One of the common anxieties of football’s age of billionaire owners and nation state PR projects is the fear that clubs will lose their long-standing identities, that they will become instead plasticised entertainment vehicles, anonymous machines for winning. Although not quite yet, it seems. Relax for a moment. Kick back. And take a long cool drink of the mixed and flowing substance that remains forever Spurs.
There was at least something reassuringly familiar about the collapse at home to Southampton on Wednesday night. Tottenham may have the greatest new-build ground in Europe. They may have an A-list manager in his mid-career prime. They may have in Harry Kane – and bear with this – the outstanding Premier League attacker of the last eight years. But the ability to shift effortlessly between fluent attack and showing all the defensive resilience of a beaded curtain remains intact.
The worst part of that home defeat wasn’t the fact Tottenham were 2-1 up with 10 minutes to play, then lost the game 3-2. The inept defending for both late goals wasn’t the worst part either. The worst part was Antonio Conte being nice afterwards.
This is the same Conte who seems to generate his own ambient energy field with those fits of performative rage; for whom that gorgeously lush auburn hair transplant was probably written off as a necessary business expense, such is the importance to his professional wellbeing of the tousled and passionate mediaeval warrior king persona.
The Italian was instead muted and conciliatory in defeat. He talked about the need to protect his players’ confidence. He said: “This is our life now.” And the reference to the present tense seems telling. Conte is being careful, in public at least. Southampton at home may have revealed the fragility of key parts of this team, but it was also the start of a run of five Premier League matches in 18 days that will decide the trajectory of Tottenham’s season.
This is where they catch up on the fixture list. Four points off fourth with three games in hand is still a position of strength. The same run of games could also end up deciding the future of a player who looks increasingly like an unsustainable anomaly in this team.
There has been a suggestion this week that Kane has warmed a little towards the idea of extending his contract at Spurs. Much will depend on how skewed that balance looks by the end of March, the gulf in quality between the squad’s base level and its outstanding player.
To put this in context, Tottenham have signed just two first-team-ready central defenders since the summer of 2015 (both played – badly – in midweek). Their full-back stocks have declined from the heights of Kyle Walker and Kieran Trippier divvying up the right flank, to Emerson, Matt Doherty and Japhet Tanganga being rotated hopefully like a set of misaligned tyres.
Kane hasn’t had a regular supplier of goalscoring passes since Christian Eriksen left.
And somehow through that same period this declining team have managed to hang on to the best Premier League centre forward of his era. Kane has now scored more Premier League goals and more England goals without actually winning a single career trophy than any other player. He turns 29 in the summer. This is getting a little uncomfortable.
At which point it is necessary to re-state just how good Kane is. It has become habit for those confused by team trophies, glitz, and a cinematic highlights reel, to say that Kane is an overrated footballer. If anything the opposite is true. Kane is underrated, his scoring feats taken for granted, his deeper gears, his supreme all-round game under-praised. He now has exactly 300 career goals: 236 for Spurs, 16 for Millwall, Orient and Leicester City and 48 for England, with 43 in his last 50 internationals.
Scroll down the Premier League list and only Sergio Agüero and Thierry Henry have a better goals-per-game record among those to reach one hundred. The difference being, both played in sublime teams surrounded by brilliant footballers. Whereas Kane has only ever played regularly for those notorious flakes and flunkers England and Spurs, teams that are to some extent defined by their lack of success. His entire first-team career has been spent without an adequate back-up striker, so he has been out there twanging his ankle, rushing back, carrying that burden alone. His record swimming against that tide is extraordinary.
Even this season, which has seen two brand new managers and Kane either distracted by the summer’s drama or roving weirdly around the pitch, he has still somehow crept up to 21 goals, most of them sneaky, box-ticking filler against tadpole opposition, but classic Numbers Man stuff for that. This is the other issue Kane must wrestle with. His own tactical development of the last few years is becoming a problem.
The tendency to drop into the No 10 role, to roam as a 360-degree playmaker, has confirmed that he can also moonlight as Spurs’ best midfield passer. No great shakes
in itself. But it is also a bit like using an artisan Japanese steak knife to grout the kitchen floor.
Conte has tried to reposition his best goalscorer as a cutting edge. “At the moment with us he is playing much more like a No 9,” he said after the win at Leicester, where Kane did play further forward and racked up 10 shots, a goal and an assist. But it is a vice that returns in moments of doubt, something Kane does when nothing is coming through the midfield. So Kane drops back to create because he’s better at doing this than anyone behind him.
It works at times. Against Brighton in the FA Cup he scored twice while still playing nine long forward passes from those deep pockets. But it has also become a sign of a clog in the works, as it was against Southampton where the midfield simply collapsed after half-time.
Kane should be playing in front of midfielders who make him look good, save his legs and expand his own game, not twirling about in a space more authoritative teammates would insist he vacated. It is similar to what Lionel Messi ended up doing at Barcelona, filling holes, patching up his team on the go, delaying the necessary structural work.
Conte has tried to rebalance this weakness by bringing in a greater depth of passing quality in the January window. The next six weeks will test how well he can finesse these adjustments on the hoof, and how successfully Kane can clarify his own role.
For all the horrors of that defensive display in midweek, Spurs still have a manager who has won this league and a central striker with the chops to get them into the top four. “I am super happy,” Kane announced at the turn of the year.
Wolves at home on Sunday is the next stage in a run that will test exactly how deep those feelings run.
