Filling the void...
Harry Kane covered a multitude of failures at Spurs.
It’s easy to forget how much a world-class player really does paper up the cracks.
We’ve seen it time and time again, yet when a top-level player leaves a club, it’s always stark just how much of a miss they can be.
The very best teams (or the very wealthiest) can get by. And those clubs that are supremely well run, but where expectations are generally not the highest, are also adept at finding replacements who are well-suited to the system and the model. Data often plays a big part.
But for those clubs trying to break the glass ceiling. Those clubs that have fanbases that expect some form of (relative) success, losing a star name really can be a hammer blow, especially if the approach to replacing them lacks any form of cohesion.
See West Ham with Declan Rice. See Everton with Romelu Lukaku. And, see Tottenham with Harry Kane.
Don’t get me wrong, there can still be a period where all seems well. In the season after Rice left West Ham for Arsenal, the Hammers finished ninth under the tutelage of David Moyes, and reached a Europa League quarter-final. But once they tried to develop their playing style and move away from Moyes, the holes that Rice filled in the team became clear.
The season after Everton sold Lukaku, Ronald Koeman was dismissed by November and Sam Allardyce was soon in. Survival football, but the club were never really in relegation trouble that campaign. In fact, they finished eighth, as they did the season after, but as they tried to builld, and made mistakes while doing so, the value of a reliable goalscorer became ever the more apparent.
And that brings us to one of the best goalscorers to grace English football.
It would be unfair to say Kane just papered over cracks at Tottenham. Under Mauricio Pochettino, Spurs were a fine team. Son Heung-min, Christian Eriksen, Moussa Dembele, Dele Alli, Jan Vertonghen, Hugo Lloris… These were top-quality operators.
But at the spearhead of it all was Kane, and without Kane’s reliable source of goals, who knows whether Pochettino would have been given the time to truly shape that team.
