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It’s difficult to understand how heavy one piece of fabric wrapped around a bicep can feel. But to describe a captain’s armband in such a way would be to ignore its prestige, its importance, its history, the team and the people it represents.
To captain any football team or club is a great honour – even at the most basic level, its a sign of uttermost respect from your peers – however to captain your country is a different category altogether. With that comes not only the pressure to perform but also distractions; media duties, maintaining a positive public profile amid heavy national interest, serving as a role model and of course, the requirement of leadership. It’s not a job for everybody, even if you are one of the best in the world.
Harry Kane certainly falls under that label. Forget about him being the best striker around – his level of goalscoring is only a shade shy of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi’s. He’s one of the best players around irrespective of position and if you’re examining his attributes on paper, the Tottenham star is everything a captain should be.
He leads through example in the same way as David Beckham, but he doesn’t come with all the baggage and dangers of super-stardom – his full focus is on football with no time for the limelight. But Kane can be aggressive and passionate too, and perhaps most importantly he has the ability and the right role in the team to deliver in the big moments. At the World Cup, his composure from the spot was vital to England’s push to the semi-finals.
And yet, even a player of Kane’s ability can find the captaincy tough to deal with, a little heavier than expected, a little more overawing than inspiring. That’s what the statistics suggest, at least at club level.
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Incredibly, Tottenham’s surprise defeat to Watford on Sunday was the seventh time Kane’s failed to score from the eight occasions he’s worn the armband for the north London club in the Premier League and perhaps even more incredibly, it was the sixth time Spurs have failed to win – their victory-rate with the centre-forward as captain is a miserly 25%. For a team that have been machine-like winners throughout most of Mauricio Pochettino’s tutelage, and for a goalscorer whose strike-rate is closer to one-in-one than one-in-two, that can’t be a mere coincidence.
In fairness, not every occasion that Kane’s captained Spurs has been a disaster. In the FA Cup, he’s captained Spurs seven times and produced a return of six goals. However, the quality of the opposition must be taken into account here, not to mention the fact those strikes were scored in just three of those games. A hat-trick over Fulham, back when they were in the Championship, and a brace over AFC Wimbledon is juxtaposed by scoreless encounters as captain with Manchester United in last season’s FA Cup semi-final and even Crystal Palace.
And it’s a similar story with Kane’s England captaincy too, which will be tested once again this weekend when the Three Lions host Spain in the Nations League. On the surface, the armband hasn’t affected Kane’s potency in the slightest – averaging better than a goal per-game, with 12 in 11 appearances, is a simply phenomenal record at international level. But scratch a little deeper and it’s difficult not to question how impressive that return actually is.
After all, while Kane left Russia with the Golden Boot, it was arguably the World Cup’s least impressive Golden Boot of all time – a hat-trick against Panama, possibly the least talented team involved in this year’s competition, three penalties in total, two six-yard-box poaches against another modestly-equipped country in Tunisia and of course the very forgettable inadvertent deflection of a wayward Ruben Loftus-Cheek shot.
You can’t contest the history books; Kane was the 2018 World Cup’s top scorer. But his actual level of performance only became more concerning the longer the competition went on, and to describe it as a month of vintage Kane would be pure fallacy.
Should Kane be England captain? Let us know by voting below…
There is always a debate too, over whether strikers really should be given the armband in any case. They’re by design selfish players, at least on the most part, so asking them to take responsibility for the rest of the team would seem to contradict that psyche – their full focus, at all times, should be how to find the back of the net.
Likewise, strikers are never quite in the position to see or be involved in everything that’s going on, at least not in the same way as centre-backs or central midfielders. You want a captain at the thick end of the action, always chirping in the referee’s ear, sticking up for his team-mates and getting them out of trouble when needed. When you have to jog 20 or 30 yards to represent the armband in every incident, it must become a little taxing – and your presence must become a little less effective.
Perhaps we’re being harsh on Kane. He is, after all, just 25 years of age and part of teams at both club and international level that contain plenty of even younger team-mates. That’s a lot of responsibility on his shoulders, before he’s even fully matured, and not much support either. Being a captain takes leadership but also the experience to handle difficult situations and high expectations. Kane, for all his brilliance as a footballer, maybe just isn’t quite at that level as a captain yet.
Should Pochettino keep the armband from Kane in the future? Let us know by voting below…
