https://www.independent.co.uk/sport...ino-latest-future-jonathan-liew-a9088981.html
KANE TACKLES ATTEMPTED PER 90 MINUTES, BY SEASON
- 2013-14 - 1.6
- 2014-15 - 1.6
- 2015-16 - 1.8
- 2016-17 - 1.1
- 2017-18 - 0.8
- 2018-19 - 0.9
- 2019-20 - 0.3
So okay, Harry is tackling less often these days. Not that much of a surprise considering the ankle injuries he's sustained over recent seasons.
But read on:
It was an opening that could have been tailor-made for
Harry Kane. The 198th North London derby was in its dying minutes, and in a broken, scrappy climax
Giovani Lo Celso had won the ball on the Tottenham right and was advancing diagonally towards the edge of the penalty area. With
Arsenal stretched, it was the perfect opportunity for a little reverse ball into the path of Kane for a famous Tottenham winner.
Except Kane wasn’t making the run. In fact, he wasn’t making any sort of run at all. When Lo Celso won the ball, Kane was close to him in the right channel, but instead of bursting into the area in anticipation of the pass, he lurched forward at barely higher than walking pace: chest heaving, legs heavy, the efforts of the previous 80 minutes having left him utterly exhausted.
And to watch Kane in the last half-hour of Sunday’s game was to glimpse a curiously bathetic performance, the sight of one of the
Premier League’s most dynamic players reduced to a weary, trundling husk: unable to summon the energy to show for the ball, win the ball, or even do very much with the ball once he got it. At one point he went 15 minutes without a single touch. Late on, he knocked the ball promisingly past Granit Xhaka, realised he had neither the pace nor the inclination to chase it, and simply crumpled to the turf and accepted the foul.
A couple of minutes later, deep into injury time, came the moment that would ensure his face would be splattered all over the following morning’s back pages. With Tottenham on the attack, he took the ball into the area, considered trying to beat Sokratis, but instead simply got his body in between the defender and the ball, stopped abruptly, and allowed Sokratis to clatter into the back of him.
It wasn’t a dive, per se. There was very definitely contact between Sokratis and Kane. But it was a contact that Kane himself had induced, a sort of footballing brake test, a dastardly little trick with which he had doubtless won countless fouls in the past. And it was in large part, a course of action forced upon him by his own fatigue, his inability to do anything other than seek the contact and crumple gratefully to the turf.
The suggestion he was way too knackered after 80 minutes on Sunday to summons up anything more than a stroll, on the face of it that is very worrying.
My only thought is that Poch is renowned for pushing his players to the limits in training at the start of the season, the idea being to build their strength so they can outlast the opposition in the latter stages. We are generally known for being slow starters because of the rigours of our early season regime.
On top of that we also know that Kane is one of the last to leave the training field. Let's hope that's what this is really about, and nothing more.