It has been a strange couple of weeks for Harry Kane. He has returned early from a bad ankle injury, has been lampooned for claiming a goal against Stoke City, has been mocked by the Football Association’s Twitter account and was even the butt of a joke by Ben Purkiss, the chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, in front of his peers at their awards evening on Sunday.
Kane could be forgiven, along with the rest of us, for having to Google exactly who Purkiss is after he “quipped”: “Harry Kane is so prolific that he is able to score without touching the ball.” A search will have shown the 34-year-old is a journeyman defender whose career started at Sheffield United but slid down from there. He is currently at League Two Swindon Town.
Nothing wrong with that, although quite why, as chairman of the PFA, the players’ union which is there to support its members, he felt it necessary to take the mickey out of Kane is another matter.
But that is the “bantz”, as the football world cringingly says, and Kane will obviously have been the recipient of far more vicious ribbing, not least in the Spurs dressing room since he appealed against the Premier League’s decision to award his side’s second goal against Stoke to Christian Eriksen. But at least that stays within the four walls. It is not an attempt to ridicule him in public by the FA or his own union. What is the point, Kane might wonder?
He was adamant he had touched Eriksen’s free-kick and the goal was eventually awarded to him as he attempts to chase down Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah to become the Premier League’s leading goalscorer for a third successive season. Such is Kane’s driven nature that it did not occur to him his behaviour would cause a fuss. He is fuelled by scoring goals, by winning and by making himself the best he can possibly be. Spend any time in his company and it is quickly apparent that whenever his career ends, no one will accuse him of not trying to wring out every last ounce of his talent: whether that is employing a personal chef, taking advice on sleep patterns, examining sports such as American football, for which he has a passion, or working with a sprint coach to try to make himself quicker.
Kane is aware of the statistics, the comparisons, the career landmarks and that, alone, makes him a rarity among British footballers. He is unabashed in his desire to be the best and wants to be bracketed in the elite. It is part of his competitive instinct and there are not enough like him.
Kane wants to win personal, as well as team, honours. One dream is to win the Ballon d’Or; to be voted the world’s best player. And why not? If he does so then whoever he plays for – club and country – will have profited. Salah won the PFA Player of the Year award on Sunday and deservedly so. An Englishman has not won it since Wayne Rooney in 2009-10 and Kane is his country’s best hope of eventually ending that run.
Those close to Kane say he is unmoved by the recent ridicule although that does not quite tally with Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino claiming the 24-year-old had been “hurt” by the mockery after claiming his goal. For Kane it was a black-and-white issue. He is adamant the ball came off him and, therefore, it is his goal.
For the FA to then attempt to cash in on that theme was crass, stupid and immature. A tweet went out after Saturday’s FA Cup semi-final defeat by Manchester United, a game in which Kane was superbly shackled by United’s defence and struggled. The message was “What’s in your pocket, Chris?” with a video of defender Chris Smalling saying: “Harry Kane.”
It was retweeted more than 20,000 times, provoking a huge response, much of it yet more ridicule aimed at Kane, before it was taken down. On the scale of gaffes by the FA – and that is quite an extensive scale – it is hardly huge, but what does it say about the organisation that it is so desperate to curry favour or be part of the zeitgeist that whoever was managing its social media account that day thought it would be funny to ridicule the man expected to captain England at the World Cup in a few weeks?
Unsurprisingly, the FA has written to Spurs and United who were not impressed by the tweet either, to apologise, which is fair enough, but what an idiotic, avoidable episode it is. I wonder what the reaction would have been in Portugal had the Portuguese Football Federation done that to Cristiano Ronaldo? Kane would be perfectly within his rights to question the FA’s motives and, maybe, tell it where to go the next time it asks him to promote a commercial venture for England.
Kane has been the golden boy of English football. He has not courted controversy, there is no juicy backstory. In fact, this is the first piece of negativity around him and it all stemmed from the heinous crime of him claiming a goal. Nothing more. It has, therefore, fuelled social media, which can be such a cesspit, with its memes and gifs which have gone way beyond attempts at humour, which is what the FA tried. It has been almost gleeful.
But why?
It now seems to be open season on Kane and however thick a skin he has, however impervious he is to criticism, and no one ultimately is, it does not help. Ask Gareth Southgate. England will go to the World Cup with it having been accepted that the biggest barrier to success at major tournaments is the mental pressure the players feel, how they freeze on the big stage. And here is the FA and the PFA messing with England’s biggest hope of actually not being humiliated for once by also taking the mickey out of him. Maybe I am being too po-faced. But that is not funny.
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