You can compare Harry Kane to two other major 21st century English footballers - David Beckham and Steven Gerrard (my next post will be a combined England men's XI and squad of the century, by the way).
The comparisons to Beckham are fairly straightforward - they went to the same school, are solid, good-natured Essex boys with an astonishing gift for ball-striking, an underrated football brain, they became England captain at a young age, stayed in the role for a long time, led by example, were unfairly pilloried for a heartbreaking World Cup exit, stayed at the club they loved for a long time before a big money move to a giant of Europe where they continued to thrive.
They both speak with a slight impediment which brought undue mockery and was misperceived to be the absence of shrewdness. They are both highly excellent, rather than brilliant, footballers. They're not willo-the-wisp magicians, but they produce countless exceptional exciting moments.
The differences are obvious too. Beckham's ridiculous good looks made him something beyond football, a true megastar, brought him into philosophical conflict, at times, with the football world. He sought stardom and still has it on a vast scale. Harry Kane is all football. We don't know much about him beyond football. He's married with kids, half-Irish, likes American football, no one's really ever said anything bad about him as a person (plenty of football fans don't like him, mind, but that's just football ...). He seems wilfully pleasantly boring (on the Spurs Amazon series from a couple of years ago, you could tell he was popular, pleasant, could be sharp-witted).
The other big difference, of course, is that David Beckham had won everything with Man Utd by the time he left, and Harry Kane has not won anything. This is where the comparison to Steven Gerrard comes in. Yes, Gerrard won plenty of cups at Liverpool, including one of enormous personal and team glory, but, playing for Liverpool, and England, Gerrard did not historically improve the performance of the club, and that is, or should be, a major check on the plaudits he receives. They won the league before, they've won the league since, they did not win the league with. They usually finished around 4th.
Kane did improve Spurs. They had their best league seasons for more than 30 years with him in the team. They reached semi-finals and finals, even the Champions League final. But they didn't win anything, and they started, in the last few years, to move further away from winning anything. I felt they should have sold him a lot earlier than they did. It was clear they had reached the limit of Kane-team potential. He scored 30 goals in a season and they still didn't win the league or anything else. You couldn't expect him to score 40 goals in a season. They needed to reshape the team in a different form, which is what is now happening.
Does it affect Harry Kane's status that he has never won anything? Yes, of course. The point of football is to win matches and then competitions. Liverpool should have won more when Gerrard was playing for them, they're Liverpool for goodness sake, Spurs should have won ... something ... when Kane was playing for them. Spurs do, historically win things, nowhere near as many as Liverpool, but more than West Ham and Leicester. And they had opportunities. The cruel current reality of the magnificent Harry Kane's record-breaking, consistently excellent career is that he has not seized the moment when the moment came. He missed chances in the 2018 World Cup semi, he started well but faded in the 2021 Euro finals, he played excellently but missed a penalty in the 2022 World Cup quarters. He didn't play well in the 2019 Champions League final or the 2021 League Cup final. However much I and others love and admire Kane, that's the stark reality.
He has gone to Bayern Munich to win things, is breaking all goalscoring records, and yet, it might still not work out. Bayern win the title every year, but this year Bayer Leverkusen also look indomitable. Bayern are one of the best teams in the Champions League, but still, the chances are they won't win it.
Harry Kane could score 60 goals this season, score a hat-trick in the deciding game of the German league season and the Champions League final, not to mention the Euros, and yet, if he misses a chance in the last minute of each which means Bayern/England don't win, it is still reasonable to see him as a player who doesn't grasp his moment. It seems almost comically fated to go that way.
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