As many fans will be aware of, there’s an ongoing ‘joke’ of sorts around English football that Harry Kane simply doesn’t show up in the Premier League until September. The argument many fans have made is that he simply can’t be bothered to start performing in the opening month of the campaign, and we’re here to analyse whether or not that’s actually the case.
We’ll kick things off by looking into the actual facts behind the statistic, starting off with the 2014/15 season which is when the Englishman really started to hit a solid run of form (and by that we mean he started smashing in 20 league goals every year).
The opponents in August for Spurs were West Ham, Queens Park Rangers and Liverpool. In the first game against the Hammers our local lad Harry was able to set up the winner for Eric Dier in injury time, showing that he was starting to embed himself into the culture of top flight football quite nicely.
He was a relative unknown in the other two games but he did manage to score in both legs of his side’s Europa League play-off, which leads us to believe that this was more about easing Harry into the system that the club was trying to implement more than anything else. That makes sense, especially considering he took until November to actually get himself off the mark.
When you fast forward to 2015/16 you could argue that there was a tough schedule to contend with, as Manchester United, Stoke, Leicester and Everton were all on the cards for Spurs. Still, when you go on a 748-minute drought you know that there’s something wrong beyond the obvious reasons.
Kane was handed the iconic number 10 shirt, which he claimed was done in order to allow him to become “a club legend”. Perhaps that pressure in addition to his overachievements of the previous season started to get to the youngster, which adds a mental element into these analysis proceedings.
In terms of 2016/17, it legitimately started to seem like there was a curse at play because Harry had already become one of the club’s biggest stars of the last few decades by that point. Everton, Palace and Liverpool were three games in which they probably would’ve anticipated a big time performance – but again Kane failed to deliver.
With the captain's armband now on his shoulder perhaps the weight of having to ‘lead’ the team was too much to handle, but it’s starting to sound like we’re making excuses for him above everything else.
Last weekend’s game against Newcastle proved that it’s not so much about the final product, but instead, it’s about his mentality. You see, Kane knows that once he’s gotten into the swing of things he can tear any defence in the league apart, meaning that starting off slow isn’t exactly something he’s going to worry about all that much.
As the years have gone on the expectations have risen and Harry seems to have realised that the players around him are exceptionally talented. As such he doesn’t need to get into that next gear immediately because pushing himself too hard could lead to another injury.
That’s not necessarily a knock on Kane because he’s one of the leading figures in the whole division right now, and he can still take Spurs towards a title challenge, but perhaps it’s something to think about.
