“NEWS on Harry we don’t have and, if you ask me every time we come here, the answer will be the same,” Jose Mourinho said. “We expect him to be out until mid-April, end of April, May, next season, I don’t know.”
Which at face value looks like a manager fed up with the media’s focus on an absent player that he worries is distracting from the players who are available to him. Except this is Mourinho, and so nothing ever has a face value. He knows that by hinting Harry Kane may miss the Euros he will ensure that Kane and his injury remain a live topic – and that suits him, because it offers an easy excuse for Tottenham’s poor form and because it puts pressure on Daniel Levy, the Spurs chairman, to sign a new striker.
And this being Mourinho, he knows exactly which buttons to press. This is a very good England team. England will play three group games at Euro 2020 at Wembley and, if they get there, the semi-final and the final. They got to the semi-final of the World Cup two years ago and, if anything, they’ve improved since then. Here is youth and dynamism and excitement about England for the first time in a long time. There is a genuine and well-founded belief that they could actually win a tournament.
But if Kane is not there, those chances are diminished. He won the Golden Boot at the last World Cup. He is a brutally reliable penalty taker. He is the captain, a regular source of goals. He is a leader, not in the screaming blood and thunder mode of a John Terry or a Tony Adams, but through example. There is a humility to him that suits the mood of Gareth Southgate’s England. He has the game intelligence to drop deep to make space for Raheem Sterling and either Jadon Sancho or Marcus Rashford surging outside him. He is not just an extremely gifted player, he is the right player for the team around him.
#thfc Told Kane still expects to be back in training in early April, barring any unforeseen setbacks, despite Mourinho's suggestion yesterday that he could miss Euro 2020. At this stage, it's roughly a 12-week injury.
— Dan Kilpatrick (@Dan_KP) January 14, 2020
In those few worlds, Mourinho conjured the ghosts of tournaments past, of the metatarsals that, along with everything else, undermined the so-called Golden Generation. Memories of David Beckham in 2002 and Wayne Rooney in 2006 – or of Kevin Keegan and Trevor Brooking in 1982, for that matter – should be enough to urge caution: there is no sense taking a player to a tournament if he is not able to contribute. Kane’s past history suggests he often returns earlier than expected from injury (it’s certainly easy to imagine him as being diligent with the recovery work) but that he then takes time to get back to his best form – which in a sense is the most dangerous combination for Southgate: the temptation to pick Kane will be strong but he might not then be anywhere near his best.
There are alternatives. Sterling could be used as a central forward, although that would restrict the aerial threat England offer. Rashford could be switched into the centre, although for both Manchester United and England, he always looks at his most dangerous cutting in from the left. Rashford is joint second-top scorer in the league this season, one of three Englishmen in the top four of that list.
Jamie Vardy tops it, but he is 33 and has retired from international football. Then there’s Danny Ings, who is enjoying a remarkable season. One behind Ings and Rashford is Tammy Abraham. Callum Wilson, who was Kane’s deputy at the Nations League last summer, has faded with Bournemouth. Abraham and Ings both have similar stats to Kane. Abraham dribbles less than the other two, while Ings wins fewer aerials, although both those details can be explained by how Chelsea and Southampton play. Ings’s pass completion rate is notably lower than either Kane or Abraham, but then he is often left isolated. He also, notably, loses the ball rather less than the other two.
But the problem any replacement for Kane has is that they cannot compete with his all-round game. Kane can be a target man and he can play deep, almost as a number 9. He has an astonishing capacity for conjuring opportunities from nothing. There is a game awareness about Kane that is very hard to express in stats. Plus there is the fact that the front three of Rashford, Kane and Sterling is proven, and has worked together regularly.
It’s probably two decades since England had such an array of attacking options but Kane still offers more than any of the others. If this is, at last, to be England’s summer, the hope has to be that Mourinho is mischief-making and that the captain will return in time to get back to form for the Euros.
