Maybe there is nothing to worry about. Harry Kane has looked lazy and uninspired so far this season, but then again he often does when he comes back from a long hiatus. This is a player who has scored 166 league goals, but only five of them have come in the first month of a season. In his first two seasons as a Tottenham starter, he didn’t start scoring until the last weekend of September. With a couple of goals against Arsenal on Sunday, the recent uncertainty may be forgotten. But given his efforts to leave the club in the summer, any poor performance is inevitably invested with additional meaning.
The optimism at Tottenham led by three straight 1-0 wins at the start of the season, one of them over Manchester City, quickly faded. At the start of the international break, Tottenham were leading the standings and Arsenal in last position. If Arsenal were to win by two on Sunday, they would overtake their rivals in north London. Last week’s 3-0 defeat to Chelsea is perhaps nothing unexpected, and Spurs played well at times, but the previous weekend’s 3-0 defeat at Crystal Palace was sad. There was little creativity and Kane, moving deeper and deeper, was at the center of it all. He hasn’t scored in four Premier League appearances and only two for Spurs in all competitions, both in an August Europa Conference League match against Paços de Ferreira. He has scored more goals for England (three) since Tottenham’s start of the season.
But the disappointment has to go in two directions. Spurs fans are understandably frustrated with Kane, and particularly that curious week early in the preseason when he stayed in Florida insisting he had a longer hiatus after Europeans, while the club said it was waiting for him. again. Since he’s often a slow learner, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if an extra week of training might have brought him to sharpness a week earlier.
At the same time, with every bad performance, every result that takes the Spurs away from qualifying for the Champions League. Kane has to wonder if he could have fidgeted harder for a move, if there was a way to secure a move to Manchester City, which, in between his regular minor team jokes, has already produced a couple of displays where he looked needs. of a high-level striker. Mutual dissatisfaction rarely ends well.
But in addition to the main ramifications of the longest saga of the summer, there is also a tactical question. There was a significant rumbling, as there was with England in the summer, about Kane’s tendency to drop deep. But it’s a very old-fashioned view of a striker who should only occupy the opposing area (although it works for some players, most notably Dominic Calvert-Lewin last season, who thrived after being told by Carlo Ancelotti to think about nothing. other than scoring goals).
Kane, who has suffered a number of ankle injuries, is not as fast as he used to be. He adapted his game accordingly, playing not on the last man, but trying to create space for others to stumble upon. His relationships with Son Heung-min for Tottenham (and, to a lesser extent, last season, Gareth Bale) and Raheem Sterling for England are proof of how this can work.
But Bale left and Son missed the Palace game with a calf injury. Without them, Kane has gone down. Lucas Moura’s work rate cannot be faulted and occasional performances – that hat-trick at Ajax in 2019, in particular – have hinted that he could still become a very special player, but he hasn’t arrived yet, while Steven Bergwijn impressed. against City but remains inconsistent. Last season, Lucas was the Spurs’ fourth top scorer in the league, with three goals; Bergwijn scored one.
And this is problematic. Kane scored 23, Son 17 and Bale 11. With Bale gone, if Kane and Son aren’t scoring, the danger is that no one else is. Yet the strangeness of that statistic is that it comes at a time when Kane is facing criticism for falling too deep, for trying to get others involved in the game. He has almost come to define himself as a non-selfish striker, yet the goals are not yet shared. The Spurs need Dele Alli to regain his form, or for Tanguy Ndombele to settle down. They need more angles of attack.
Under José Mourinho, too much has focused on Kane, who is never healthy for any team, but of course this problem is amplified when the player he relies on so much becomes out of love. Even a drop in application by a couple of percentage points can be extremely damaging.
The paradox now is that the less happy Kane is, the less well he and Tottenham perform and the less likely a suitor is to try to sign him next summer.
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