'Harry came to see me' - Pochettino names turning point in Kane's career
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‘Harry came to see me’ – Pochettino names turning point in Kane’s career

Seb Jenkins
Seb Jenkins

Mauricio Pochettino has claimed that the turning point in Harry Kane’s career came just a few weeks after the Argentine joined Tottenham as the club’s new head coach. 

Emmanuel Adebayor and Roberto Soldado were the two first-team strikers at the club and 20-year-old Harry Kane was fresh off the back of another somewhat disappointing loan spell.

Harry Kane
(Photo by Tottenham Hotspur FC/Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)

But Pochettino has revealed that Harry came to see him and the Spurs coaching staff to make the argument that he deserved to be getting more minutes on the pitch, to which Mauricio respectfully disagreed.

The coaches apparently showed Kane all the stats and video clips to reinforce their opinion that, while he was on the right path, he was not yet ready to start games ahead of experienced players.

Of course, we all know how the story ended. Kane clearly went away and worked on that stuff and eventually displaced Soldado as Tottenham’s main man up front, and hasn’t looked back since.

Pochettino wrote in his column for The Athletic: ‘One of the turning points in Harry Kane’s career came a few weeks into my first season as Tottenham manager.

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‘I had started with Emmanuel Adebayor and Roberto Soldado as our two first-choice strikers — great players, senior players, and deserving of respect. Harry was only starting in the Europa League.
‘On September 18, we played at Partizan Belgrade, but Harry struggled, and we drew 0-0. Three days later, when we played West Bromwich Albion in the Premier League, I did not even put him on the bench.
‘That week, Harry came to see me and my coaching staff. He thought he deserved to play more.
We showed Harry, with video clips and with stats, that he was wrong. We showed him running stats, the positioning of shots, everything that we could find. Because if a player has played poorly, it’s important for them to realise why we as coaches think they have.
‘We had to show Harry he still needed to improve in different areas. He was heading in the right direction, but he still needed to wait, and to prove to us he was better than his teammates, and that he deserved to start.
‘He needed to prove we could trust him like we trusted the more experienced strikers. It was a really tough conversation, but it was also a really good conversation.’
Spurs Web Opinion:
This is such an interesting insight that I haven’t seen Pochettino talk about before. You can tell that Kane has always had that hunger to play, but he was clearly a little lost at 20 years old and Pochettino and his staff were the perfect people to coach him to the next level.

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