It was the season’s standout striking performance. Harry Kane
had a wonderful vantage point, too. He was sat in the padded seats at
the Etihad Stadium, in the sunshine near the halfway line, when Sergio Aguero became the only player in the 2014-15 Premier League campaign to score four goals in a game. Aguero 4 Tottenham 1.
Kane is Tottenham’s top scorer now. In October he was the midweek man,
the Europa League expert, the Saturday and Sunday substitute. Forget
Aguero, he ranked below Roberto Soldado and Emmanuel Adebayor then. Or
he did for Mauricio Pochettino, anyway.
Not now. Now, Kane and
Aguero are going head-to-head. Not just on Sunday either. They are
rivals for the Golden Boot, with the City man edging ahead courtesy of
the goal Brad Guzan gift-wrapped for him on Saturday.
But if the World Cup finalist has the edge there, the former Leyton Orient loanee has already chalked up one triumph.
Kane has kept Aguero out of the side. Not an actual team, admittedly,
but one constructed by their peers. When the PFA Team of the Year was
named, Kane was in it. As usual, Aguero, who has never got the seal of
approval from his fellow professionals, wasn’t. While the PFA do not
disclose how others fared in the polls, the chances are that the City
striker would have been on the imaginary bench.
Chalk it up to
English football’s newest phenomena - Kanemania - or the power of
momentum if you like, but the likeable local came from obscurity to
out-perform a striking superstar in recent months.
It is worth
remembering how improbable that was. When Aguero scored the most famous
goal in City’s history to deliver the Premier League title in May 2012,
Kane was just concluding a loan spell at Millwall. The Argentine was
touted for greatness at such an early age that Atletico Madrid had paid
€23 million for him before he turned 18. Kane’s only senior football at
the same stage of his career had come for Leyton Orient.
Now
hurricane Harry Kane has blown into discussions about the game’s great
marksmen. Some of the suggestions he will follow Luka Modric and Gareth
Bale on the increasingly well-trodden path from White Hart Lane to Real
Madrid are light-hearted reflections on his seemingly inexorable,
unstoppable rise. Yet the truth is that Tottenham have proved a selling
club, albeit only when Daniel Levy can command the biggest of prices.
It is only natural that Kane’s achievements have attracted attention.
He has become the first player to score 30 goals in a season for
Tottenham since Gary Lineker. Bale, Adebayor, Jermain Defoe, Robbie
Keane, Teddy Sheringham, even Jurgen Klinsmann: none of them managed
such a feat.
Kane has already provided himself with a
challenge: to ensure the extraordinary becomes ordinary, to prove a
wonderful season is not a one-off, or, to put it another way, to show he
is the equal of Aguero, a player whose class is evident every season.
Though not for the whole of every season. Aguero had barely joined City
when a spate of stories from Spain suggested the former Atletico man
could become Real’s next Galactico. There have been suggestions, too,
that Barcelona wanted him.
And perhaps, were his calves,
hamstrings and knees not so fragile, he might have joined the talent
drain to Spain. Instead, since he scored 30 goals in 48 games in his
debut campaign in England, his years have been interrupted. He has never
had a Luis Suarez season: one that catapulted him to the Golden Boot,
the Player of the Year award and the multi-million pound move to the
Champions League favourites.
Instead, Aguero is the specialist
at superb scoring spurts: 25 goals in 23 games last season were followed
by injury and another 16 in 14 outings - including the quartet against
Tottenham - have again been punctuated by a spell on the sidelines. He
has only really regained his sharpness in a recent burst of four goals
in three games, ending a 564-minute drought.
Aguero had scored
nine league goals this season before Kane was given the chance to get
his first. Now they are neck and neck, the player with pedigree and the
one with potential.
Aguero is the sleeker and the speedier, the
man whose laser-guided finishes arrow into the corners of the nets.
Kane is the great enthusiast, the willing runner who seemingly can
barely believe his own success. He is five years Aguero’s junior. His
prospects have changed dramatically in the last six months.
But
the Argentine has touched heights that appear out of reach even for a
specialist at defying expectations such as Kane. He has scored the goal
that won the Premier League, a hat-trick against Bayern Munich and he
has performed well with remarkable regularity in the Manchester derby.
Aguero has been a smiling assassin on a major stage. He represents a
role model to Kane, even as the spectator turned scorer looks to claim a
famous scalp in the battle for the Golden Boot.