A curious thing happened at White Hart Lane on Wednesday night. Harry Kane had scored another goal for Tottenham Hotspur in cup football – against Brighton & Hove Albion in the Capital One Cup – and the 21-year-old striker was feeling the adulation of the home support.
After his late substitution they demanded that he give them a wave and there was also the song about how they loved him and he loved them. Then, the Park Lane end started the chant that goes to the tune of Yellow Submarine.
It is the one that Liverpool fans used to sing about Jamie Carragher, the club legend. It was the one that was briefly adopted by the Manchester United crowd to pay tribute to George Best after his death in 2005. But here it was the Tottenham support that was dreaming of a team of Harry Kanes.
The youngster has yet to start a Premier League game this season – all six of his career starts in the competition came at the end of the previous campaign under Tim Sherwood – but there is little doubt about his man-of-the-moment status, which is verging on that of the cult hero.
Perhaps there was a slightly ironic undertone to the chant against Brighton and it did not exactly boom around the stadium before fizzling out. But Kane ticks many of the boxes of the modern-day fan favourite and he has come to enjoy a tremendous connection to the Tottenham crowd.
Born in Walthamstow to a Tottenham-supporting family, he is a product of the club’s youth system and there is littlethat fans like more than to see one of their own make the grade. Local identity adds value. Were Kane from further afield, the affection would surely not be as strong.
Kane is likable and he gives everything, even in goal, where he played following Hugo Lloris’ red card against Asteras Tripolis in the Europa League last week. Kane fumbled to allow the Greek team’s late goal and even that drew smiles. He can do no wrong. It helped, of course, that he had already scored a hat-trick.
What matters most is that Kane is getting goals. The close-range finish against Brighton took his tally for the season to eight, with all of them coming in cup games. He had scored in the previous round of the Capital One Cup against Nottingham Forest while in the Europa League, together with the Asteras hat-trick, he scored in both legs of the qualifier against AEL Limassol and in the group tie against Besiktas.
Kane scored four goals last season, three of them in the Premier League, while he also got one in 2011-12, when Harry Redknapp gave him his debut at Tottenham in the Europa League. He has been out on loan, at Leyton Orient in League One, Millwall and Leicester City in the Championship and Norwich City in the Premier League. Norwich did not work out, he was mainly a substitute at Leicester but he did well at Millwall and Orient.
A yearning for Kane to succeed at Tottenham has led to pressure on the manager, Mauricio Pochettino. There will be plenty of chuntering if Kane is again overlooked from the start in Sunday’s league game at Aston Villa. The issue dominated Pochettino’s pre-match press conference and it has been thrown into even sharper focus by the travails of his other strikers, Emmanuel Adebayor and Roberto Soldado, who have scored two apiece this season.
Pochettino appreciates the delicacy of the situation. He said he understood how Kane was a “special player” for the supporters. “He is English, young and from the Tottenham academy so this is normal,” he added. “If we were in Argentina and he was an Argentinian player and the team was playing with two foreign strikers, it would always be a sensitive situation.”
Pochettino might also reflect how Kane’s goals this season have come against Championship-level opposition or worse (apart from the one against Besiktas). Also at issue is whether the manager believes Kane can be a lone spearhead up front. The suspicion is that he does not – in which case he would have to move Christian Eriksen from the No10 position to accommodate Kane. He would not do that lightly.
Pochettino talked about the need to share the minutes between his strikers, how the club was in more than one competition and they had many games to play. He was in diplomatic mode. “My decisions are always based on my analysis of training and to give balance to the team and the performance,” Pochettino said. He will not be swayed by the clamour.
