It's amazing how sometimes the present deceives us without our realizing it. Arsene Wenger may have suffered the most from this problem throughout his coaching career. Almost no major talent has emerged in European football in recent years without being associated with the name of the man in its adolescence. The story always revolves around a failed attempt to include this or that star when he was an obscure youth that no one knows, lamenting what he could have offered to Arsenal if he had joined.

Also, the story always ends with a funny reason that makes it more like a joke, so the story goes in one pattern almost every time; Arsenal was around the corner from signing Ronaldo, Zlatan, or Drogba, but it failed because Wenger refused to pay an additional 100,000, or because the player did not find suitable shoes before training, or because the heart machine read his pulse incorrectly in the medical test, or Because his club insisted that Arsenal pay the transportation costs, or because his great-aunt's daughter had given birth to sextuplets and he had to go to the hospital.

The important thing is that it is a trivial reason that turns Wenger into a laughingstock every time.

32 thousand and 950 Wenger

The past often casts a shadow on the present, but the present often reflects its light on the past as well. That's what you discover when you go back to Kane's first official match with Tottenham. We are almost certain that none of the 32,950 fans present at White Hart Lane that day expected that he would become one of the Premier League's historic scorers with 200 goals and counting and that he would be the only Englishman capable of threatening Alan Shearer's throne at the top of the historic scorers with 260 goals.

The date is the twenty-fifth of August 2011, and the event is the second leg in the preliminary round of the European League, after Tottenham beat Scottish Hearts 5-0 in the first leg, and the return match became just a foregone conclusion, the conditions were appropriate to push eighteen-year-old Harry Edward Kane in the basic configuration.

Any objective look at what Kane presented in the match will not find anything impressive. The most prominent shot was his obtaining a penalty kick, then wasting it with great recklessness and naivety; Kane stopped halfway to the penalty mark, then looked to the right of the keeper, then continued his run to shoot into the same corner, as if to give the keeper an earlier idea of ​​where he had shot.

This is the same way Ronaldo missed his kick in the 2008 Champions League final three years earlier; The Spanish statistician and economist, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, had assured Chelsea coaches, after studying thousands of penalty kicks, that Ronaldo would shoot to the right of the goalkeeper if he stopped for a moment in the middle of the distance, simply because this prevented him from rushing hard enough to shoot into the direct corner.

Shooting in this corner needs to swing the leg more strongly than usual, which is not available when the shot is not preceded by a complete quick run, and it was what Huerta expected, and Petr Cech managed to successfully save it.

Even so, just watching a summary of Kane's touches in the match can mislead you; Every shot compels you involuntarily to recall what is similar to it from his subsequent career, and every sound reception makes you feel that he will turn to get rid of his marker before he launches a charming through ball towards Son to score, and every long shot reminds you of his legendary goal at Arsenal a few seasons ago, and every scoring opportunity reminds you of the 184 goals. later in his Premier League career.

Against your will, you will watch Kane's first matches with the eyes of the present that are biased towards his legend, and against your will, you will evaluate him in terms of what will happen later.

Kane, at the right time, at the right... space

Between this and that, approximately 11 seasons or more, and despite this, Wenger did not escape the usual joke; Kane was not only about to join Arsenal, but had already joined at the age of 8, and was released one season later, because Liam Priddy, the legendary academy director who produced many young talents between 1996-2014, saw that Kane's "extra weight and slowness" would prevent him. To become a professional soccer player in the future.

Of course, it's easy to make fun of the man now after 200 goals in the Premier League. If this was a Facebook post, people would return to it every year to remind him of his failure, but the truth is that Kane was really overweight, and he was really slow, and the man's decision at this moment, given the circumstances and context, was somewhat logical, but logic does not make jokes.

Perhaps what Brady is really to blame for is that he did not take into account the amount of effort that Kane was putting into training, and his overwhelming desire to improve himself and fill his shortcomings, that is, in short, what Alex Inglethorpe, director of the Tottenham Academy at the time, currently serving in Liverpool, saw in the blond London youth, and made him feel that all this work He must produce a good player, who can be used in the first team or even sold.

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Perhaps what Brady also didn't see was Kane's superior awareness of the elements of time and space, such that he easily outperformed his peers at a relatively late age.

After four fruitless loans to Leighton Orient, Millwall, Norwich and Leicester, which did not tempt any of them to extend it or try to sign him, Kane was glowing with the Tottenham first team under Pochettino, the man who saw in him what no one else saw; A key striker and England's first star in the future, a man who combines Shearer's scoring sense in the last third, and Sheringham's abilities in the second third.

The funny thing is that Inglethorpe was just around the corner from the fate of Brady himself in this story because Tottenham was about to give up Kane for free after the failure of the four loans, but Pochettino's analytical team dissuaded him from that after their statistical data showed that the reason he did not score enough among the goals was the dearth of chances he had on the scale of expected goals, the qualitative statistic that has revolutionized game data science ever since.

It's amazing looking back at all of this and realizing that Kane's career was closer to ending as a striker who isn't "Premier League quality". But, the story didn't end like that, in fact, there's a lot more to say.

Sources

10 superstars Arsene Wenger missed out on
Spurs vs Hearts Midlothian Match Report
It's been over 10 years since Harry Kane made his debut for Tottenham and MISSED a penalty in the Europa League against Hearts... yet NOBODY would have predicted how the England captain's career took off after four failed loan spells away from Spurs
When Harry Kane Made His Spurs Debut
Ignacio Palacios Huerta's Book: Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics
Is Throwback Harry Kane the Premier League's Most Underrated Player?
Expected goals: What is the controversial stat and why is it useful?
Harry Kane's Stats
Harry Kane’s Record Hunt Gathers Pace
Introducing The Athletic’s 18 player roles: Orchestrator, Safety or Unlocker?
Tito Football's Harry Kane & the Gambler’s Fallacy Video