On Sunday evening, one of the most dramatic finales to a Premier League game this season finally ended with Harry Kane scoring his 100th goal in the Premier League.
It was an achievement of some repute, and not just because he’s managed to join the 100 club faster than all but one player in the league’s history, nor because he’s managed to do it by scoring in just 63 games. It’s impressive for the way he did it at Anfield alone.Kane stepped up to take a highly controversial penalty in front of the Kop end after having missed one just minutes earlier and seen his mistake apparently punished by Mohamed Salah’s special goal at the other end. If the stakes weren’t obviously clear the first time he stepped up, they were crystal clear by the time he was taking the second.
Then there’s the fact that it wasn’t just the missed penalty earlier in the game which would have been weighing him down. Kane was simply off form, touching the ball barely enough times to get him into the double digits in terms of stats. He touched the ball fewer times than any other starter, and completed fewer passes, too.
There were one or two chances missed in a game which simply didn’t go his way, and when he was faced with a penalty which looked at the time as though it could be a winner at the end of normal time (and before all hell broke loose afterwards) it was actually little surprise he missed it.
It had looked as though he was off form. It was a sub-par performance whose problems had nothing to do with application or effort, he was quite simply unable to get it right. It happens sometimes, especially when you’re as prolific as Kane is – it would be unreasonable to expect greatness every game.
To be clear, no stats back-up any assertion that Kane was about to hit a goal drought. He had scored 12 in his last eight starts before the trip to Anfield and was only one shy of that 100 milestone, and such records are often enough to weigh on your mind in the first place.
But he hadn’t scored against Manchester United at Wembley, nor had he scored against Liverpool right up until the pressure penalty at the end. And with things not going his way I was certainly starting to wonder whether we were experiencing the first few moments of a loss of form.
Which makes me now wonder whether that penalty was actually one of the most important goals he’ll score for Tottenham.
The upshot of such a thrilling game is fairly banal. It doesn’t really matter that much to the table. Neither team lost, which means neither gained a huge advantage over the other in the race for a top four spot, and there is now quite a bunching-up between third and fifth after Chelsea’s defeat on Monday night. Indeed, even sixth place Arsenal are still in with a shout.
But it did mean a lot more than that
This is a run of fixtures where Tottenham are having to dig deep. To face Manchester United and Liverpool in successive Premier League fixtures is one thing, but to have Arsenal at the weekend and then Juventus straight after that is a cruel and unusual run of fixtures, especially for a club like Spurs, who haven’t done well in top six games of late. Throw into the mix an FA Cup replay against Newport County – which should be fine but is a potential banana skin to take as seriously as stretched resources will allow – and it’s a period where Mauricio Pochettino’s side will be revved to the max.
And that suggests that Kane’s goal might well turn out to be the most important of all the 100 top flight goals he’s scored for Spurs
Why? Because if he was to go another game without scoring, and if his side were to slump to their first defeat since mid-December away to a rampant Manchester City, then Tottenham’s momentum would have been clipped at the worst possible time. Form, too, is not like a tap that you can just turn on and off – to be a striker off form is to be struggling with a psychological and emotional issue from which it can be difficult to extract yourself.All of that is to say that had he not scored, it would at least suggest that Spurs would be in a bit of trouble this week, sweating on the current goalscoring abilities of the one player who appears to guarantee them goals.
That’s not to proclaim everything well, of course. Kane has played a full 90 minutes six times in less than a month, and all six times in a row. It would be understandable if he’s feeling tired and off form. And then there’s the question of how much that penalty will actually stop him from losing that form anyway: if the problem is deeply rooted enough, just scoring a penalty at the second attempt when the keeper dives the wrong way isn’t necessarily proof of a return to form.
But the emotion, and the importance of the goal, not to mention the psychological effect it will have, are also important factors.
This won’t be the most important game Harry Kane ever plays for Tottenham. A last-minute escape against Liverpool keeps Spurs closer to the top four than they would otherwise have been, but they’re only one point behind Chelsea today. Had he missed, they’d be just two.
But the real power of that goal might just come in stopping a terribly-timed goal drought just when Tottenham feared it most.
