Invisible man casts shadow over opener
Hsupporters make a pariah of Kane as former hero remains stuck between first love and the riches of Guardiola’s project
In the giddy haze of a late summer’s afternoon, it felt as if Tottenham fans were already content to cut Harry Kane adrift. As Son Heung-min donned the robes of talisman with seamless grace, his cleverly taken winner bursting Manchester City’s bubble, supporters sore at their beloved striker’s intention to leave could not help but crow at his absence. They asked whether he was watching, their deserved victory over the champions fortifying their belief that they no longer needed him. Such is the price to be paid for jilting your first love so publicly: the transformation from club hero to has-been can happen in a heartbeat.
Even amid the euphoria of this opening win, the Kane saga brought a bitter subtext. On such an occasion, he should have been feted as a returning conqueror, optimism for the season to come mingling with memories of how, just five weeks earlier, he had led his country to a first major final for 55 years. Instead, he was rendered a pariah. “Whatever happens, we’ll give it absolutely everything,” ran an official Tottenham message for this match, above drawings of Son, Hugo Lloris and Pierre-emile Hojbjerg. Kane was excised from the picture altogether. For all parties, it was the strangest state of affairs. As 58,000 people savoured the final match of a free-scoring and wonderfully cathartic weekend of football, the England captain remained frozen out in the shadows.
It is an age-old truth of the workplace: the moment you suggest that your ambitions lie elsewhere is the moment you risk a potentially irrevocable rupture. Kane imagined, perhaps naively, that he would receive more generous treatment, that his relationship with the club he had served from the age of 16 would never descend into an icy stand-off. It was, on this evidence, a miscalculation: by fluttering his eyelashes at City, Kane has alienated fans who once deemed him indispensable.
His tilt at the Elysian fields of the Etihad offers a grim reflection of the power structures of the modern game. City arrived here boasting the most expensive match-day squad assembled in Premier League history, their 20 players representing a combined value of £930million. And yet they lost, a riddle to which the only apparent answer was to spend another £127million on the one commodity they lacked, a dependable centre-forward.
For all the staggering sums of money, nobody’s reputation is emerging enriched from this episode. Kane owed his place in fans’ affections to the sense that he was that precious species, the one-club
man. But if even Lionel Messi can leave Barcelona for the blandishments of Paris St-germain, only a fool would retain any faith in perfect endings. Kane has had his head turned by City’s limitless wealth, and there is little hope, judging by his negotiating position, of it being turned back again.
This was an equally chastening experience for Pep Guardiola. While he has earned the right to be acclaimed as the greatest tactical sophisticate of his generation, the scale of City’s spending fuels arguments that he is becoming a chequebook manager. Here he unleashed Jack Grealish, the £100 million man with the honour of inheriting Sergio Aguero’s No10 shirt. His was hardly a debut to assuage the doubts. There were a few cultured first touches, a few deft flick-ons, but little else. Grealish, to his credit, regards his status as the most expensive British player as an honour, but it can also be a cross to bear.
City fielded £550 million of talent in their starting XI and left another £380 million on the bench. Theirs is an eye-wateringly lavish project, but still it feels incomplete, without the goals that Aguero would deliver by the dozen. It falls to Kane to furnish the missing piece. It is a pact of mutual convenience: where City need his lethal instincts, he requires the reassurance he will not wind up a stellar career without a trophy.
This was always destined to be a fraught occasion for Kane, a meeting between the club who loved him unconditionally and the suitors desperate to prise him away. For all that City underwhelmed, his decision is unlikely to have been swayed. One glance at Tottenham’s next home game, a Europa Conference League qualifier against Portugal’s Pacos de Ferreira, was a reminder of the uphill struggle his boyhood club face to reach City’s level regularly.
There could be no doubt, though, that they humbled Guardiola’s modern-day Harlem Globetrotters here. Raheem Sterling was firmly in the pocket of 22-year-old Japhet Tanganga, while Grealish kept running headlong into the immovable obstacle of Lucas Moura. At the centre of it all was Son who, contrary to theories that he and Kane were interdependent, proved he could just as easily make it on his own. His was a second-half strike to make these fans’ schadenfreude complete. For on the same day they renounced Kane, their former idol, they toasted the coronation of the Son king.