Former Spurs star Jermaine Jenas has admitted that he did not expect Harry Kane to have such a successful career when he first saw him during his younger days.
Jenas, now a well-respected pundit, played for the likes of Newcastle United, Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa during his Premier League career, and he was in N17 when Kane was just breaking through the ranks.
Harry Kane ended his 19-year-long association with the North London club when he joined Bayern Munich in the summer for a reported fee of £100m.
He has had a sensational start to life in Germany, netting 21 goals and providing seven assists in just 16 appearances across all competitions. (Transfermarkt)
Kane is a Tottenham Hotspur legend in every right and is the club’s leading goalscorer. He has scored 278 goals and provided 64 assists in 430 appearances for the North London club. (Transfermarkt)
Things weren’t always rosy for the English superstar during the formative years of his career though, as he spent many seasons out on loan at clubs like Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich City and Leicester City before finally making the cut at Tottenham.
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Jenas did not see Harry Kane’s stardom coming
Speaking on talkSPORT Drive with Andy Goldstein, Jenas revealed that he thought Harry Kane was going to be more like Teddy Sheringham and felt he was not athletic enough as a striker.
He said: “If you watched Harry when he was at Spurs, playing under Mourinho and playing under Conte, they played very deep as a team. So they would suck teams onto them and Harry would drop into the little pockets of space, which as a kid, is how he used to play when he’d come and train with us in the first team.
“Everybody thought he was going to be like Teddy Sheringham and then Mauricio (Pochettino) turned him into more of an athlete and he would run in behind.
“When I was at Tottenham and he was probably 16 or 17 coming through the ranks with the likes of Andros Townsend, Danny Rose and Jake Livermore and so on.”
Jermaine Jenas admitted that when he first saw Harry Kane train, he felt that the Englishman did not have it in him to cut it at the highest level of the game. He had no qualms in admitting that he had been proven wrong though.
He added: “No, but this is part of Harry’s brilliance. He’s diligent, he works harder than the next and he’s driven by everybody who has told him he’s not good enough, essentially.
“That’s what he had for the early parts of his career and every now and then you’d see that he was working harder or working on his finishing and spending time speaking to Robbie Keane and Jermaine Defoe and getting information and putting into practice.
“Then it was like, right, he’s now got the make-up to do what he needs to do but from an athletic point of view he wasn’t as quick as he needed to be and wasn’t as strong or sharp as he needed to be, he just had a hunger to score goals.
“The rest was put together by Tim Sherwood, who played a massive part in his early development and then Mauricio probably took that on to another level.”
Spurs Web Opinion
Harry Kane has been one of the best players the Premier League has seen in the past 10 years and we can consider ourselves lucky that it came in a Tottenham shirt.
We trusted him and backed him at a time when everyone thought he did not have it in him to succeed at the highest level and nineteen years later, we managed to sell him on for a huge fee.
The doors of Tottenham will always be open to Harry Kane but that is a subject for the future. Right now, we can always be grateful for everything that he has done for us.
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