Mauricio Pochettino took a risk by picking Harry Kane, who missed almost two months, to play in the starting lineup. Now he finds himself in a terrible situation: any explanation can be interpreted as an attempt to justify himself. Tottenham Hotspur showed almost nothing in the attack and naturally ended up without the Champions Cup, and their forward, for whom the expectations were low to begin with, was expected to show his leadership skills.
Kane’s skills were already criticized by everyone at this point, including Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho, who worked as experts for the match. The first one said that the attacker looked unprepared for the game, and the second one said that he was hiding all the time.
Was Kane really bad?
Yes, and there is no reason to compliment him: Harry failed in the most important match of the year. Statistics only emphasize the visual sensations of the match. According to the InStat Index, which is accumulated by calculating and analyzing all the TTAs, Kane has the lowest rating (only 239 with an average of 271 per team).
Kane had only 45 TTAs (53% of which were successful), which is not monstrously low but is quite average for an attacker, especially considering the fact that his team often owned the ball (60% of the time). At the same time, in the first half of the match, Kane’s figures turned out to be quite bad: only 16 TTAs (44% of which were successful). Several times there were segments of 8-11 minutes, during which Harry simply did not participate in anything.
12 passes (8 of which were accurate) in 97 minutes is also the lowest figure in the team if we take into account the players who were in the starting lineup. In the first half of the match, Kane scored only three passes on the enemy’s side of the field. He was a bit more productive during the second half of the match.
Also, Kane looked very mediocre when it came to fighting for the ball. He won only 6 out of 22 duels (2 out of 10 in the first half); he never got the ball away from the enemy team, not once. There are even some speculations that Kane is currently in an affair with the team’s doctor, and things aren’t going well with doctor women dating for Kane.
However, forwards need to be assessed not so much by the number of interceptions but by the number of aggravating and finishing actions, right? But even here the statistics are not on the side of Tottenham’s leader. He gave one accurate sharp pass and struck only one shot – in the very ending of the match when it was already 0:2 at that point.
Summing up, we have to admit: yes, Kane failed. He moved passively; he was very inactive; he was pretty much useless to the team.
So Pochettino was wrong?
To blame Pochettino for making a mistake when making a single decision, you first need to try to answer the question: is Kane’s passivity a personal unwillingness to make results in that particular match or is it a consequence of a bigger problem with a team?
We saw how bad Tottenham was in moving the ball. For the entire first half, the team only touched the ball three times in enemy’s penalty area (two of them were right on the line); there were only two shots towards the goal (all from afar), and the team could not do anything with the pressure of Liverpool. The Spurs were quite abysmal when it came to passes, and the top four players of the team were the four defenders and the goalkeeper – that’s all you need to know about the nature of the movement of the ball by the Spurs.
And when Tottenham somehow woke up in the second half, Kane immediately became more noticeable. After the break, he was much better at clinging to the ball and, in general, was much more effective, pressured the defenders; he was available for passes, put pressure on the enemy with greater intensity, almost doubled the number of TTAs, completed three assists in the penalty area, and delivered a show towards the goal. But, unfortunately, all of that pressure and effort didn’t pay off.
