Ange Postecoglou has challenged the rest of Tottenham’s squad to seize the opportunity to step out from Harry Kane’s shadow and says the club must find a way to “replace greatness with greatness” if they are to move on from the striker.
Kane is set to bring down the curtain on nine years in north London by joining Bayern Munich in a deal worth at least £100million.
Spurs’ all-time record scorer has been the beating heart of the team under Postecoglou’s four most recent predecessors and become increasingly influential on and off the pitch over the past four years.
Postecoglou, who will take charge of his first Premier League game at Brentford on Sunday, says members of the squad may have “supressed themselves” around Kane and is hoping some can seize the opportunity to fill a leadership vacuum in the dressing room and on the pitch.
“All you can do is create that space and see what grows from there,” Postecoglou said. “There is sometimes that element where people supress themselves to an extent because they understand that there is a unique individual in the room that has such great presence and is such a force on and off the field.
“The opportunity is there, put it that way. With all these things there’s opportunity.
“What you’ve got to try to do is what the great clubs do, the great organisations: replace greatness with greatness. How that comes about is not easy -- but that’s what the big clubs do. They find a way to sustain and maintain and grow even when the greatest leave their doors.”
Postecoglou, however, dismissed the suggestion that losing Kane could ultimately be a positive for a team which had become too reliant on the 30-year-old.
“That’s doing a great disservice to a guy who did some unbelievable things,” he said. “There wouldn’t be a manager in the Premier League or the world that wouldn’t want Harry Kane in their team. That’s the reality of it.
“So you can’t say that because he’s here that’s sort of stymied the club into having success, I just don’t buy into that. I just think he’s done his utmost to try to have success at this football club and it hasn’t worked for him for a number of reasons.
“What we do know about this game, it’s very, very, very rare that an individual will be the difference. It’s usually the collective so what that offers now is an opportunity to build a collective that brings us success and within that context you still want outstanding individuals, you still want the best players, that doesn’t change.
“You don’t dismiss someone just because he’s been part of something hasn’t been successful. That might be because of other reasons, rather than what he brought to the team.”
Postecoglou revealed he had known Kane leaving was the “most likely outcome” this summer before he accepted the job on a four-year deal in June.
“Yeah, pretty much,” he said. “It wasn’t part of the contract negotiations that I needed certain players to stay.
“You do due diligence when you take a job and hopefully I was well researched enough to know what was going on in the background. You have these conversations with people and it was in the public arena. When a player of Harry’s stature is going into the last year of his contract you don’t need too much investigative research to know what’s going on. I knew going into it that this was the most likely outcome.”
Postecoglou said he was not aware if the deal included the option of a buy-back clause or first-refusal on Kane in the event that he wants to return to the Premier League but said there was no doubt he would be back at Spurs one day.
“No idea about the details of the deal,” he said. “He’ll definitely be back at Tottenham one day in one capacity or another. When you have a career like he has at one football club, you’re never not part of it.”
