ScottDaYid
Vital Football Legend
I agree they wont be back, no one paying big money for a near 30 year old.
This was his last chance for a big move IMO
I agree they wont be back, no one paying big money for a near 30 year old.
This was his last chance for a big move IMO
muttley
Alert Team
So Levy gets the credit for Harry staying, but Fabio is our MDoF and is having a mare according to some.
Surely Fabio kept Harry on his watch so deserves at least equal credit?
Buying and selling is a team sport.
Also, Nuno has a big part to play moving forward. I don't want Harry on the pitch until he is going to put an equal shift in as the other 9 outfield players. I'm happy for him to leave it all out there and be subbed early if he only has 60 mins in him. What I can't tolerate is Harry playing in 3rd gear so he can last 90 mins. Every Spurs and England fan is sick of that pattern.
Surely Fabio kept Harry on his watch so deserves at least equal credit?
Buying and selling is a team sport.
Also, Nuno has a big part to play moving forward. I don't want Harry on the pitch until he is going to put an equal shift in as the other 9 outfield players. I'm happy for him to leave it all out there and be subbed early if he only has 60 mins in him. What I can't tolerate is Harry playing in 3rd gear so he can last 90 mins. Every Spurs and England fan is sick of that pattern.
Gary Onedaysoon
*Prediction Champion 20/21 & 21/22*
I read a couple of articles earlier saying Kane's announcement came after a meeting he had with Paratici this morning. Now the meeting may or may not have taken place and even if it did it probably wasn't a game changer for Kane, but it may have given him food for thought.
D
Departed
Guest
Well said Muttley. Combination of an owner who walked away from serious cash and a MDoF wh has some serious cojones.
The entire aura of the club has been turned into a glowingly positive environment with everybody backing everybody.
TOP 4 HERE WE COME. 3rd to be exact.
Real Deal
Alert Team
Ronaldo went for 90m at 34.
Bayern Munich want 110m for Lewandowski at 33 with 1 year left on his contract.
The way some of you go on is like Kane is on the brink of retirement.
He will be around at 35. He has 7 years left at the top Imo.
Spursex
Alert Team
Oh it won't be January.
Harry Kane says he is "staying at Tottenham this summer" after accepting he will not be joining Manchester City this season.
So I'm certain if they haven't cleaned up and won the CL this year, they'll be back next summer..
Gary Onedaysoon
*Prediction Champion 20/21 & 21/22*
I'd agree, he's he's not on the scrap heap yet but I'd be shocked if he's still playing PL at 35.
Ronaldo is a freak of nature. There are very few 34 year old forwards playing at his level and with his athleticism.
I think that Lewandowski story was complete fabrication. The story was no sooner put out than he retracted it and said he would be staying for at least another year. I don't think you would have any buyers at ÂŁ100m. Or even half of that.
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It probably did in which Paratici said we can't let you go because we cannot get anyone to replace you. I suspect Paratici has found it harder here than he first thought. Levy was never going to sell Harry until we had a replacement but he cannot get a good enough one to replace him. Watching the first 2 games anyone can see we need a proper striker. Son is not a number 9 anyone can see that
D
Departed
Guest
Lots of guessing going on.
My bet is Harry has just been taught a lesson that cost him a lot of money.
My bet is Harry has just been taught a lesson that cost him a lot of money.
stupops
Vital 1st Team Regular
We don't need that much of a rebuild.
Sanchez.
The new Argie chap.
Japhet are nailed on mid season.
Kane is twenty goals we don't need to replace.
Dele looks to be where he needs to be.
Gil might be a bonus.
Sonny won't fail.
If Ndom decided to get on board there is the rebuild.
Ish.
RichmondSpur
Vital Football Hero
Ronaldo is an arrogant, lazy ass poser who others do the running around for, pass the ball to me so I can score and be the centre of attention. I hope the rumours about him joining us are permanently closed.
The flip side (apart from City never bidding anything that was reasonable) is that not needing to replace Kane for at least another year is hopefully a year with full stadiums to give our finances a chance to recover (and potentially reach the financial heaven of the CL). If we were able to spend like we did last year (and this year), and if we can look to Arsenal as an example of how much money can be spent following the stadium being finished then perhaps we won't need to rely on sales so heavily as we might have in the past to have big changes to the squad.
Gary Onedaysoon
*Prediction Champion 20/21 & 21/22*
A long but interesting accounts of events starting in May.
How Daniel Levy trumped the bungling Harry Kane camp
The Spurs striker relied on his brother’s advice but neither could outwit a stubborn opponent, writes Tom Roddy
On the morning of May 18, the unusual silence set an appropriate tone. The players of Tottenham Hotspur arrived at the club’s Enfield training ground, driving down the winding entrance road towards the car park for the main building, while anticipating the fallout from the night before.
News that Harry Kane had informed Tottenham he wanted to leave this summer had filtered out and been reported across every media outlet in the country, from television bulletins to back pages. The England captain had grown frustrated at Spurs, envious at seeing international team-mates competing for major trophies while his boyhood club, now managerless after sacking José Mourinho, had missed out on Champions League qualification for a second successive year. Kane had hit the eject button: He wanted to land at Manchester City.
Around 9.30am, his Tottenham team-mates parked up with some heading to the gym and others to the canteen where they discovered the giant television, which is made up of four screens and would usually show rolling coverage of Sky Sports News, had been turned off. Every television in the building was blank. Tottenham had decided to shut out the noise and ignore it.
This represented the approach Daniel Levy, the club’s chairman, decided to take for the next 100 days. The fiercest negotiator in football would not be moved from his position, with experience informing his decision not to get involved in the deafening noise and media briefings every time an attempt was made to unsettle those inside the country club-like quarters of the training ground.
All the moves were made by Kane. As City sat back, baulking at the £160 million figure placed on a prize asset with a long-term contract, Kane and his advisers were the ones trying to tempt Levy to the negotiating table. The man with the poker face would not play their game and watched on as their clumsy moves began to tear apart Kane’s long-held reputation among Spurs supporters as a loyal and grounded professional.
For weeks now, it has been clear that Levy held all the cards. As The Sunday Times reported on August 15, the day of Manchester City’s awkward trip to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Levy was digging in on his determined stance not to allow Kane to leave the club and would not even accept the previous asking price.
Although there were desperate last attempts from the Kane camp to salvage the move, the striker had finally succumbed to reality by Tuesday afternoon. On the lush fairways of Queenwood Golf Club, in Surrey, an angry and upset Kane revealed to team-mates that the messy summer saga was, for now, dead. Confirmation came yesterday afternoon on Twitter, when publicly stated he would remain at the club: “I will be staying at Tottenham this summer and will be 100% focused on helping the team achieve success.”
It brought an end to the messy three months which has left an inescapable blot on Kane’s clean reputation. Respected pundits, like Gary Neville, who described the England captain as a model professional gave him no excuse and accused Kane of disrespecting Tottenham team-mates. The repair job will now begin after many Tottenham fans who gave Kane their blessing for him to leave only a few months now wish him gone.
Senior officials at Tottenham had been shocked at the way in which the team talisman, whose quiet life away from football is filled with a passion for golf and NFL, had acted in attempting to strong-arm the club into a sale. Kane’s desire to leave came as no surprise, though. Last summer, he held meetings at the training ground in offices overlooking the state-of-the-art training pitches and facilities, and explained how his ambitions meant he would need to depart the club he joined aged 11.
This was a new Kane, though the narrative had already been fed into public knowledge in an interview with Jamie Redknapp during the first lockdown in England last year. “I am an ambitious player, I want to improve, I want to get better, I want to become one of the top, top players,” Kane explained. “I have always said that if I don’t feel we are progressing as a team or going in the right direction, I am not someone to stay there for the sake of it.”
Howeever, the six-year contract Kane signed in 2018, which runs until 2024, meant he was not in a position to dictate the outcome.
Levy had come away from previous transfers with the reputation of a cold, ruthless negotiator. He is a man who is fond of cars and red wine but has little interest in small talk. Nine years ago, he engineered the sale of Gareth Bale to Real Madrid into a world-record transfer after taking negotiations to the final 48 hours of the window and demanding an extra £8.5m. “He is like Napoleon,” Martin Jol, the former Spurs manager, told The Sunday Times. “There is always a strategy. He waits and waits and he is tough.”
Jonathan Barnett, the founder of world-renowned Stellar agency group, represented Bale and described Levy as “hard” and the negotiations “hair-raising.” This time, Levy was on the other side of the table to Charlie Kane, Harry’s older brother who was taking his first steps as an intermediary, setting up an agency called CK66, after working alongside the group that negotiated Kane’s six-year deal, Unique Sports Management. Senior officials at Tottenham suspected Kane’s father, Pat, was the one truly in control and found the prospect of Kane’s 32-year-old brother taking on their master negotiator as highly amusing.
Kane was meant to have options. Chelsea and Manchester United were among the clubs that had approached CK66 over signing him this summer, but there was a clear path in Kane’s mind. He was so convinced that the move would happen that he held a lengthy conversation with a senior member of the City squad about how he would fit in and life under Guardiola.
Kane thought he had laid the groundwork for a move away from Spurs at the beginning of May, before he had gone public with his desire in an interview with Gary Neville’s YouTube show, The Overlap. Playing a round of golf, the pair discussed Kane’s future in which the striker insisted it would be he, and not Levy, who dictated his future as he admitted an “honest conversation” was needed.
Strutting down the fairways with his slicked-back fair hair, Kane laughed at Neville’s probing comments on his future but when the time came he made his message clear and firm. Asked if he was at a crossroads in his career, Kane replied: “I think it’s definitely a conversation to be had with the club. I’m sure that [Levy] will want to set out the plan of where he sees it but, ultimately, it’s going to be down to me and how I feel and what’s going to be best for me and my career. This season, I’m watching the Champions League, watching the biggest English teams doing amazing.”
Kane believed he had a way out. The previous summer, after Manchester City had expressed strong interest in signing him, Levy had convinced Kane to remain at the club. But Kane believed he had a gentleman’s agreement — a verbal understanding — with Levy that he would let him go if Tottenham did not qualify for the Champions League in two successive seasons.
Tottenham have continually denied that such an agreement ever existed and sources close to Levy suggest he would only ever agree to sell to a foreign club, as was the case with Luka Modric in 2012. Levy sold Croatian midfielder Modric to Real Madrid for £30m despite Chelsea offering £40m the previous summer and Modric publicly insisting they had a gentleman’s agreement.
Levy’s resolve to keep Kane was strengthened by his anger at the leak being made into the media before the end of the season, as Spurs were mathematically still capable of qualifying for the Europa League. It was a side to Kane they hadn’t seen. Tottenham were furious and saw it as a betrayal of his best friend, Ryan Mason, who had been called up to lead the first team from academy after Mourinho had been sacked a month earlier.
But Kane wanted to plant the seed before England met for the European Championships. He believed his appearance in the 2-1 defeat to Aston Villa that week would be his last for Spurs and that City would complete negotiations while he was with Gareth Southgate’s squad. In fact no serious talks were ever held during the Euros. A week after the final Kane had to wait a week before flying out to the Bahamas with wife Kate and their two young daughters. Charlie was getting married the following Sunday and Kane was best man.
The week after the wedding, The Sun was briefed that Levy had changed his mind on selling Kane and that the striker had informed wedding guests of his impending move to Manchester. The information was incorrect, but reflected a first attempt at getting City to make a move.
Knowing the deal was far from done, Kane and his family jetted off to the luxury Albany resort that looks over South West Bay’s crystal waters waiting for good news. None arrived.
The crucial week came at the beginning of August. At the exact time that Guardiola and his coaching staff began to believe the chances of signing Kane were disappearing, he made the move that sent disapproving groans among the fan groups. For the past two-and-a-half months, they had brushed off the news as rumour and conjecture but then Kane made the move that signalled his desperation.
Continued on next post.
How Daniel Levy trumped the bungling Harry Kane camp
The Spurs striker relied on his brother’s advice but neither could outwit a stubborn opponent, writes Tom Roddy
On the morning of May 18, the unusual silence set an appropriate tone. The players of Tottenham Hotspur arrived at the club’s Enfield training ground, driving down the winding entrance road towards the car park for the main building, while anticipating the fallout from the night before.
News that Harry Kane had informed Tottenham he wanted to leave this summer had filtered out and been reported across every media outlet in the country, from television bulletins to back pages. The England captain had grown frustrated at Spurs, envious at seeing international team-mates competing for major trophies while his boyhood club, now managerless after sacking José Mourinho, had missed out on Champions League qualification for a second successive year. Kane had hit the eject button: He wanted to land at Manchester City.
Around 9.30am, his Tottenham team-mates parked up with some heading to the gym and others to the canteen where they discovered the giant television, which is made up of four screens and would usually show rolling coverage of Sky Sports News, had been turned off. Every television in the building was blank. Tottenham had decided to shut out the noise and ignore it.
This represented the approach Daniel Levy, the club’s chairman, decided to take for the next 100 days. The fiercest negotiator in football would not be moved from his position, with experience informing his decision not to get involved in the deafening noise and media briefings every time an attempt was made to unsettle those inside the country club-like quarters of the training ground.
All the moves were made by Kane. As City sat back, baulking at the £160 million figure placed on a prize asset with a long-term contract, Kane and his advisers were the ones trying to tempt Levy to the negotiating table. The man with the poker face would not play their game and watched on as their clumsy moves began to tear apart Kane’s long-held reputation among Spurs supporters as a loyal and grounded professional.
For weeks now, it has been clear that Levy held all the cards. As The Sunday Times reported on August 15, the day of Manchester City’s awkward trip to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Levy was digging in on his determined stance not to allow Kane to leave the club and would not even accept the previous asking price.
Although there were desperate last attempts from the Kane camp to salvage the move, the striker had finally succumbed to reality by Tuesday afternoon. On the lush fairways of Queenwood Golf Club, in Surrey, an angry and upset Kane revealed to team-mates that the messy summer saga was, for now, dead. Confirmation came yesterday afternoon on Twitter, when publicly stated he would remain at the club: “I will be staying at Tottenham this summer and will be 100% focused on helping the team achieve success.”
It brought an end to the messy three months which has left an inescapable blot on Kane’s clean reputation. Respected pundits, like Gary Neville, who described the England captain as a model professional gave him no excuse and accused Kane of disrespecting Tottenham team-mates. The repair job will now begin after many Tottenham fans who gave Kane their blessing for him to leave only a few months now wish him gone.
Senior officials at Tottenham had been shocked at the way in which the team talisman, whose quiet life away from football is filled with a passion for golf and NFL, had acted in attempting to strong-arm the club into a sale. Kane’s desire to leave came as no surprise, though. Last summer, he held meetings at the training ground in offices overlooking the state-of-the-art training pitches and facilities, and explained how his ambitions meant he would need to depart the club he joined aged 11.
This was a new Kane, though the narrative had already been fed into public knowledge in an interview with Jamie Redknapp during the first lockdown in England last year. “I am an ambitious player, I want to improve, I want to get better, I want to become one of the top, top players,” Kane explained. “I have always said that if I don’t feel we are progressing as a team or going in the right direction, I am not someone to stay there for the sake of it.”
Howeever, the six-year contract Kane signed in 2018, which runs until 2024, meant he was not in a position to dictate the outcome.
Levy had come away from previous transfers with the reputation of a cold, ruthless negotiator. He is a man who is fond of cars and red wine but has little interest in small talk. Nine years ago, he engineered the sale of Gareth Bale to Real Madrid into a world-record transfer after taking negotiations to the final 48 hours of the window and demanding an extra £8.5m. “He is like Napoleon,” Martin Jol, the former Spurs manager, told The Sunday Times. “There is always a strategy. He waits and waits and he is tough.”
Jonathan Barnett, the founder of world-renowned Stellar agency group, represented Bale and described Levy as “hard” and the negotiations “hair-raising.” This time, Levy was on the other side of the table to Charlie Kane, Harry’s older brother who was taking his first steps as an intermediary, setting up an agency called CK66, after working alongside the group that negotiated Kane’s six-year deal, Unique Sports Management. Senior officials at Tottenham suspected Kane’s father, Pat, was the one truly in control and found the prospect of Kane’s 32-year-old brother taking on their master negotiator as highly amusing.
Kane was meant to have options. Chelsea and Manchester United were among the clubs that had approached CK66 over signing him this summer, but there was a clear path in Kane’s mind. He was so convinced that the move would happen that he held a lengthy conversation with a senior member of the City squad about how he would fit in and life under Guardiola.
Kane thought he had laid the groundwork for a move away from Spurs at the beginning of May, before he had gone public with his desire in an interview with Gary Neville’s YouTube show, The Overlap. Playing a round of golf, the pair discussed Kane’s future in which the striker insisted it would be he, and not Levy, who dictated his future as he admitted an “honest conversation” was needed.
Strutting down the fairways with his slicked-back fair hair, Kane laughed at Neville’s probing comments on his future but when the time came he made his message clear and firm. Asked if he was at a crossroads in his career, Kane replied: “I think it’s definitely a conversation to be had with the club. I’m sure that [Levy] will want to set out the plan of where he sees it but, ultimately, it’s going to be down to me and how I feel and what’s going to be best for me and my career. This season, I’m watching the Champions League, watching the biggest English teams doing amazing.”
Kane believed he had a way out. The previous summer, after Manchester City had expressed strong interest in signing him, Levy had convinced Kane to remain at the club. But Kane believed he had a gentleman’s agreement — a verbal understanding — with Levy that he would let him go if Tottenham did not qualify for the Champions League in two successive seasons.
Tottenham have continually denied that such an agreement ever existed and sources close to Levy suggest he would only ever agree to sell to a foreign club, as was the case with Luka Modric in 2012. Levy sold Croatian midfielder Modric to Real Madrid for £30m despite Chelsea offering £40m the previous summer and Modric publicly insisting they had a gentleman’s agreement.
Levy’s resolve to keep Kane was strengthened by his anger at the leak being made into the media before the end of the season, as Spurs were mathematically still capable of qualifying for the Europa League. It was a side to Kane they hadn’t seen. Tottenham were furious and saw it as a betrayal of his best friend, Ryan Mason, who had been called up to lead the first team from academy after Mourinho had been sacked a month earlier.
But Kane wanted to plant the seed before England met for the European Championships. He believed his appearance in the 2-1 defeat to Aston Villa that week would be his last for Spurs and that City would complete negotiations while he was with Gareth Southgate’s squad. In fact no serious talks were ever held during the Euros. A week after the final Kane had to wait a week before flying out to the Bahamas with wife Kate and their two young daughters. Charlie was getting married the following Sunday and Kane was best man.
The week after the wedding, The Sun was briefed that Levy had changed his mind on selling Kane and that the striker had informed wedding guests of his impending move to Manchester. The information was incorrect, but reflected a first attempt at getting City to make a move.
Knowing the deal was far from done, Kane and his family jetted off to the luxury Albany resort that looks over South West Bay’s crystal waters waiting for good news. None arrived.
The crucial week came at the beginning of August. At the exact time that Guardiola and his coaching staff began to believe the chances of signing Kane were disappearing, he made the move that sent disapproving groans among the fan groups. For the past two-and-a-half months, they had brushed off the news as rumour and conjecture but then Kane made the move that signalled his desperation.
Continued on next post.
Gary Onedaysoon
*Prediction Champion 20/21 & 21/22*
Continued from previous post.
He had been due to return to Spurs lodge for a Covid test and routine assessments on Monday, August 2 but did not turn up. By midweek, it transpired that he was now in Florida. Tottenham were shocked but saw the self-sabotage taking place.
As well as angry fans, pundits including Jamie Carragher, Micah Richards and Neville were critical of his tactics. On the night of Friday, August 6, Kane released a statement saying he was “hurt” by those that had been “questioning my professionalism” and insisted he had not “refused to train”. Kane realised he was beginning to lose the all-important public relations war and was single-handedly improving the image of Levy whose popularity was at an all-time low only weeks earlier.
Tottenham had heard from City. In June, an offer in the region of £100m was made but got nowhere near Levy’s valuation. He was left bemused and amused by the Premier League champions only other significant move. During that first crucial week of August, having signed Jack Grealish for a British record £100million from Aston Villa earlier in the week, Guaridola broke with convention by discussing Kane in his pre-Community Shield press conference.
“If Tottenham don’t want to negotiate, it’s finished,” Guardiola said. “If they are open to negotiate, many clubs would want to try to sign him. We are not an exception, but it depends on Tottenham. Jack had a release clause and he is different. Harry Kane is an exceptional, extraordinary striker and of course we are interested — but he is a Tottenham player and if they don’t want to negotiate there is nothing more to say. If they want to, we will try.”
The message was clear: City were telling Tottenham to come to the table. At Tottenham, this was met with both bemusement and amusement. Without an offer, they saw nothing to even consider.
By the time City officials were on the M6, heading towards north London for an opportunity to see Levy face-to-face at the opening match of the season, he had stopped responding and the inevitable outcome was becoming clear to all. Kane had returned to individual training at Tottenham but was not involved in the awkward encounter with City, his absence explained as fitness reasons. Tottenham won the match 1-0 and the game finished with a raucous chant from fans: “Are you watching, Harry Kane?”
The following day saw one last, desperate attempt to make City try to negotiate a final time. A briefing came from the Kane camp and was published in the pages of the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, re-emphasising Kane’s belief that Levy had broken his promise and that the delayed return from his holiday was a miscommunication. Rumours emerged that a new public relations company that has history working with Kane had been hired but, again, there was confusion as CK66 denied any other involvement or pushing the briefing which did not go down well with fans.
Even at this late stage he and his side tried to win the PR war. As the team prepared for their the Europa Conference League match against Pacos de Ferreira last week Kane, who was said to be not fit enough to play in that game, trained alone. Having not been seen in public during the opening few days of the season he chose to post a photo of himself on social media at the club’s Hotspur Way headquarters, captioning it: “Another session in the bank.”
His first appearance in public came a few days later, last Sunday, ducking into Molineux’s main stand in Wolverhampton wearing the club’s black Hugo Boss suit while being booed by fans waiting by the bus. He carried the same stoic expression all afternoon, only appearing to interact briefly with the left back Ben Davies before being brought on as a 70th-minute substitute to taunts from the home crowd but support from Spurs, singing: “One of our own.”
Kane applauded the fans at the final whistle but went straight down the tunnel on his own. By now, he knew his nuclear attempts had been for nothing. City had decided not to offer £150 million as they didn’t believe it represented good value for a 28-year-old, despite finishing the previous season as top of the Premier League charts for goals and assists.
Tottenham have already begun to receive enquiries from clubs about signing Kane next summer but whether a deal can be done then will depend on one man. Kane now knows it’s not him. The giant television on the wall at Hotspur Way will carry fans and pundits applauding Daniel Levy today for sticking by his guns. In 100 days, the real commander-in-chief at Tottenham managed to exert his authority in silence while the golden boy shouted the halo off his own head.
He had been due to return to Spurs lodge for a Covid test and routine assessments on Monday, August 2 but did not turn up. By midweek, it transpired that he was now in Florida. Tottenham were shocked but saw the self-sabotage taking place.
As well as angry fans, pundits including Jamie Carragher, Micah Richards and Neville were critical of his tactics. On the night of Friday, August 6, Kane released a statement saying he was “hurt” by those that had been “questioning my professionalism” and insisted he had not “refused to train”. Kane realised he was beginning to lose the all-important public relations war and was single-handedly improving the image of Levy whose popularity was at an all-time low only weeks earlier.
Tottenham had heard from City. In June, an offer in the region of £100m was made but got nowhere near Levy’s valuation. He was left bemused and amused by the Premier League champions only other significant move. During that first crucial week of August, having signed Jack Grealish for a British record £100million from Aston Villa earlier in the week, Guaridola broke with convention by discussing Kane in his pre-Community Shield press conference.
“If Tottenham don’t want to negotiate, it’s finished,” Guardiola said. “If they are open to negotiate, many clubs would want to try to sign him. We are not an exception, but it depends on Tottenham. Jack had a release clause and he is different. Harry Kane is an exceptional, extraordinary striker and of course we are interested — but he is a Tottenham player and if they don’t want to negotiate there is nothing more to say. If they want to, we will try.”
The message was clear: City were telling Tottenham to come to the table. At Tottenham, this was met with both bemusement and amusement. Without an offer, they saw nothing to even consider.
By the time City officials were on the M6, heading towards north London for an opportunity to see Levy face-to-face at the opening match of the season, he had stopped responding and the inevitable outcome was becoming clear to all. Kane had returned to individual training at Tottenham but was not involved in the awkward encounter with City, his absence explained as fitness reasons. Tottenham won the match 1-0 and the game finished with a raucous chant from fans: “Are you watching, Harry Kane?”
The following day saw one last, desperate attempt to make City try to negotiate a final time. A briefing came from the Kane camp and was published in the pages of the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, re-emphasising Kane’s belief that Levy had broken his promise and that the delayed return from his holiday was a miscommunication. Rumours emerged that a new public relations company that has history working with Kane had been hired but, again, there was confusion as CK66 denied any other involvement or pushing the briefing which did not go down well with fans.
Even at this late stage he and his side tried to win the PR war. As the team prepared for their the Europa Conference League match against Pacos de Ferreira last week Kane, who was said to be not fit enough to play in that game, trained alone. Having not been seen in public during the opening few days of the season he chose to post a photo of himself on social media at the club’s Hotspur Way headquarters, captioning it: “Another session in the bank.”
His first appearance in public came a few days later, last Sunday, ducking into Molineux’s main stand in Wolverhampton wearing the club’s black Hugo Boss suit while being booed by fans waiting by the bus. He carried the same stoic expression all afternoon, only appearing to interact briefly with the left back Ben Davies before being brought on as a 70th-minute substitute to taunts from the home crowd but support from Spurs, singing: “One of our own.”
Kane applauded the fans at the final whistle but went straight down the tunnel on his own. By now, he knew his nuclear attempts had been for nothing. City had decided not to offer £150 million as they didn’t believe it represented good value for a 28-year-old, despite finishing the previous season as top of the Premier League charts for goals and assists.
Tottenham have already begun to receive enquiries from clubs about signing Kane next summer but whether a deal can be done then will depend on one man. Kane now knows it’s not him. The giant television on the wall at Hotspur Way will carry fans and pundits applauding Daniel Levy today for sticking by his guns. In 100 days, the real commander-in-chief at Tottenham managed to exert his authority in silence while the golden boy shouted the halo off his own head.
ScottDaYid
Vital Football Legend
He also has dodgy ankles, that has to be taken into account.
Ronaldo is a different beast and no one is paying that for Lewandowski.
Spursex
Alert Team
There is one aspect of this that lays at the heart of the dispute between player and club; the eponymous 'Levy's promise'.
Under pressure, last season and besieged by Jose's antics (I pray for the day when the reasons behind his sacking become clear), I'm almost 100% certain that the 'promise' was made (unless Kane's camp is simply lying - and I don't believe they are - they've been suckered by it), it almost doesn't matter what the promise details were, but it does strike at the heart of Levy's management character.
Personally, whenever I've had a high performer point a gun at my head, I've refused to comply with their demands; do it once and it will happen again and again, once you lose your leadership and integrity, it's like virginity, you can never get it back.
I've heard and read much about Kane's camp stupidity, I've even laughed at them for their naivety and Charlie's stupidity, but Levy really is the culprit that started all this.
Under pressure, Levy appears to believe that saying anything that will get the immediate issue resolved is acceptable.
It isn't.
Kane virtually switched off towards the end of last season knowing that in his mind he was soon to be off - almost certainly that wouldn't have happened if Levy had stood tall and stayed firm and reminded him that he had 4 years left on his deal and that it was the club who would consider what the way forward would be.
Instead, we've had weeks and weeks of disruption, yes Charlie has been exactly that, a complete Charlie who with no experience of building and crafting a deal or protecting his client's rep, has been found out to be what he is, an amateur, with absolutely no cards to play.
Levy has brought in Paraticci, he now needs to step away from the footballing side of the business completely and let him get on with it and all we can do is hope he has more of a backbone when it comes to confrontation than Levy does.
Making silly knee-jerk promises leads to disaster; I am told that Kane's camp are all angry and won't forget in a hurry, Harry for not getting his 'promised' move, Charlie for being made to look a real Charlie.
No one comes out of this clean, not just Harry.
Barnsleyspur
Vital Squad Member
I don't even think this is the heart of the matter.
I believe Levy promised kane he could leave if x conditions were met. The truth is an agreement to leave needs a value agreed and it seems to be the point that Charlie dipshit didn't iron out.
I don't think Levy has failed to adhere to the agreement (and you know I'd criticise him if I felt he had). I just don't think the conditions were met.
Hopefully this is a learning point for Charlie and his massive ego.
I would rather kane have left and we let Paratici rebuild but Levy is right to pull any plug at this point as we'd be held hostage to unreasonable demands for any half decent striker.
steveperryman
Vital Football Legend
Well played Daniel.
If he goes next summer so be it. Just as long as we do our homework & bring the right guy in to replace him.
If he goes next summer so be it. Just as long as we do our homework & bring the right guy in to replace him.
