Last week a German reporter brought a Bayern Munich shirt printed with Harry Kane’s name to an Ange Postecoglou press conference. Get the physio in here, we’ve got an acute case of aching sides.
Postecoglou was not amused by the famous Teutonic sense of humour and his mood will not be improved if the Manchester Evening News pull any similar stunts, but at least it brought some intrigue to the desperately dry Kane transfer narrative. It is crying out for some spice, a good old-fashioned gazumping, or Erik ten Hag opening a devastating can of warchest all over Daniel Levy’s fax machine.
This levity will not be coming from Kane himself. In Dear England, the play starring Joseph Fiennes as Gareth Southgate at the National Theatre, the Kane character provides comic relief as a monotone simpleton, a sort of football version of the talking clock. This seems harsh for England’s all-time leading scorer and most successful captain since Bobby Moore, but you can see why the caricature is tempting. For a man so famous he is unusually inscrutable. Also, and to use his favourite connecting phrase, “yeah, no, obvi’sly”, his delivery in interviews is not giving voiceover artists sleepless nights.
So who is Kane? Fans of Football Manager, the game in which retiring players come back in as youngsters with a different name as “regens”, will know. Kane is an Alan Shearer regen. Shearer was a similarly blank canvas in his playing career, known only for goals and raising his hand after scoring them. For Shearer celebrating a title by creosoting his fence, for Kane read staying at home on Fortnite drinking tea with two sugars. Without the title bit.
There have been a few more hints to Kane’s tastes in recent years, mostly on YouTube where he has cropped up on channels your children and grandchildren consider mainstream which you have likely never heard of. A year ago he joined Eric Dier and Matt Doherty to rate pizza with shouting edgelord David Portnoy on his One Bite Pizza Reviews channel. This month we have had a pleasant if very, very long 23 minutes of Kane eating progressively spicier chicken wings on the inexplicably popular Hot Ones. Sample quote: “That’s not nice.”
All quite tame, which feeds into this oddly low key summer transfer blockbuster. It is not a saga, it is barely even a haiku:
Harry Kane will go
Probably to Germany
Yeah, no, obvi’sly…
Plenty of those elusive trophies on offer at Bayern Munich, a club who won a recent pre-season friendly 27-0. At what point, you wonder, does that stop being fun? After about goal two judging by the utterly joyless highlights. Like that game, Kane to [insert new club] has lacked narrative thrust. One year left of deal, available for free next year, interest from overseas, vague sense it might be nice one day to play for a club that is not afflicted with incurable Spursyness. Good luck turning that into an Amazon Prime documentary.
Meanwhile Kane spent much of his summer holed up at Joe Lewis’ secret hideaway in the Bahamas, Tracy Island for hotshot strikers. Keeping his counsel and, as ever, giving little away. When he seemed destined to move in 2021 there was the marginally rebellious move of reporting late for training. This time he is doing it all properly. For fans of Tottenham this is good and respectful conduct. Sadly for the rest of us, with Wimbledon and the Open done and the Ashes over as a contest, it is not very entertaining.
