Kane breaks record
Dwight Yorke, Andy Cole, Les Ferdinand, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Didier Drogba, Fernando Torres. Just a handful of the strikers who scored fewer Premier League hat-tricks in their entire career, than Harry Kane managed in 2017 alone.
It’s not an exclusive pool. We could’ve plucked any number of net-plundering behemoths from the modern era. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Teddy Sherignham, Ian Wright— take your pick.
You’d actually save time by noting that only five players have hit more trebles in England’s top flight, than Kane has in the past twelve months. And all five of them are among the top eight goal scorers in Premier League history.
A staggering return from Chingford’s deadliest marksman.
It’s so easy to let the flood of recent Harry Kane achievements wash over you. The whole ‘calendar year’ benchmark feels like a fairly contemporary phenomena and is often met with rolled eyes. I’m sure May was the month Alan Shearer tallied up his personal milestones. But if anything indicates that 2017 has been annus mirabilis for Kane—the ‘miraculous year’—it’s those type of statistics. Ones that position him alongside genuine masters in the art of goal-scoring.
The Boxing Day demolition of Southampton was as good an example as any of Kane’s rapacious knack of finding the net.
The few remaining doubters will point to the fact that two of the goals were close range tap-ins. But the hat-trick could so easily have been comprised differently.
An angled dink that rose just too high over Fraser Forster’s crossbar at the end of the first-half. The over-the-shoulder volley that scorched inches wide, following a long floated diagonal ball from Danny Rose. On another day, either of those chances would’ve met their natural end.
As it goes, unlike a visit to best10casinosonline.co.uk, the finishes were fairly routine for Kane. Even his third, a deft scoop past a dithering Forster, had a sense of inevitability about it. The kind of unshakable aura you create having scored 38 goals in your last 35 games. Once he’d wriggled free of his marker and was closing in on the goalkeeper, you could pretty well guess what might happen next.
Naturally, as a consequence of Harry’s superhuman feats, talk has switched to his future at Spurs. You don’t post figures in the same ballpark as Europe’s finest forwards without someone noticing.
Kane sits above Lewandowski, Cavani, Messi and Ronaldo as the year’s most prolific striker and one thing they all have in common is that they’re at truly elite clubs. Major trophies tend to gravitate towards them; titles to sit alongside their individual awards.
‘I think it’s inevitable they’ll come calling,’ said Alan Shearer in the aftermath of Kane’s goal jamboree at St Mary’s. ‘They’ being the ominous specter of Real Madrid, who have a history of this type of thing.
The good news for Spurs is that Kane genuinely appears to like playing for his local club. The only sure fire way of making sure he remains faithful, is to make good on the promise to challenge for the game’s biggest honours—hell, maybe even win something. And for heaven’s sake pay the man. Pay him everything. Give him all the money. Every bit. Then at least we can say we tried.
God damn it, at least we did that.
