Harry Kane

A quick summary of his Spurs career thus far...
i.) Break into the first team ☑️
ii.) Establish himself in the first team ☑️
iii.) International call-up ☑️
iv.) Nuisance paper talk of a move to Man Utd ☑️
v.) Lead Spurs into the Champions League ☑️
vi.) Earn the Golden Boot ☑️

 

Safe to say I'm a bigger fan of him now...

Pretty glad we kept hold of him too

 

you know i remember saying this and i thought id got away with it!

 

Lol, just read this thread. How things change eh?

Sad not to see Notso and Tots on here anymore, too.

 

I wonder if there'll be a similar thread in two or three years time... Onomah? Oduwa? CCV? KWP? Edwards? Obika? Wait what...

 

I hope the mods are quietly shuffling the Tom Carroll threads into the archive section...

 

You could start an Academy "where are they now" article ??
Parrett, Luongo, Obika, Fryers, McEvoy etc.

Knowing the attrition rate for hopefuls would be interesting
(if the Academy doesn't already have stats and tell newbies the harsh truth on day 1) .

 

I often think these lads get too much money at far too young an age and it impacts on their desire, their hunger to make it.

As an example, we have recently been rejected by an 18 year old because we would not match his current wages. He is being paid £8k per week by a fellow PL club. Ridiculous.

 

Deferred gratification is something that is needed for these kids.

Firstly, they don't have the life maturity to deal with the levels of their weekly wages,
especially when they have not contributed to their club (promotion, titles etc) to that point.
Secondly their main working lifetime is short, so they should be putting nearly all of it
away and spending little now, because they will need it later.

 

Crazy isn't it.

Two of my best mates used to be very close with Ryan Mason as they went to the same school and about 5 or 6 years ago (during his Yeovil loan period I think) they said at the time that he was earning around £4k a week. Unbelievable when you consider he hadn't even kicked a Premier League football yet was picking up roughly £16k a month!

 

Youth players have always been distracted by the finer things in life, though.
"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered." - George Best

They've got more of it now and they're thrown into the public eye even quicker, but I think that the distractions will always be there.
Ferguson seemed to know which youngsters would get their heads down and which would lose them, for the most part.
That's the key to it and I think that players like Kane will always be looking for the next mountain to climb.
Anything that he does never seems to be enough for him, which is a wonderful attitude but will probably see him move on eventually.

 

One thing about Kane that stand out is that, of his generation of academy players, he didn't really have the pressure of expectation thrust upon him before he'd kicked a ball in earnest: Caulker was being spoken of as filling Ledders' boots, Townsend was being spoken of as walking out of our academy and becoming as good as Bale, Carroll was being spoken of as a homegrown Modric - and even when he was showing glimpses of what was to come when on loan at Millwall back in 2012 he wasn't spoken of as the striker who would one day lead us to glory, Coulibaly was.

 

Yeah but Kane had the daunting task of replacing our well known player, A Striker, remember him?

 

Him and Coulibaly were in the same boat, yet Coulibaly was the one with the hype - he was being dubbed "the new Drogba" when we signed him, after all.

 

Coulibaly has just been released by Peterborough.

 

You could argue that the Academy were under pressure to produce a decent striker ASAP.
By 2012-13 the house had been bet on Adebayor continuing to repeat his loan season form.
That + the perennial NEW STRIKER saga =

The U21 class of 2012-13 was Obika and Kane. One out of two ain't bad it seems.

 

Interesting

 

I held my hands up and admitted I was wrong a good while back lol

 

Hat trick on Saturday please Harry.

 

To be fair, he looked like he was destined to be loaned out to a dozen clubs before signing for Brentford, then 12 months later getting a free to Gillingham