There was, what I thought was a really well-written piece by
Oliver Kay in The Times on the 28th April that seems to have passed without comment here. Unless you're a subscriber, you tend to have a limited number of 'free' article with The Times, so I'll post the whole thing, just in case you've hit your number.
---------------
Harry Kane needs to laugh with his critics
No journalist would claim to know Harry Kane, but most of us would agree that we like what we see. He is one of those rare footballers who routinely stops in the post-match mixed zone, answering questions while others skulk past. He is well mannered and obliging — win, lose or draw.
There are other players who, even in moments of triumph, want you to feel that their time — time that could otherwise be spent waiting on the team bus, looking at their phone — is precious and that you should be grateful for two minutes of it. Kane stops not because he craves the limelight but because it would be rude not to. His is a boy-next-door type of courtesy. He is a throwback, an old-fashioned centre forward in more ways than one.
A personal recollection dates back precisely three years to the night that he won the PFA Young Player of the Year award. It has been a long-running tradition that the awards winners would grant the media a few minutes for an interview after the ceremony, but not many of them do so these days. On the night in question, the only difficulty was finding a quiet corner of the Grosvenor Hotel. One journalist pointed towards an empty suite which, it transpired, was the dressing room allotted to The Charlatans, who had been invited to perform by the PFA that night. Kane looked aghast at the thought of invading their private space. He gave the impression that it was the most rock-and-roll thing he had done in his life.
In front of his parents and his older brother, who all hung on his every word, Kane reflected on a season that had surpassed his every expectation — from Roberto Soldado’s understudy in August to the great hope of Tottenham Hotspur and England in April. “Incredible,” he said. “I got on a little goalscoring run, grew in confidence and just seemed to ride the wave, which got bigger and bigger.”
He really has. That wave has got bigger and bigger and bigger. In the past four seasons he has scored 143 goals in 205 appearances for club and country and it has been a pleasure to watch the boy-next-door thrive. His is a success story that we can all enjoy. As he told
The Times last June: “The fact that I was clean-cut, an Englishman with slicked-back hair, who was just going out and working hard, I think people kind of took to that. When people saw me celebrating a goal, that pure emotion and happiness and joy, I think that’s what people enjoyed.”
They did and they do, which is what has made the past few weeks all the more bizarre. Suddenly Kane finds himself re-cast in some quarters as selfish, precious and thin-skinned. At the time of writing this, he has just been urged on Twitter to “GROW SOME BALLS, you weapon” and to “stop being such a fanny” and “grow a set of bollocks”. Those are, right now, the two replies at the top of his Twitter feed. Numbers three and four are disparaging but clean. Number five calls him a “moaning little bitch” with a “weak mindset”, which is all the more laughable when you consider the mental strength that he, far from the most technically gifted footballer of his generation, has shown to get this far in his career.
What an utterly bizarre situation. It all stems from Kane’s insistence that he scored Tottenham Hotspur’s second goal against Stoke City on April 7. The goal was initially credited to Christian Eriksen, whose inswinging free kick seemed to have sailed straight into the far corner, but Kane swore “on my daughter’s life” that he got a touch with his head. The Premier League agreed and three weeks later the joke — or “joke” — is still circulating at his expense, whether it is congratulating him on his role in the Korean peace summit or on the birth of Prince Louis. By now the memes on social media are approaching John-Terry-celebrating-in-full-kit territory. Yes, that tedious.
For a football columnist, player-irked-by-mild-social-media-piss-taking should not be a rich seam but, over the course of the three weeks this Kane situation has snowballed into a different type of discussion. Mauricio Pochettino said a fortnight ago that the forward was disappointed he had been mocked for claiming the goal against Stoke. Yesterday the Tottenham manager said that Kane was “very sad” about something that — again, bizarrely — appeared on the FA Cup’s official Twitter feed, which made a laboured joke after Tottenham’s FA Cup semi-final defeat by Manchester United last Saturday about Kane being in Chris Smalling’s pocket.
It has all begun to feel slightly football-will-eat-itself — the beautiful game circa 2030, as imagined by Charlie Brooker — but, as unlikely as it seems, this is real. It has called to mind a recent conversation with a former newspaper journalist who now earns far more money as a PR consultant, with several footballers among his clients. “No offence, but the players these days don’t care what you lot write,” he said. “They don’t care about what’s on the back pages. Ninety per cent of my work is about keeping them off the front pages. That’s what they worry about. That and their social media.”
In
Fifty Years of Hurt, his insightful chronicle of the England team’s underachievement since 1966, Henry Winter recounts how one former England player said that his overriding feeling when standing in the tunnel at Wembley, before an international match, was “what mark I’m going to get in the ratings in the papers” because “if it’s bad, my life’s s*** for a bit”.
That, though, was a previous generation of footballers. The modern player does not live in dread of being given 4/10 in
The Times or the
Daily Mail. He may dread ending up in MailOnline’s showbiz column, papped outside Nando’s, but the biggest fear of all is becoming a laughing stock on social media. An agent tells the story of how, during Euro 2016, one of his clients, an England player, spending long afternoons and evenings in hotel room, had his head “scrambled” by what was being said about him on social media. Eventually the agent persuaded him to delete his social media apps from his phone, but by then the damage had been done.
So here is some free PR advice for Kane, which seems more pertinent than ever in the build-up to a World Cup. Take the mickey out of yourself. Reclaim the joke. Tell your 1.9 million Twitter followers that you are negotiating with Eriksen for the rights to his ten Premier League goals, which would take you ahead of Mohamed Salah in the race for the Golden Boot. Next time Salah curls one in from 25 yards, tell your 1.9 million Twitter followers that you are claiming it. No it is not terribly funny or clever, but it would win people over and persuade the mob to move on. And it might not be your style, but, in comparison with much of the brand-obsessed nonsense that footballers allow to be posted in their name, it would serve a purpose.
Kane was right when he said a year ago that people appeared to have warmed to his “clean-cut” image. It seems wrong that a player should even have to worry about how he is perceived, but it calls to mind something that Frank Lampard, another impeccably mannered, boy-next-door type, endured at the 2006 World Cup finals. Lampard told
The Times years later that he “reacted inside very badly” to criticism during and after that tournament, that he “sunk into myself and got the hump”. “As a footballer,” he said, “you have to be very thick-skinned.”
We should never underestimate that — the number of blows a player has to take on his way to the top — but if there is one thing that Lampard regrets in his career, it is allowing that criticism to get under his skin in 2006. To judge by Pochettino’s words yesterday and indeed over the previous two weeks, Kane finds himself contending with something similar, struggling to fathom this apparent backlash against him. This is not easy to say, but Kane needs to pick himself up and start riding that wave again. Score goals, smile, score more goals, smile some more. People like you, Harry. Don’t change.
