And this is the key point. City (and Arsenal) employ systems that don’t rely on an out and out striker. Sure, Guardiola recently employed Haaland, perhaps the world’s most deadly number 9, but he won the league last season without him. Haaland may have scored a bucket load of goals this season, but what striker wouldn’t with the sheer amount of chances City create?

Referring back to that table showing where teams would be were we to remove the impact of their top scorer, interestingly, City were down a whopping 14 points, yet they remained in 2nd place. This just goes to show us that the rest of the team contribute in ways that players beyond Kane simply do not for Spurs. City don’t rely on one aperture for their goals. Haaland wasn’t even on the bench having been rested for the game against Liverpool, yet they still scored 4 goals. Arsenal top the table and their supposed centre forward, another player forged in the ways of Guardiola (Gabriel Jesus) has only scored 7 league goals. Yep, you guessed it, they remained top of that imaginary league table. Few teams rely on a star striker less than the team sat atop the Premier League right now.

The way for us to get past Kane, the way for us to survive a hole in our heart the size of the great man, isn’t to try and replace him, it’s to change our club’s template and bypass the heavy reliance on such a player. For me, Kompany feels like the best man to manage this tactical transition. It won’t be quick, it’ll take lots of investment and fans will have to take a back seat and see the bigger plan rather than melting down after each inevitable set back.

In recent years, Arsenal fans embarrassed themselves with regular online outbursts, doubting Arteta in childlike tantrums of impatience each week. They were always told to “believe in the project, believe in the process”, yet now look at them. Well, Spurs need a new project and an entirely new process too and whether the Twitter ranters could handle it or not, only a fool would deny that we are ripe for it.

Mourinho and Conté (and not forgetting Nuno) were undoubtedly dark mistakes and it has left us with horrific scars both on and off the pitch, so Levy would do well to snap up a manager willing to alter Spurs direction and bring our football up to date. It’s time for a new era, a new adventure, something neoteric to believe in. Someone who can unify us, top to bottom, turn us back towards the ascendancy. Everything at Spurs is fixable, the top of the table isn’t actually that far away, and we still have a core of decent young players to build around, (of the highly technical kind that Guardiola always looks for), from Romero, to Bissouma, to Sarr, to Devine, to Bentancur, to Kulusevski. So it wouldn’t actually take that much to return us to our happy place. 

Rudderless and cut adrift, our club may well feel as though the end is somewhat nigh in this moment. Unfortunately, even more tears lie ahead if Kane does indeed leave us. I love him, you love him too, but it doesn’t serve us to sit here in denial. Our club is at a key junction in its modern history, the change is already upon us.

This summer feels absolutely huge and if we get it right we may just manage to shake off the cobwebs of the recent era and set up something more befitting of a club with the best infrastructure and the best fans in the Premier League. Believe me, the thermals will one day swirl around our club once again and we will rise back up, and when we do, these difficult days will be consigned to the memories.

The hurricane will have passed us by, but we will be standing there, roots held strong, ready to grow once again. We may well not have Kane, but we’ll still be able.