On Harry Kane

Harry Kane is obviously the main man at Tottenham now in the same manner that Gareth Bale once was. He is also seemingly a shoe-in for Young Player of the Year in May, and for a place in the England starting line-up in March. But how good could he actually end up being?

Kane has scored 23 goals in 35 games this year, better than Ronaldo (23 in 53 games)  and Bale (11 in 41 games) and almost as good as Messi (38 in 51 games) at the same age. It's also worth pointing out that Gareth Bale's best season total for Spurs was 26 which Kane is well on course to eclipse already.

Of course stats don't tell the whole story by any means; Kane does not seem to (yet) have the ability to do truly spectacular things on the pitch like the aforementioned players do on a regular basis. And we don't know much about him off the pitch yet either. Truly great players have a persona of some sort (e.g. Cantona, a philosopher with a nasty streak; Henry, a cool guy and a gentleman ; Beckham, a Hollywood star; Messi, quiet and shy etc). That is why someone like Alan Shearer isn't up with those players, he scored a lot of goals but he's a boring bastard. 

In terms of his playing style, a friend recently compared Kane to 90s footballer Teddy Sheringham. I reckon that's rubbish because Kane has pace whereas Sheringham was known for being very slow. I also think that Kane is going to be a better player than Sheringham ever was. No, I think a more apt comparison might be Gabriel Batistuta (an Argentine striker who played for Fiorentina in Italy in the 1990s) in the way he drops deep to pick up the ball and run at defenders and in his incredible shooting accuracy. And that is high praise indeed because Batistuta was one of the great players of his era.

In terms of England, I don't think Kane is going to be able to do very much, unfortunately. Football is a team game first and foremost and it doesn't matter how good our strikers are, (Rooney and Welbeck actually have excellent scoring records for England already) we are lacking in too many other areas. England have one of the best defensive partnerships in the world in Terry and Cahill, of course. But the former doesn't want to play for England because he has been vilified by our idiotic fans and morally bankrupt media. 

Harry Kane is obviously going to be the Premier League's next big thing. I hope he's also going to be England's next big thing, but we need to change the way we treat our players if we are going to ever have a successful team again.